She’s just trying too hard to write with wisdom she has not yet tapped into. I am not at all interested in reading from the adolescent personal essayist.

These phases have nothing at all to do with physical age. There’s an adolescence phase of personal essayist and there’s a Sage phase. I want to read about the storm from the other side.Ĥ. I don’t want to read about being in the storm. I prefer personal essays that detail the struggle and the greater understanding, growth, letting go, acceptance…what have you…that comes through the personal struggle. After much contemplation I’ve come to this insight about myself - I do not enjoy reading personal essays where the writer is using the essay to attempt to work through a personal struggle. I spent my whole time reading it trying to make myself love it or at least hone in on the aspects I respected from it but I couldn’t. I didn’t like this and that was confusing. I read this as recommended by a local librarian in response to my love of The Witch of Eye by Kathryn Nuernberger.Ģ. She interlaces stories from her forebears with cultural artifacts from her own life- Twin Peaks, the Oregon Trail II video game, a Claymation Satan, a YouTube video of Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham-to explore questions of cultural inheritance and the particular danger, as a Native woman, of relaxing into romantic love under colonial rule.įive (or 10) things about White Magic by Elissa Washuta 2/5⭐️ġ. In this collection of intertwined essays, she writes about land, heartbreak, and colonization, about life without the escape hatch of intoxication, and about how she became a powerful witch. Following a decade of abuse, addiction, PTSD, and heavy-duty drug treatment for a misdiagnosis of bipolar disorder, she felt drawn to the real spirits and powers her dispossessed and discarded ancestors knew, while she undertook necessary work to find love and meaning.

Throughout her life, Elissa Washuta has been surrounded by cheap facsimiles of Native spiritual tools and occult trends, “starter witch kits” of sage, rose quartz, and tarot cards packaged together in paper and plastic.

Bracingly honest and powerfully affecting, White Magic establishes Elissa Washuta as one of our best living essayists.

White magic elissa washuta