I was judging the L.A. Times 2020 and 2021 fiction contest. It’d be generous to call what I’d been doing upon my first cursory glance—reading. I also don’t take this task lightly. As a fellow writer and lover of words and books, I took this position—in hopes of being a good literary citizen. My heart aches for all the writers who have a debut at this time. What I can share now is the thing that held my attention and got me to read on even though it was among 296 other books I’m charged to read.

Despite having to read 296 works of fiction I could not help but request this book by Elissa Washuta as I’d read one of her essays earlier that year and was so moved by it. I loved everything about this book. She said everything I needed to hear in an incredibly difficult time.

Here’s just one example:

I want to ungrow back into the child who truly believed in magic. I google spells to take the PTSD out of me. But is that what I want? To stop my brian from thrashing against the wickedness America stuffed inside?

I have had a hard time getting past the initial descriptions of abuse, assault, stalking, and all the resulting emotional trauma/mental illness. I've read so many reviews of this book though and know I will love it if I can get over the rough beginning. Just requested an audio copy from my library as I think that will help me power through, and will come back and rate on goodreads accordingly!

In parts a struggle and others all-consuming, White Magic could have benefited from a stronger edit, making it a better more comprehensive book. But, when it finds its sweet spot, I love this book, her intimacies and insights.

Ultimately a bit of a slot, despite how much I wanted to love it. It took me several weeks to finish....and usually I finish books in one sitting.

I went into this book blind and will be haunted for a long time by this series of essays. And while I struggled to get through most of these, I do appreciate the style of writing and the author’s authentic voice throughout. Trigger warnings abound- the abuse discussed is harrowing. The author’s PTSD is often remedied by excessive consumption of alcohol.

I respect and think the hard look the author took at cultural appropriation is poignant, especially in terms of indigenous people in this country. Because of all the heavy content in these essays, I struggled to get through this book. However I would recommend for future readers to take your time with reading this one and read all the essays separately over time.

This is a powerful and fascinating read that ought to be required for all. Great points. Washuta has a way with words and thoughts, though it's not always an easy read because of the many traumas she has lived through.

I have nothing now but my big aura, my fistful of keys, and my throat that still knows how to scream because no man has succeeded in closing it.

I’ve kind of dreaded assembling my thoughts to write about this book, because it moved me like little else, certainly in recent memory and probably in much longer. I thought about it constantly when I wasn’t reading it. It’s haunting, even when it felt strangely exhilarating. I’m afraid to attempt summarizing it because I can’t do it justice, it’ll inevitably fall short of what this writing does.

It’s such a hard-to-categorize book, so artistically unique, and the connection I felt to it was so almost bizarrely strong and emotional that I don’t even know how to do this. This is all to excuse the messiness that’s coming.

Written by Elissa Washuta, a member of the Cowlitz Indian Tribe and writing professor, White Magic is, loosely, an essay collection, in that it doesn’t have the cohesive quality and trajectory that would be associated with a novel or a memoir about a specific incident or topic per se. And yet I felt it was much more cohesive than it’s packaged, I’m not sure I would’ve labeled it essays. These are all so interconnected and you couldn’t really skip around without losing something.

A minor point though, and it’s not criticism. I just had so much trouble categorizing this in my own mind, slotting it into any box that made sense. It’s a jumble of themes, topics circled and poked at and explored from different angles, or even the same ones, the fleshing out of specific scenes and hazy, dreamy looks at others.

The end product is a story about attempting to heal oneself by calling on the history that lives in you, genetically, alongside the power that inevitably accompanies survival. Doing this kind of healing work alongside ancestral legacies of trauma and colonization complicates the picture further, as do the elements of abuse and addiction Washuta’s experienced. It’s a messy story, but whose isn’t. She tells it so beautifully I didn’t want it to end.

On its most basic level then, this is memoir-in-essays. In her previous collection, told in similar style, My Body is a Book of Rules, which I immediately sought out after this, she muses that she earned writing degrees then wrote however she wanted to. And that’s her style here, one wholly her own – “experimental” doesn’t really cover it, but it is that. She breaks the fourth wall, bounces from memory-laden looks at incidents preceding trauma (hauntings, of a sort) and punctuates it with pop culture references — Stevie Nicks and her relationship with Lindsay Buckingham, then her link to modern witchcraft, especially the specific brand of it practiced by white women on Instagram, being an especially meaningful one.

I’m not exactly emotionally available. I spend most nights in my creaking house google image searching Stevie Nicks and her large sleeves. I save images while weeping and listening to “Silver Springs,” the song Stevie wrote and loved and could not get onto Rumours because that decision wasn’t hers to make.

Which leads to the topic of witchcraft, and how Washuta writes about becoming a “powerful witch” after various incidences of trauma – with men who don’t want to be loved, or know how to be, multiple rapes and assaults, mental health struggles, addictions, being misdiagnosed as bipolar for years, and understanding and contextualizing her identity as a Native American in a land that erases or revises this history more than it acknowledges or celebrates it.

And worth mentioning that although I’m a skeptic and totally uninterested in the woo-woo, I loved her use of magic and witchcraft in this storytelling.

Her early religious education is another topic making appearances, and I found this explanation telling for why, to her, the supernatural and the objectively real have blurry boundaries:

The priests said we could never understand how God impregnated Mary, how Jesus rose from the dead, or how Mary was pulled to heaven. But I was instructed in assumption before gravity, resurrection before biological death, and immaculate conception before reproduction. The problem with mystery is that I have always understood completely. I never fully cultivated a sense of reason in which what’s called supernatural would be anything but natural.

Maybe that’s why I could get on board with the supernatural subjects here. That made perfect sense to me (and is probably why it took me so long to grasp science).

She weaves in other pop culture touchpoints – “cultural artifacts” from her childhood and adolescence — one entire section is structured around the cult favorite show Twin Peaks. (Some understanding of what the show is is probably necessary to appreciate this section; I’ve never seen it but had read enough about it). She also ties stories from her ancestors into modern storytelling devices, like the Oregon Trail computer game.

Another section follows a summer she spent as writer-in-residence in a tower of Seattle’s Fremont Bridge, writing about the Puget Sound region’s Native history while navigating her own heartbreak, making for one of those viscerally haunted-by-longing stories woven into a beautifully told regional mini-history. Her writing is so smooth it’s a magic trick in itself; I don’t even know how she manages to make so many disparate ideas work together so seamlessly.

My triggers and traumas had been allowed to multiply unchecked, making for a hefty pile of kindling that would catch fire from the smallest sparks: a boyfriend’s irritated silence, a stranger’s shouting from down the street.

The topics can be heavy, and Washuta’s style is blunt and confrontational. It doesn’t feel oppressive though, as she also has a dark, dry sense of humor. Although her writing is so rich and gorgeous it’s easy to get lost in the loveliness of it, it doesn’t negate how raw and painful some of the experiences she addresses are. And yet there’s so much value in telling these stories, especially in the way she does it. One of my favorite sections is, I think, a forceful example of this:

I am still alive and ambulatory after having been raped more times than I can recall, threatened with a knife and a gun, smothered, choked, held down, and stalked, over the course of several years and at the hands of more than several men. I’ve wrapped my arms around men who told me I should fear them or told me I had nothing to fear. I’ve been alone, certain no good man would waste his life with the rotting apple core of me.

I read Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird shortly after reading this, and Lamott repeatedly makes the point that if you write something authentically, as painful or ugly as it may be, it’s going to connect with someone else, because if you felt that someone else has felt it too. That’s what this book was to me — a pitch-perfect example of doing just that, conveying lived experiences so authentically and revealingly that they inevitably resonate.

This isn’t going to be for everyone. It’s explicit, sometimes meandering, often brutal. But Washuta is such a brilliantly skilled writer that nothing feels gratuitous, and even when incidents and narratives get hazy — she assures the reader that you don’t have to remember exactly which guy is which — it all feels in service of examining the emotions and how they’ve shaped her, and not necessarily the rigid narrative. “We shape the recollected by how the remembering changes us. The mind wants to understand what’s done but not settled.”

Maybe the story didn’t start in either place. Or maybe a causal chain will never work because multiple causes, some mostly mystery, interwound to make me need to alter reality.

From the synopsis I wasn’t totally sure, to be honest – it did sound a bit all over the place and magic and woo are not my thing. Yet here I am, completely changed by this book. The best piece of writing I’ve read in a long while. It felt as cathartic to read as it must have been to write.

There is nothing I can say about this book that will do it any justice at all. Washuta's writing is rich and evocative and comes dancing off the page into your eyeballs and soul. There is magic in these pages - in content, yes, but also in form and skill.

I'm constantly struck by the intimacy in Washuta's work. The private moments laid bare to become a universal connector of survival, transformation, and love.

I'm in awe of every word.

An interesting mix of essays that discuss a range of topics - mental health, settler colonialism, relationships, and identity, as well as internet witchiness!
I enjoyed her perspective, especially since I am located semi near to the Cowlitz reservation.

This is one of those books with a deeper meaning that everyone should read. There is so much packed into this book that I feel like I should re-read a few of the sections/essays just to begin to unpack what I read.

I love the writing style, I love Washuta’s use of imagery, I love her use of witchcraft and tarot as metaphors, I love her colored prose, and I love her honesty around so many things both positive and negative. Reading this book feels like you are having a conversation with a friend, at 2 AM after all the music is stopped and the lights are dimmed, that you have known for years and she’s giving you her past stories and facts coded in something else that you can never put your finger on but still feels right. Brilliantly done.

I enjoy reading books that call out the colonization/white mindset, especially as a white person. We need to be exposed and questioned/questioning more. For me, this also includes discussing the ways that we white people have destroyed what once was because of the superior mindsets. She excellently highlights this throughout, but I really felt it in the section talking about her work detailing the history of Fremont Bridge. I loved the intertwining of Indigenous history and stories with the history of what settlers did to make the land better hospitable for them and no one else. We forget these things and think landforms like rivers are unchanging and have always been the way they are.

This book also takes a hard hit at the abuse, rape, murder, and disappearances of Indigenous women. Washuta hits us with some shocking numbers and facts about having an Indigenous body and what that grants you in our culture. These things aren’t said enough. As a white female, I have no way of understanding what that is like so I appreciate Washuta’s honesty and straight-to-it writing. Read these things closely and really think about what you’re reading and how important it is.

There is so much in this book to unpack and digest. Again, brava Washuta.

This was such an intriguing read. I picked this up because of the topics referenced in the description and expected something similar to Hanif Abdurraqib's work, but from a different point of view. I was so delightfully surprised at the way each individual essay braids into the others to build a more powerful whole. There's some great investigation here of identity, race and colonization, pop culture, and I'm going to be digesting it all for at least a few weeks.

5 stars

My lit students always express frustration over the idea that everything has been done, everything has been written, and they don't feel like they have anything NEW to say. There are obvious answers to counteract these sentiments, and I provide them all the time, but I have never been so convinced of the falsehoods behind them as I have been since the first page of this collection.

Truly, I have never read anything like this. Structurally, Washuta takes a group of essays and defies conventions. The reintroduction and the energetic attention to themes and moments and details from all over the work and all over Washuta's life - one assumes - reflect a kind of literary stamina that is still blowing my mind. There's a Modernist stream of consciousness slant to the way Washuta organizes, but that sense of effortless flow is so much more powerful because the narratives are grounded in so many forms of trauma: the persona's and those of others (Stevie Nicks! The Log Lady! So many!). In the midst of the content-related horrors, I'd find myself chuckling and shaking my head at the play with structure. It's just masterful.

Equally majestic is the aesthetic quality Washuta produces in every part: from the sentence structure to the citations to the essays to the narrative as a whole. The gritty ideas and experiences are offset by the ways in which they are articulated. It's a true salted caramel phenomenon here, wherein too much of one is revolting and the right balance is unbeatable. Washuta explains that she is operating in "not just a recounted story" and that she is "trying to make something happen and record the process and results." That *something* unquestionably happens, and readers are part of Washuta's complex experiment.

I fully anticipate that most readers will find this work polarizing. Folks more drawn to literary elements, aestheticism, innovation, and representation will, I think, LOVE this. Readers who come in with a general sense of what an essay is and expect to find that here and/or those who cannot stomach the intensity of the conversations here on rape, sexual assault, intergenerational trauma, etc. are best left to lighter collections. But wow they will be missing out on something special. Choose wisely.

The author holds the reader emotionally and critically hostage with their trauma meanwhile describing what Wikipedia has taught them. If one wanted this experience, they can do what the author so clearly did to get a leg up in the memoir industry -- browse the internet. Beautiful cover though!

Deep and insightful look into the life, and trials and tribulations of the author. But I did have some issues with keeping up with the way the book was written. I would've liked to read more about Native American spirituality through the eyes of Elissa. Not a bad read though.I voluntarily read this book in exchange for my honest opinion.

This is an incredible, hard-hitting collection of essays. Washuta interweaves cultural commentary, history, studies of race and colonization, pop culture, and memoir to create something unlike anything I have ever read before. I feel that the strongest parts of the collection focus on race, culture, and identity. I wasn't expecting so much memoir, but it was well done, if incredibly painful at times, to read.

I am very conflicted about this review, because my reading experience of this book didn’t turn out how I expected. I was very excited when I received an ARC for White Magic by Elissa Washuta. This was a book that I had been looking forward to because I love powerful essay compilations and memoirs. However, this book was just not my cup of tea. The author used a very specific type of prose and story-telling that I had a hard time following. However, I think many readers will find the writing beautiful and poignant. I just really struggled with it, and found it really hard to follow along with the actual content of the essays. I think, in general, readers will either love this book or hate it. Washuta’s stories are very powerful, but the language and prose will not be for everyone. 3.5 stars.

I received a free digital ARC from NetGalley and W.W. Norton & Company in exchange for an honest review.

A brilliant analysis of race, ethnicity, and culture, but not an easy read. Washuta explores the cooptation of Indigenous cultures through short pieces and fragments. Very much a book worth taking ones time with.

Wow.

In this collection of essays that read like long form poems describing Washuta's stream of consciousness, we see the author's views on Witchcraft/Witch-adjacent/Spiritual spaces, both in person and online, as a white-passing Indigenous woman. We see the flaws she sees in herself, in others, and in the powers that be. We see her history with processing toxic and abusive relationships, mental illness and the various diagnoses received, inherited and intergenerational trauma, and how her numerous experiences with sexual assault have impacted her.

Washuta bounces from topic to topic through tangents of personal and general timeline jumps, definitions, and short stories. We are moved back and forth between her childhood and her present with breaks in between.

The language is beautiful. There's a sort of rhythm to her writing that makes almost every passage easily quotable.

The longer I read, the more some stories seemed to be getting recycled, however they were re-told from a different angle or perspective.

I enjoyed the fluid timeline filled with tangents as it's how I speak and think but it may be difficult to follow for other readers.

A powerful, humorous and painful read.

This is a beautiful book! It's smart and engaging and it feels so thoughtfully crafted, like every single line is full of the same care and intense energy. The combination of personal stories, historical research, and cultural analysis works super well and allows Washuta to play around with the definitions of essay, memoir, etc - this aspect makes it a very good pick for all those who loved Carmen Maria Machado's In the Dream House. This book also feels very different from any that I might compare it with, though, and I think that has to do with its continual ties to land and place making even the more abstract parts feel rooted and tangible in a really satisfying way.

I had read the introductory essay to this collection when it was published two years ago in Guernica, and it was wonderful to revisit it and see it in its fully context here. I will say that while this essay collection is brilliant and includes fascinating juxtapositions analyzing pop culture, more canonical works, as well as philosophical ideas and Washuta's own experiences, it was heavy going a lot of the time due to the heavy, traumatic nature of those personal experiences. It's not a book, at least in my opinion, that a reader can plow through quickly. Both because of the critical rigor as well as the traumatic focus, it's a book that demands taking one's time.