Elissa Washuta

"White Magic is magnificent." --Kristen Arnett Bracingly honest and powerfully affecting, White Magic establishes Elissa Washuta as one of our best living essayists.

White Magic

As Elissa Washuta makes the transition from college kid to independent adult, she finds herself overwhelmed by the calamities piling up in her brain. When her mood-stabilizing medications aren’t threatening her life, they’re shoving her from depression to mania and back in the space of an hour. Her crisis of American Indian identity bleeds into other areas of self-doubt; mental illness, sexual trauma, ethnic identity, and independence become intertwined. Sifting through the scraps of her past in seventeen formally inventive chapters, Washuta aligns the strictures of her Catholic school education with Cosmopolitan’s mandates for womanhood, views memories through the distorting lens of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, and contrasts her bipolar highs and lows with those of Britney Spears and Kurt Cobain. Built on the bones of fundamental identity questions as contorted by a distressed brain, My Body Is a Book of Rules pulls no punches in its self-deprecating and ferocious look at human fallibility.

My Body Is a Book of Rules

Theresa Warburton

Just as a basket’s purpose determines its materials, weave, and shape, so too is the purpose of the essay related to its material, weave, and shape. Editors Elissa Washuta and Theresa Warburton ground this anthology of essays by Native writers in the formal art of basket weaving. Using weaving techniques such as coiling and plaiting as organizing themes, the editors have curated an exciting collection of imaginative, world-making lyric essays by twenty-seven contemporary Native writers from tribal nations across Turtle Island into a well-crafted basket. Shapes of Native Nonfiction features a dynamic combination of established and emerging Native writers, including Stephen Graham Jones, Deborah Miranda, Terese Marie Mailhot, Billy-Ray Belcourt, Eden Robinson, and Kim TallBear. Their ambitious, creative, and visionary work with genre and form demonstrate the slippery, shape-changing possibilities of Native stories. Considered together, they offer responses to broader questions of materiality, orality, spatiality, and temporality that continue to animate the study and practice of distinct Native literary traditions in North America.

Collected Essays by Contemporary Writers

Shapes of Native Nonfiction

In Starvation Mode, Elissa Washuta crafts a personal accounting of her struggle for culinary control, and presents the guidelines she followed as she attempted to shape her body and mind through the food she consumed. The book's seemingly simple structure (a series of rules to eat and live by) contrasts with the powerful way she pulls readers into a complicated story of our needs and the cultural pressures that shape us.

Starvation Mode

Erin Malone

Richard Fifield

Rick Barot

Kathryn Smith

David Naimon

Catherine Johnson

Kate Lebo

Nicola Griffith

Joe Wilkins

Beth Piatote

Leyna Krow

Tiffany Midge

Alexis M. Smith

Shawn Vestal

Johanna Stoberock

Kate Peterson

Katrina Roberts

Kathryn Nuernberger

Lucia Perillo

Tess Gallagher

Margot Kahn

Taneum Bambrick

David Allan Cates

Erin Pringle

Nance Van Winckel

Linda Cooper

Ruth Joffre

J. Newell

Anca L. Szilágyi

Rena Priest

Tara Roberts

Leah Sottile

Dayna Patterson

Gary Copeland Lilley

CMarie Fuhrman

Dujie Tahat

Elissa Ball

Alexander Ortega

Ellen Welcker

Mita Mahato

Jennifer Marsh

Emma Noyes

Tamara Love

Katharine Whitcomb

Dawn Pichón Barron

Shantell Jackson

Laura Read

Rachel Mehl

Derek Annis

Christopher Maccini

Seanse Ducken

Tim Greenup

Henrietta Goodman

Inga Laurent

In this rich, shadowy, glittering anthology edited by Sharma Shields and Maya Jewell Zeller , a multitude of Northwest writers share their singular stories, essays, and poems that center what Shields calls "the literature of despair." These pages confront what is difficult in life with extraordinary precision and grace: In Beth Piatote's story "Secondary Infection," a Yakama auntie narrates the undoing of a lonely woman; in the essay "There Is No Story Until It Happens to You," Richard Fifield writes about a devastating car crash in the remote Montana northlands of his youth; in his series of poems, "During the Pandemic," Rick Barot reflects on fear, isolation, and hope as quarantine descends; in her visual poem, "The Columbia Basin Pygmy Rabbit: An Auto-Elegy," artist Mita Mahato mourns the decline of a fragile species and the terrors of human impact on the environment. In works that span themes from colonialism to environmentalism, from divorce to disease, from toxic masculinity to a loss of faith, the writers here unflinchingly address what makes us vulnerable, what makes us complex, what cleaves us and what connects us. As Zeller writes in the book's introduction, this ambitious anthology pushes us to "learn, memorize, and recite the songs sung by these regional voices, mapping us into a communal root system of evergreen selves."

Grim Tales & Verses from the Gloomy Northwest

Evergreen

Elissa Washuta

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