Writers Here & Now with Elissa Washuta
Writers Here & Now with Elissa Washuta
Join us for the Writers Here & Now event with alum Elissa Washuta, author of two hybrid memoirs, My Body is a Book of Rules and Starvation Mode, and a book of essays, White Magic (forthcoming from Tin House Books in April of 2021). She is co-editor, with Theresa Warburton, of the anthology Shapes of Native Nonfiction: Collected Essays by Contemporary Writers, and is an assistant professor of Creative Writing at Ohio State University.
Contact Lindsay Bernal (lbernal@umd.edu) with any questions.
Co-sponsored by the Center for Literary and Comparative Studies' Antiracism series and the Creative Writing Program.
From the publisher:
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. 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.
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. 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.
Bracingly honest and powerfully affecting, White Magic establishes Elissa Washuta as one of our best living essayists.
Follow the Conversation @UMDEnglish
Join us for the Writers Here & Now event with alum Elissa Washuta, author of two hybrid memoirs, My Body is a Book of Rules and Starvation Mode, and a book of essays, White Magic (forthcoming from Tin House Books in April of 2021). She is co-editor, with Theresa Warburton, of the anthology Shapes of Native Nonfiction: Collected Essays by Contemporary Writers, and is an assistant professor of Creative Writing at Ohio State University.
Contact Lindsay Bernal (lbernal@umd.edu) with any questions.
Co-sponsored by the Center for Literary and Comparative Studies' Antiracism series and the Creative Writing Program.
From the publisher:
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. 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.
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. 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.
Bracingly honest and powerfully affecting, White Magic establishes Elissa Washuta as one of our best living essayists.
Follow the Conversation @UMDEnglish
false
RSVP
Contact Lindsay Bernal (lbernal@umd.edu) with any questions.