Elissa Washuta is a member of the Cowlitz Indian Tribe and a nonfiction writer. She is the author of My Body Is a Book of Rulesand Starvation Mode, and her book White Magic is forthcoming from Tin House Books. With Theresa Warburton, she is co-editor of the anthology Shapes of Native Nonfiction: Collected Essays by Contemporary Writers. She has received fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Creative Capital, Artist Trust, 4Culture, and Potlatch Fund. Elissa is an assistant professor of creative writing at the Ohio State University.

EB: How did you begin writing in general and writing nonfiction specifically? 

EW: I don’t know exactly when it began, because I know I wrote stories as a child, but what I first remember is that around age twelve, I wrote poems about longing for my crushes and sent them as submissions to the feminist magazine for girls my mom subscribed me to. None were published. I began writing for myself alone. Around age thirteen, I started writing “screenplays” in which all my celebrity crushes and favorite Major League Baseball players fell in love with me and moved into my mansion. It was more of an imagination diary than anything. I’m sure I wrote at least a thousand notebook pages, probably more, and I put them in a dumpster near the movie theater before leaving for college.

I became quite serious about writing poetry as a high school freshman. That may sound silly. I wasn’t extremely good, but I had a New Yorker subscription and, by the end of high school, I was on the list of winners of the New Jersey High School Poetry Contest, which was my primary objective in life. I quit writing poetry after some discouragement—I am sensitive—but started writing fiction as a college sophomore, then became serious about that, began an MFA immediately after graduation, and switched from fiction to nonfiction writing my first quarter. All it really took was formal instruction in nonfiction to make me feel that I could do it.

EB: What is the origin story of your essay collection White Magic? When did you start working on it, and how did it come about? 

EW: After finishing my first book, My Body Is a Book of Rules, and having a hard time getting agents and editors (or their bosses) interested in trying to bring it into the world, I tried to write a simple book that would easily sell. I tried writing a novel, but writing fiction bores me, and I just can’t see myself making stuff up for hundreds of pages. I tried writing something about the paleo diet because it was just starting to get popular, and I knew it well. (That eventually morphed into Starvation Mode, a chapbook.)

In 2012, I saw a woman I was certain was my future self and wrote about the encounter. That’s the earliest writing that ended up in the book, which I certainly didn’t know was going to be what it turned out to be. Between then and my realization, in 2017, of what the book was going to be, I went long stretches without writing. I wrote some pieces of drafts that ended up being essays in White Magic. Once I started my first full-time job in 2017, when I was hired by Ohio State as an assistant professor, I finally had the security and room to focus that allowed me to finish the draft relatively quickly.

EB: What was the easiest (“easiest”—is writing ever easy?) essay for you to write for this collection, and which one took the longest or was the most difficult to write?

EW: “In Him We Have Redemption Through His Blood,” the final essay in the book, was by far the easiest. I had mostly finished the rest of the manuscript, and I found myself noticing that so much in the game Red Dead Redemption 2 felt connected to the book, so I took notes as I played, then arranged them into a draft that didn’t end up needing significant revision.

The hardest was probably “Centerless Universe,” originally written as part of a writing residency in one of the towers of Seattle’s Fremont Bridge. Writing something for such a purpose proved to be an incredibly daunting task, even though most of the pressure was coming from me, and it was research-heavy. It was a challenge to complete the draft, and a separate challenge to return to it later and revise it to pull the stakes to the surface.

EB: The amount of research you did for the essays in White Magic is mind-blowing. (That bibliography!) How did you go about your research for this book? What is your process like—research first and then write? Write and research simultaneously? Do you have any advice on how to keep so many sources organized while writing? And what, if any, personal research did you do for the book—rereading old diaries, old Tweets or Instagram posts, looking at old photos, contacting exes…?

EW: Oh, god, I wish I knew what I was doing, I wish my skills had progressed beyond the undergraduate research seminar I took when I was briefly a history major. I’m being ungenerous with myself. But it is true that I don’t have good methods I can recommend. I’m disorganized (although my struggles to clean things up in the end inspired me to get some ideas in place for next time). I’m not methodical, so my research process was different for every essay. I don’t care about being exhaustive because this is a book about me, and if someone wants to read about spiritualism or appropriation or the oral history of Dances with Wolves, all of that exists outside my book.

I wrote all of this book while employed by research universities: first University of Washington, where I was half-time staff, then Ohio State. At UW, I was in American Indian Studies, a multidisciplinary unit within the social sciences division, and I know that my desire to look broadly outside myself for source material came from conversations with those scholars. But my methods are really just shaped by curiosity, going down rabbit holes, and knowing how to use the library’s online research tools. Typically, research and writing are not separate processes for me.

EB: I love the line in your essay “The Spirit Cabinet” that goes: “He wanted fantasy, maybe, his life turned into the autofiction he loves, the details changed a little for the sake of the story. But I write nonfiction. I want it real. And I want, to my constant detriment, to work other people like I work an essay, conjuring up meaning where there was none.” I feel like this helped me understand how I approach relationships myself, as a nonfiction writer. How else do you think being a writer of nonfiction affects your world view and/or how you live and operate in the world?

EW: Oh, I might write an entire book about this, and I think White Magic is actually a book entirely about this. I’ll just say that the longer I went on working on White Magic, the more I began to live for the essay. I did things so I could write about them. A happy, satisfied protagonist is boring, so I built conflict into my life and turned it into material.

EB: What other writers do you admire or turn to for inspiration? Any particular books or authors who you feel shaped your approach to writing White Magic?

EW: It’s going to sound corny, but my students are by far my most reliable source of inspiration these days. I’m teaching two MFA classes this semester. We are all crushed under the weight of pandemic life. I struggle to get out of bed in the morning. And yet they are writing these fascinating, inventive, impressive drafts. Reading published work has been difficult for me this past year, but reading my students’ work and talking to them about it keeps me aware of how desperately I want to write.

I did read some books while doing the bulk of the writing that became White Magic, and I don’t know how all of that influenced me, but I think the books that were probably the most impactful on what came out of me were The Self Unstable by Elisa Gabbert, This Wound Is a World by Billy-Ray Belcourt, and Teeth Never Sleep by Ángel García.

EB: What do you find most rewarding about writing nonfiction?

EW: This is such a tough question—maybe because the answer is so simple: I really like my essays! I like making things I think are good. I also like the attention, but I metabolize it quickly. Pride in my work stays with me.

EB: And what do you find most challenging? 

EW: The boundary I have to create between essay and reality when writing doesn’t hold once my work is published. I’ve tried to find ways to write about other people without causing pain. But the fact is, real people have caused me pain. I’m allowed to write about my life. There is no way to make my truth easy.

EB: Finally, what is a favorite passage of nonfiction by a fellow “non-man” writer?

EW: “I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you. Then even death, where you’re going no matter how you live, cannot you part. Seize it and let it seize you up aloft even, till your eyes burn out and drop; let your musky flesh fall off in shreds, and let your very bones unhinge and scatter, loosened over fields, over fields and woods, lightly, thoughtless, from any height at all, from as high as eagles.”—Annie Dillard, “Living Like Weasels”

Author photo credit: KR Forbes