Writing to Heal: The Millions Interviews Elissa Washuta

I once heard writer and educator Elissa Washuta say that writing essays can get very exhausting when it feels like the essayist is expected to be an insight machine. I took comfort from that acknowledgement, as a young writer who was (and still is) wrestling with the limits of my perception and self-awareness in a genre that often depends heavily on those qualities. And I continue to take comfort and inspiration from her work. She writes well about the difficult and sometimes fruitless struggle to shape narrative out of the mess of experience—from romantic entanglements to searches for the supernatural to our place in the troubling histories of our nations and peoples—and enacts that struggle on the page. The narrator Washuta’s readers encounter is not a sage on a mountaintop doling out wisdom to the worthy, but a friend writing from the middle of confusing and painful experiences, letting you listen while she considers the failures of life to cohere.

Washuta is a member of the Cowlitz Indian Tribe and an assistant professor of creative writing at The Ohio State University. She is the author of My Body Is a Book of Rules and 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.

I met Washuta when I was one of her graduate students in the MFA at Ohio State, and this spring we exchanged some thoughts via email about White Magic.

The Millions: This is your third major publication, after My Body Is a Book of Rules and Starvation Mode, and a third book seems like a special milestone. Does it feel that way to you? What’s different about this publication from your previous two, in terms of your career or development as a writer?

This book feels massive to me—it feels like in a way that the first two no longer do. I guess that’s not unusual. But I wrote those relatively quickly in comparison, and I didn’t know what I was doing to the extent that I do now. was actually an offshoot of the project that eventually became , though the starting point (ancestral diets, disordered eating, and chronic health problems) is completely gone from the book at this point. I think of as my second book, and