Creative writing professor lets readers into her thinking
Anytime Elissa Washuta thought she was holding back or not using her true voice while writing and editing her new book “White Magic,” she channeled the energy of the creator of the cult classic TV show “Twin Peaks.”
“If I ever felt like doing something safe, I’d think, ‘If David Lynch was allowed to make ‘Twin Peaks’ Season 3 as he did for Showtime, surely I can have a little bit of a time shift here,’ ” said Washuta, 36, a creative writing professor at Ohio State University.
And she had a hunch that her audience might just enjoy something a bit different too.
“Readers are ready for books doing weird stuff,” Washuta said. “I think readers are a lot more adventurous than big publishers give them credit for.”
That mindset allowed her to pen the personal essays that make up “White Magic,” with an honest lens into what makes her who she is.
It’s why she spends a whole essay writing about the rabbit hole she fell down trying to find an old video she remembered watching in D.A.R.E. (a drug-abuse prevention program) as a middle schooler while examining what led to her own struggles with addiction and finally getting sober six years ago.
She also puts the same epigraphs on her first few pieces and then asks the reader directly, “Do you think I made an error? Did you flip back to the previous epigraph? Do you worry you’re missing the meaning?”
Her beliefs in magic and witchcraft — “I’m not a witch exactly: I’m a person with prayers, a person who believes in spirits and ‘White
Magic’ plays with fire,” she writes — serve as a central theme throughout the book.
As a member of the Cowlitz Indian Tribe, she weaves in stories of her ancestors — their colonization and genocide as well as their healing powers and spirituality — with her love of video games (“Oregon Trail II” and “Red Dead Redemption”) to find peace within her own life while maybe helping others enrich theirs too.
A: I can see a strong connection with my love of reading as a child leading me to produce something like “White Magic.” How truly magical books were for me as a kid. I truly believed that what happened in “A Wrinkle in Time” could happen in real life. We just had to catch up to Madeleine L’Engle. … I wanted to captivate readers like those authors captivated me. not worth writing about. What changed your thinking?
A: Once I had formal instruction in my graduate program in personal essays, I learned how to make stuff in my life interesting even if it was not interesting. But I also had people around me telling me, “This is interesting and you should tell it.”
Personal essays are not about the plot points of your life. It’s how you represent those events — in form, voice and most of all how you make meaning of them now. What I’ve grown into is research and cultural criticism to help me make sense of what I was thinking and feeling in my life.
Now that I’m older, there are not so many dramatic plot points, and I’m still able to write about my life. My work is less based on new traumas but more looking back on periods of my life with a large time scale — years — around them. I’m very interested in how I see the events of my life in such a different light.
A: A weird quirk of my personality is I’m really not hesitant to share personal things that other people might be more hesitant in saying. I’ve never primarily written with an audience in mind.
I felt compelled to share it and I want people to hear it, and even if they don’t hear it, writing it helps me make sense of a world that makes no sense.