I first met Elissa Washuta at the Port Townsend Writers Conference in July 2019. On the tip of the Olympic Peninsula, the sunshine, cool mornings, and shockingly numerous deer made for an idyllic few days in a pre-pandemic world. Washuta is Cowlitz, and what is commonly referred to as Washington State is her ancestral territory. There we were, in Fort Worden Historical State Park, on grounds where the shadow of the violent colonial military is ever-present. According to the official state park website, one hundred years ago this place “was home to nearly 1,000 troops and officers training to defend the Puget Sound from potential enemy invaders.” The insulting irony of this extends to the fact that the Cowlitz people were not federally recognized until 2000 and had no reservation until 2015.

Washuta, thirty-six, was born and raised in New Jersey; she later moved to Seattle, where she earned an MFA in fiction at the University of Washington. She went on to teach at her alma mater, as well as at the literary center Hugo House, and was the city’s writer in residence at the Fremont Bridge, where she was tasked with undertaking an in-depth exploration of the bridge. Much of Washuta’s newest collection of essays, White Magic (Tin House), takes place in Seattle, and includes a chronicle of her time spent in the tower of the drawbridge. Her previous books—My Body Is a Book of Rules (Red Hen Press, 2014), Starvation Mode (Future Tense Books, 2015), and a coedited anthology, Shapes of Native Nonfiction: Collected Essays by Contemporary Writers (University of Washington Press, 2019)—grapple with complex identity and corporeality, but vary widely in their approach and content. In the hands of a writer as skilled as Washuta, what writing teachers often call the “hermit crab essay”—a list, an SVU script, a doctor’s note, a diary entry—becomes a well of invention and imagination. One of the many things Washuta is consistently skilled at is combining humor with insight. She also plays with the ideas of language, time, and the shape of a text—both its literal shape on the page and its shape as a narrative—to create a story that makes its own life inside a reader’s rib cage and skull.