Elissa Washuta: “Living inside this empire is all that I will ever have.”

Elissa Washuta’s White Magic, her third book, a collection of exquisitely crafted lyric essays, is shaped like a visitation. Washuta is the protagonist and also something like an apparition bound by unfinished business, retracing her own pain and desire, cycling through her own patterns, conjuring meaning from repetition, collapsing linear time, circling, looking for a way out. “The internet says I will not release my karma across lifetimes until I learn my lesson,” she writes. “I am ready for this to be my last life. I do not want to come back.”

In one essay, Washuta sees herself from a decade into the future on a city bus. In another, she plays Oregon Trail II on an old computer and her white-man avatar travels west, as she herself did at twenty-two, journeying in a Chevy from New Jersey, where she was born, to Seattle, north of her Cowlitz ancestors’ territory, hoping to make a new start; she relaunches the CD-ROM over and over, searching the screen hungrily for the faces of her Native relatives, which she has been doing since she first entered the world of the game as a child. The book’s centerpiece is a hundred-page essay in which scenes from Twin Peaks: The Return and the same stretches from three consecutive years of Washuta’s life bump up against and tumble into each other, creating what she calls “time loops,” a scrambled diary through which men move, and hurt her, and leave her. Symbols recur, numbers reappear, astrological bodies pass in and out of alignment, proving or not proving that she and her ex-boyfriend are meant to be together. What is coincidence and what is meaningful? It doesn’t matter. Washuta is in pursuit of magic because magic is what gets her out of bed, it’s what “lets me live.”

When pressed to describe , Washuta says it’s “about how my heart was broken and how I became a powerful witch.” It is also, along the way, about PTSD and addiction and America and appropriative white witchcraft and tarot and Fleetwood Mac and the portal of the internet and the grievous effects of settler colonial violence on the body and for PlayStation. It’s about Washuta’s tremendous longing to be loved, a wanting she could only ever blot out with alcohol, and what it is like to grieve