I like the three-act structure of White Magic<\/i> a lot\u2014how Washuta plays with dramatic structure, the idea of beginning\/middle\/end, the idea of the three parts of a magic trick as described in the movie The Prestige<\/i> (the pledge, the turn, the prestige). As far as the individual essays, there are some I love, and some I just admire: like, I appreciate what Washuta is doing with multiple\/overlapping\/circling time lines in the long piece near the end called “The Spirit Cabinet,” but also, I’ve never seen Twin Peaks<\/i> so the way she’s using it as a point of reference is sort of lost on me. (I’ve also never played Red Dead Redemption 2<\/i> or The Oregon Trail<\/i>, but I love Washuta’s essay about playing the latter as a Native American, her Native female self playing the game as a white male settler character, seeing the landscapes of the game while thinking about her real Native ancestors\u2014the differences between a white person’s imagining of past Native people, general or specific, and her own imagining of them.) <\/p>\n
I like the way Washuta writes about landscape and place alongside her personal history and broader histories in essays like “The Spirit Corridor” (which talks about the underground fire in Centralia, Pennsylvania, and how her dad’s family worked in coal mines, and about remembering some good moments in a bad relationship) and in “Rocks, Caves, Lakes, Fens, Bogs, Dens, and Shades of Death” (which talks about the landscape of the part of New Jersey where Washuta grew up\u2014the lakes, the bears, how European settlers renamed Native places in what Washuta imagines as “a kind of white magic, an incantation against the wickedness they believed was striated into the bedrock”). Elsewhere, in “White City” and “Centerless Universe”, Washuta talks about the Seattle landscape\u2014where she lived for a time, where her Cowlitz ancestors were from, where she had an artist’s residency in the tower of a bridge. (I love that this piece includes Seattle history\u2014including how the land was literally reshaped on a massive scale in earth-moving\/”regrading” exercises to make the city more level\u2014and also the experience of playing Pok\u00e9mon Go as a distraction from a relationship that’s on the verge of ending\/has just ended.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I like the three-act structure of White Magic a lot\u2014how Washuta plays with dramatic structure, the idea of beginning\/middle\/end, the idea of the three parts of a magic trick as described in the movie The Prestige (the pledge, the turn, the prestige). As far as the individual essays, there are some I love, and some […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11922","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nonfiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11922","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11922"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11922\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11922"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11922"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11922"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}