
White Magic
Essays
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Narrated by:
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Kyla García
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By:
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Elissa Washuta
About this listen
Throughout her life, Elissa Washuta has been surrounded by cheap facsimiles of Native spiritual tools and occult trends, "starter witch kits" of sage, rose quartz, and tarot cards packaged together in paper and plastic. Following a decade of abuse, addiction, PTSD, and heavy-duty drug treatment for a misdiagnosis of bipolar disorder, she felt drawn to the real spirits and powers her dispossessed and discarded ancestors knew, while she undertook necessary work to find love and meaning.
In this collection of intertwined essays, she writes about land, heartbreak, and colonization, about life without the escape hatch of intoxication, and about how she became a powerful witch. She interlaces stories from her forebears with cultural artifacts from her own life - Twin Peaks, the Oregon Trail II video game, a Claymation Satan, a YouTube video of Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham - to explore questions of cultural inheritance and the particular danger, as a Native woman, of relaxing into romantic love under colonial rule.
©2021 Elissa Washuta (P)2021 HighBridge, a division of Recorded BooksListeners also enjoyed...
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Performance
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Girlhood
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
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Great read, audio needs editing
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Diana Helmuth, thirty-three, is skeptical of organized religion. She is also skeptical of disorganized religion. But, more than anything, she is tired of God being dead. So, she decides to try on the fastest-growing, self-directed faith in America: Witchcraft. The result is 366 days of observation, trial, error, wit, and back spasms. Witches today are often presented as confident and finished, proud and powerful. Diana is eager to join them. She wants to follow all the rules, memorize all the incantations, and read all the liturgy. But there’s one glaring problem.
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Beautifully written memoir
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
When his mother, Barbara, turns seventy, Jedidiah Jenkins is reminded of a sobering truth: Our parents won’t live forever. For years, he and Barbara have talked about taking a trip together, just the two of them. They disagree about politics, about God, about the project of society—disagreements that hurt. But they love thrift stores, they love eating at diners, they love true crime, and they love each other. Jedidiah wants to step into Barbara’s world and get to know her in a way that occasional visits haven’t allowed.
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A roadmap to a peaceful heart
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Year of the Tiger
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- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
This groundbreaking memoir offers a glimpse into an activist's journey to finding and cultivating community and the continued fight for disability justice, from the founder and director of the Disability Visibility Project.
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Alice Wong is rad
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By: Alice Wong
What listeners say about White Magic
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
- Natalie
- 08-07-21
Beautiful look into a broken but healing heart
This books is heavy content and saturated with intense raw feelings and experiences. Gorgeously articulated and engaging. Highly recommended to those wanting to share in another’s real experience of a unique life and her introspective method of relaying her world.
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2 people found this helpful
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Overall
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Story
- Sarah Montuori
- 06-14-21
not what I was expecting
Very bleak and depressing. I wanted a story about magic, not PTSD and alcohol. Not as marketed.
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