Magician's Hat: An Interview With Elissa Washuta
By Shaina A. Nez
Photo by Marcus Jackson (2020)
This interview is a special guest feature to celebrate and chat with author of the recently published White Magic (2021, Tin House Press).
Elissa Washuta is a member of the Cowlitz Indian Tribe and a nonfiction writer. She is the author of White Magic, My Body Is a Book of Rules, and Starvation Mode. With Theresa Warburton, she is co-editor of the anthology Shapes of Native Nonfiction: Collected Essays by Contemporary Writers. She has received fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Creative Capital, Artist Trust, 4Culture, and Potlatch Fund. Elissa is an assistant professor of creative writing at the Ohio State University.
Washuta co-edited, with MFA Creative Writing Director Santee Frazier, the Chapter House Journal when she was faculty for the low-residency program. We give much thanks to her for sitting down with us to talk about her work and other neat writing stuff. Enjoy!
Shaina Nez: What was the hardest part of writing White Magic?
Elissa Washuta: I think the hardest essay to write and to revise was Centerless Universe. Which is the long essay about my time as a writer-in-residence at Seattle Fremont’s bridge. It was hard for many reasons and at many different times.
I started writing that essay in late spring, early summer of 2016 when I was in my writing residency. And it was hard then because I am terrible about promising any essay to anyone or any kind of writing project. It causes me a lot of anxiety to have that pressure to know that I had to get it done and had to get it done by a certain date. And I had to get it right, I was writing this essay that I knew was in some way the history of Seattle where the Fremont bridge fit into that and of course the history of Seattle is the occupation of Duwamish territory although I’m not Duwamish, I’m Coast Salish. From the beginning I felt this enormous pressure to do right by the Duwamish people to get it right factually and have a thorough understanding of what it was I was trying to write about.
Which was not only colonization, but also about bridges and how bridges work. And I don’t understand how bridges work—the more I read, the less sense it made (laughs). Bridges are very complicated. I had these numbers of things, from the beginning, to simultaneously get right. My first draft was this really large thing about history, and about Seattle, and about my breakup with Carl, who was the person I was dating at the time and was central in the book and our breakup happens during that period when I was in the bridge tower. Writing about a feeling that I was probably going to need to leave Seattle which I eventually did.
The first draft was a little bit boring; I think (laughs). I knew it was going to be important and that it had to be in the book. Sometimes though I thought about cutting it but it was too significant. And so I just needed to figure what it was really about and I don’t know if I can sum up what I did to it and what I eventually arrived at as far as what the essay is about but I put so much work into revising that essay. I had to strip out some of the background information and detail about bridges and Seattle history. It was a matter of what to cut. Also had to add some things and figure out what my story was in the essay. Eventually it became a darker essay. It became a focus on despair and looking at despair in a new way.
The research is so hard. I still struggle with. It’s one of the primary things I still struggle with. The essays I’m working on now. So many of us are used to having been good students and finding all of our sources and making sure that in college our papers were complete and well researched and you know the essay is not that even if there is research so it becomes really easy when you pull anything into the essay. You can pull way too much and finding that place to stop is really tough for me still.
SN: Craft Question: How do you know if you’ve pulled too much information? What are your processes?
EW: You know, I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. Let me first describe my process with research—I will have my spark and idea for the essay and I know that something needs to be researched or I read something and I need to re-read it to fully understand it and then use that as a jumping off point for more research.
When I’m getting into a topic that I’m really curious about and so I start going down all these rabbit-holes and collecting all these links, and opening up all these tabs and then there’s just a mess of stuff. I spent years of just researching that essay without writing it and that was not good—it was procrastination. But I am thinking lately as I’m in the process of going so far down research rabbit-holes and compiling all of this research that is ultimately not going to end up in the book because it all can’t end up in the book—it’s too much.
So, I’ve been impatient with myself, as I’m watching myself do this research instead of writing and I realized even though the sources themselves are not going to have a direct impact on the essays I’m writing—the process of doing the research is actually what I need. Right now, I’ve been looking at a lot of maps for an essay I’m working on and looking at video locations that can be mapped onto a real map and it’s not important. It’s not significant at all. It’s not interesting to anybody but me and I’m realizing I’m doing this for hours and hours because I have to familiarize myself with what is driving me to want to know where the video game locations are in the city of Seattle. The information at the end of it is not so much of sitting with that fascination.
How I know when to stop researching and when to start writing is when I have to push myself. It’s not an easy thing, it probably never has been and probably never will be an easy thing for me, because I’m, at that point, very afraid because I have amassed so much research I have convinced myself that this essay is far too big to wrestle with. There’s just too much more that I can hold on in my mind and at some point I just have to decide if I have one sentence that’s in my head to put that down and go to the next sentence. Or if I have nothing in my head, I just have to start writing garbage and I hate writing garbage. That has been, in very recent years, something that I had to start doing. Also, writing notes to myself saying, “this will be filled in later.”
But eventually I have to form some kind of bridge for myself to get from the research that I’m not writing about into a place that if I need to know something, if I need to quote, or include facts that I can pull from the research but not leave my writing to go back there. I think a lot of the time documenting has helped me. I have a searchable database of everything that I’ve been researching so that I have that reassurance that it’s there if I need it. Probably I’ll never search this database but it’s there if I need it. Ultimately, research serves to be some of the substance of the essay and also something to hold on to.
SN: In what significant has your book changed since the first draft?
EW: I will say it took me a really long time to get to the first draft of the book. I had a first draft of several essays much earlier than the full book itself. “White City” and “Centerless Universe” I drafted in 2016 and had a finished essay of “White City” which was published by The Offing that same year. That essay I did revise quite a bit for inclusion in the work. Later, I had a first draft of My Heartbreak Workbook in late 2016. From 2017 and on, I drafted piece by piece each of these essays. The last essay “In Him We have Redemption through His Blood” being the last addition in the book.
When I was in the process of drafting each of the pieces in the book, I didn’t know exactly what the book was going to be. I did think the book was going to be about cultural appropriation, spirituality, and New Age stuff which a lot of readers think it was getting into but I got pretty bored with that. The research was not fascinating to me. That was some of the stuff I was compiling but not generating so I used that as a launching point that became a book about my ex-boyfriend (laughs).
I had a first draft of the book in 2019 and shared it with some friends and shared it with my agent. One major changed that happened after that, well, there were a couple of major changes and one in “The Spirit Cabinet”. There were tons of footnotes and a story in there that was about stage magic and card magic and realized that would be a separate essay. The essay wasn’t doing anything for the book, it was making it overly complicated and so I cut all of that out. Another thing that changed was I introduced three acts, there are three acts in the structure and introductions that prefaced each section. I was thinking of this not [as] a collection of linked essays or topically related, I was thinking this was a book length essay made up of essays and I was thinking of having its progression and shape that wasn’t coming through to. I realized that was a moment to steer the reader a little bit more.
This is what I also see with essayists who do writing of this kind that just need that feedback from readers whether they’re meeting us or not. Whether we are giving them enough to allow them to do their part of the reading experience. And so, I just needed to offer a little bit more.
After that, the next big revision came when I got comments from my editor at Tin House. He had a major change to suggest and I thought I wasn’t going to be open to any suggestions of major changes at that point. But there was an essay in the book called Shark Girl and it was an old story about a girl who turns into a shark that is reproduced in the book that is mentioned that was an entire essay all its own.
My editor pointed out something that I knew deep down that I didn’t want to think about and that essay just wasn’t as strong as the other essays. It was something I written earlier and had grown from and I was really attached to a lot of the material. There was a lot about movie The Craft, the scene where those witches summon a god, I can’t even remember that movie, but the hammerhead sharks ending on the beach. I ultimately had to realize that that was a big kill your darling’s moment and so I had to kill that entire essay. With my editor’s help, he guided me through the process of figuring out what was good to keep and in various essays in the book. So those were the major changes that happened.
SN: How much trust did you allow your editor to have in the book’s development?
EW: Using the word excitement, I think that’s the key in how I come to trust an editor especially someone who is reading my work and giving me advice in how I proceed with it. I don’t share my drafts with many people—I’m getting better about it. I’m getting better at letting people in to that process. Part of it is knowing what to ask for and know what I need in feedback. When it comes to working with editors, it’s a bit of figuring out which editor to work with if you have a lot of options—it’s a big deal. Most important factors for me when it comes to figuring out where I want my work to be published, 1) listen for excitement – when you first have a conversation with an editor for a manuscript, what are they excited about? What do they think is working? What do they understand being important in the work?
When we workshop in MFA programs, we usually open the workshop with positivity and by talking about what’s meaningful and what we appreciate in the work. That’s not just a technique for nice cushioning before the dragging starts, no, that’s not how it works. We need to establish that we care about the work we’re about to discuss and understand the stakes. We understand what the writer is trying to do and so I think working with an editor who understands what you’re trying to do and is excited about that and has ideas about how to make it better. That’s the obvious advice that everyone talks about but it’s much more than that.
What it really comes down to it and when you’re having these conversations with an editor—I do think it’s important to really listen to what their experience is of the manuscript. And see how aligned it is to the experience you want a reader to have and how you want a reader to feel. It’s important to get the manuscript to the point that’s it’s doing what you want it to do and that it is the manuscript that you wanted to create. Be open to discussions of revision and in those initial conversations listen to your gut when your editor talks about what needs work and consider if that’s something you want to work on whether that is something that registers in your gut. It all comes down to who’s invested in your work—mentally and emotionally, and how they are aligned with the sense of the end product of your book.
SN: How would you describe White Magic’s ideal reader in the sense of excitement?
EW: That’s really hard to define because I know it in my gut but that is not a single person, that is not a demographic, and it’s not a define[d] marketing category. Ultimately, with this book I had to get to a point where my audience was me. I had to write something that amused me and delighted me, that made me feel as I am laughing at my own tweets (laughs).
So I think my audience had to be me or other people who have the same taste as me. Eventually once I was revising, I really did have to think more about the reader and make sure I was giving them enough to meet me where I was. I was really thinking about who my audience was since my past work, what they probably expected from this.
Readers of my past work know that I like to do unexpected things with form and they know I write about sexual violence and they know that I have a particular sense of humor especially when things are super grim, so they know to laugh at my jokes. Of course, I wanted to expand my audience with this book and so I was also just thinking of the readers and writers that I’ve met through Twitter and other places where I’ve found people in the book world who are interested in essays and essay collections that do similar things. Really the sense of my audience is less about identity, demographics and who they are and more about what they enjoy.
The fact that some of us really strongly prefer to read things that are emotionally difficult and sad and grim and you know, it’s not for everybody and that’s okay that some of those narratives that are really, really hard in that way tend to be some of the emotionally rewarding and weirdly uplifting for me because they clarify things in my own heart that are really difficult to look at. They give me a window to look at. Fundamentally, readers need to be up for something honest about violence.
SN: I know in My Body is a Book of Rules, you are challenging sexual violence. What perspectives and beliefs are you challenging in White Magic?
EW: There were a few core beliefs that I was really trying to challenge with this book. One was that heartbreak is not a serious topic for a nonfiction book. I wanted to write this big book about a breakup in a short relationship. It was hard to move on because it was important to understand what had happened in that infatuation and loss. It was a really significant turning point for me and so I wrote about this ex-boyfriend—who didn’t live with me and was just able to cleanly walk away and so that was one thing I wanted to write this serious thoroughly researched book that entertained my ex as one of its central topics.
Another thing was I wanted to challenge the conceptions of what books of colonization are and can be. I know there are readers who have been frustrated at what this ended up being and wanted to learn something. These are settler readers and I think they wanted it to conform on what a Native writer could be. I thought we were a little past that and I guess that was naïve of me (laughs) but I wanted to challenge beliefs and expectations by making this about colonization. It’s completely about indigeneity and I feel like even though a lot of my subjects are films and T.V. shows and video games made by white people mostly for white people. I think of this being the most Native book that I could write because of the way I was trying to work with and represent time and place. I was working through my real experience of being who I am and it goes back to Native literature because I wrote it. The biggest part of that was there are settler readers who approached the book and feeling that they are receptive to what I’m doing but I’m trying to push them to be ok with surprises, as a magician, that relate to the book. I want them to be ok with the fact that I offer them this book that maybe it’s going to be about Native spirituality and culture appropriation and then I get bored and move on to the next thing leaving settler expectations behind—I could disregard them and stop thinking about what they wanted.
SN: In the section Bedroom Door, Open, you wrote, “Sometimes I forget about Carl, but his absence from my thinking never lasts. I wonder what love is and whether I’ve ever really felt it. In overlaying two natal charts, one can see the aspects between two people’s planets; some aspects show feelings that can resemble love, like the hook of early infatuation or the vertical pull of karma.” Craft Question: How does one approach vulnerability in writing?
EW: The starting point of that was located in my past years as a writer where I had to first accept myself as a valid character at the center of essays. I had to accept that I was interesting enough to be a protagonist and that had to happen when I was writing My Body is a Book of Rules. It took me awhile to get there and I’ve had a long process of being ok putting my feelings on the page and that is really, really hard. It is hard to be that vulnerable and I think I just had to create the conditions to allow myself to know that I’m doing that safely. That’s one of the reasons why I don’t show a lot of my work early on in the process, as I’ve mentioned. I need to create a space where I could say anything and know that nobody is going to see it until I let them and am really serious about holding on to the essay for publication. And really sure it’s ready to be out there in the world, which is an entirely different process making sure they are ready to go aesthetically.
Another thing that really allows me to work with those emotions is to think of them as stakes. You know, it’s not the silly feeling of infatuation that everybody is telling me to try to ignore and try to get over this guy and whatever. I need to take that seriously as stakes. This is why I care; you know? Because I’m obsessed with my ex-boyfriend that’s why I care about all of this. That’s the occasion of being here and really wanting to know these things, it’s important. It’s not even a literary process or craft process, it’s like therapy stuff to recognize the validity of one’s own feelings. Just letting them be as they are and trying to represent that moment and capture that. It’s one part of an emotional arc, and you’re not going to get a resolve without it.
I’m able to bring that on the page after paying attention to my feelings. Living with PTSD knowing what mental reel is playing and what is the recording that I’m able to hit play somehow. Recognizing what the feelings are and understanding them is preparatory work to get to before getting them on the page.
SN: Craft Question: What would you say, in the book, was your favorite craft process you were really proud of?
EW: Definitely The Spirit Cabinet.
It’s 100 pages long and there’s so many parts of the process in putting that together that I loved and I was very afraid at the same time. This essay is an extension of what I’ve already been doing with form and in many ways, totally different than what I had done.
The essay is made up of really short sections labeled by date, overlapping timelines beginning January 1st and ends on December 31st, then overlapping timelines of each year from 2016 to 2018, with some earlier events sprinkled in there with some sources. Once I had the idea to get started on that I was realizing things that started happening in repetitions of events that happened on the same day and in the previous year—that was really exciting for me and I just wanted to get started and see what I could find. It was fun because I had a defined task in front of me. I had these index cards where I put the date of events and a sentence on each one about what happened. Like if there were significant details, I’d scribble them down and I methodically went through my memories and see what was there.
Memories and calendars, texts, emails, tweets, trying to figure out what had been happening at that time frame. It was really fun to arrange that. I was not so much shaping and steering the essay, the associations especially, I was going to let the essay be whatever had happened. Of course, there were a lot of shaping but not rearranging things so much but deciding what is significant enough to actually make into a section. I really had to trust my intuition and of course, that’s what the book is about and what becomes the magic in the book. Handing over the control to whatever force was putting the essay together didn’t feel like it was only me.
SN: Titling the book White Magic, what was the process in naming your potential book?
EW: I came up with the title way before I had started working on that essay. Late 2017, or very early 2018, I came up with that title. The book had a different title but it wasn’t a perfect fit and so I sat one day was waiting for a movie to start and I started scribbling some titles just brainstorming and White Magic just seemed like it fit in ways that were sort of indescribable. I knew I wanted to interrogate the idea of white magic as benevolent, black magic as benevolent, and wanted to push back against that. I wanted to look into the other kinds of magic that this book is about, like magician’s craft. The way that kind of magic was present into my relationship, the deception and delight. I wanted that to be a part of the title.
SN: How do you set up your surrounding when you are ready to write? Do you set up your workspace?
EW: I wrote a lot of this book in various places and there were about 5 different houses and apartments that I was living in through the course of writing this book. I wrote significant chunks in my office at Ohio State or at least put in a lot of hours there. But now, this space that I’m talking to you in is where I write. I have a huge monitor in front of me and I have a huge monitor over here (laughs) and I find necessary to set it up this way to have my notes and research. I’m trying to be really organized with what I’m working on now because drafting up sources in White Magic was such a mess. It was so messy!
And so, I wanted everything in its place and use my software where I collect my sources and notes for my draft. I need to have a large visual workspace. I also have so many plants in front of me, and I like to have the plants with me. I just really grown to love this office—it is the attic of my house so it’s basically a finished third floor. It’s my own separate space with all of my books around me. It’s probably not a good thing to have set these conditions that I need to have in order to write but, you know, why not? If I could have the conditions, why not?
The major factor is I do work better when I have long stretches of writing time. Not just the quick writing session while I’m waiting for my coffee to brew or something like that (laughs) or on my morning commute. I can’t, I just can’t work that way. I do have to mentally set everything up and I do have to remind myself that this is what the essay is about, this is what I’m concerned with, these are the sources I’m looking at, this is where I left off, this is what I need to do. It’s just much to settle into for six hours than it is to do it in little bits here and there or trying to get better at using the time that I have even though the time is short.
SN: Does scheduling change when you’re writing a piece?
EW: My time management is terrible, and it’s been my major project this summer on how to structure my time this upcoming semester. Now that it’s summer I can do whatever and I do really protect my time during the summer. I’m not on contract this summer, so it’s important to not do a contract and to give myself that time to have those long stretches of time where, I was going to say when I don’t leave the house, but nowadays I don’t leave the house anyway (laughs). But I need to give myself that open time and putting boundaries on my other time as well.
Time spending on various things—it’s easy to over prepare to plan my teaching and even putting time into one email. So I googled what to do about email and found a signature, “I don’t mean to be rude, I’m trying to limit my email to 5 sentences, to have more time for writing,” because it can be a real drain to try to figure out what small-talk to make in an email that you haven’t left a house in a week (laughs) and so I decided not to worry about it and state in my emails what I came in to say and not spend a lot of time on it.
Generally, I write during the day and I don’t really write at night unless I’m having a super long writing session. I didn’t write really much this last academic year, I really had to dedicate my time to teaching and book promotion for White Magic. It was very important to me, to fulfill my responsibility to my students and it took extra work to give them what they needed. I also dedicated my time to interviews for White Magic, there was just lots of stuff to do that crowded out my writing time.
What I am trying to do this next year is be very aware of my time and actually do something with the information. I’ve been tracking my time with an app, time tracker, and switched to a different system. I used something called Toggl, how much time I spend writing, research, actual research, and university stuff. The next thing to do with that is figure out how I will spend my time in each areas of my job. Next, would be cutting down on my teaching but not takeaway my experience from the students that will adversely affect their learning. I’m going to spend blocking off days in each area of my job and the kind of work that I do. One day is my teaching day, one day I am writing, and so that I’m not switching mental modes and being less productive. Email to reading to writing and to a meeting—it doesn’t work. Ideally, I would do that but we’ll see how it goes (laughs).
SN: Advice to MFA Low Rez students and emerging writers?
EW: It’s the most basic advice and the most obvious, READ. Like read a lot of stuff. Read very contemporary literature, read what’s coming out recently, read literary magazines, and read in genres that are not genres you write in because you can learn a lot and people are doing really interesting things that you are just going to absorb as you read. Especially when you’re starting the Low-residency program, you’re going to these amazing craft talks, and using the language of craft in your workshops and in your discussion with your mentors during the semester. All of that is going to be in the back of your mind when you’re reading things, and its obvious advice. I do think that for many of us that reading sort of falls away and it’s just the writing time. But I haven’t been doing much reading, so maybe after this I should go read a book or something (laughs). It really is important to do especially when you’re starting out, and in the experimental phase of your writing life.
The other advice is to work towards being in a place of openness to feedback, but at the same time, having discernment of what feedback you carry with you and use. There’s a sort of neutrality that is really useful to have as the foundation for the piece up for workshop and being in conversation of your drafts along the way. Even if you feel defensive or strong emotions. And that’s ok—I have strong emotions when it comes to feedback about my work but whatever emotions you have just let them do their own thing. Try your best to be open to what’s being said to you and pay attention where that reader is coming from. What did they say about your work that was good—did they get it? If so, they’re going to be able to share some things that weren’t working for them but might be useful to you. It’s easy to sort of go in the other direction to not be resistant to feedback but to have the impulse to destroy your draft and throw it out if you get a lot of criticism or to really just accept that anybody pointed out revision that needed to change and that’s not true. Pay attention to what really resonates with you, that might not come through to you super clearly if you haven’t done workshops before coming into the MFA. Over time, you will better recognize what feels right to you and what feels way off the mark.
I think there are so many important things, treat your peers with respect and positive regard and try your best to give them the benefit of the doubt and spend time giving the time of the work that it deserves. Reading other peoples work and articulating the effect it has on us and why is the best way to learn craft, in my opinion. It’s how I continue to learn better than any other way. It’s how I became a better writer because now my job entails giving feedback and really paying attention to that stuff, it’s a huge effect on me and always will. I think developing trust in the workshop environment and developing trust of your mentor is really important. Workshopping can be really emotional work and it’s important to create a safe space to bring in drafts and aren’t ready for publication. It’s entirely possible to simultaneously be polite, critical, and to be curious about other people’s work. Having curiosity and positive regard for them is the most important things to bring into the MFA experience.
SN: Now getting to some fun stuff, if you could spend a day with an author—who would it be and why?
EW: I want to spend the day with Leslie Marmon Silko. I love The Turquoise Ledge and I want to go walk around with her. The Turquoise Ledge is really such an influential book to me, and I was thinking about it earlier when you brought up Silko. Just how that book is entirely its own and completely uncompromising and is so fascinated and totally unlike anything I’ve read otherwise. Just this chronicling of her days, the way she chronicles it, I want to go there and want her to show me around and to show me the turquoise. I want her to show me her paintings, I just want to know the space if it’s similar to my imagining, I want to follow her around for a day, for sure.
SN: Do you have a favorite writing snack or drink when you’re writing?
EW: I have this mug and several others like it (a cream, 8-15 oz. coffee mug, with a black abstract drawing of a stallion) and I have to have coffee in the morning in this style of mug. Of course in this written interview, you won’t be able to show the mug. I need to have coffee with half and half, and start my day with that. I generally do not eat when I am writing, I forget to eat, it’s bad, but I don’t typically eat when I’m writing. Sometimes I will bring in baby carrots, just so I have nutrients (laughs). I have to remind myself to drink water and I drink green tea, hot or iced, in the afternoons. A lot of what I take in during my writing is just an attempt to keep from passing out (laughs) but like getting me focused on whatever I’m doing.
SN: What did you do to celebrate the publishing and release of White Magic?
EW: I bought these belt buckles. I bought this massive belt buckle that has a horse and with a saying, pain is temporary, victory is forever, (laughs). It was a hard time celebrating, I had a hard time marking occasions and achievements and had to be reminded to celebrate things. One thing I tried to do to celebrate White Magic was to make a big production of my virtual book tour. Wear costumes and get dressed up and put in my contact lenses and make myself a little bit unrecognizable to myself after looking at me in glasses and a braid for a year in this zoom window (laughs).
The other thing I tried to do, that wasn’t celebratory as much was taking some time off. The semester ended a week after my book came out. I tried to really give myself some resting time in whatever it was I wanted to do. I said no to a lot of things I didn’t feel I had the energy to do well anymore. Giving myself an endpoint was really hard to do but necessary close it out and make sure that the promotions (of the book) didn’t go any longer than I was physically and mentally able to.
Ok, that was not light at all (laughs). Ok, I bought a citrus-squeezer and it’s like made of iron, which I wasn’t expecting. It’s very heavy. It’s this huge citrus-squeezer and I started making myself everyday a non-alcoholic cocktail type thing, in which I call my special drink. It’s a special drink with grapefruit juice and these various other things and that was one of the gifts I gave myself, along with my huge belt buckles (laughs) my two new favorite metal items.
Shaina A. Nez is Táchii’nii born for Áshįįhi. Nez received her MFA in Creative Writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts in May 2020. She is a member of the Saad Bee Hózhǫ: Diné Writers’ Collective. Nez serves as a BFA Program Coordinator and Adjunct faculty member at Diné College in Tsaile, Arizona. Her work has appeared in The Massachusetts Review, Tribal College Journal, Yellow Medicine Review, Woodhall Press and elsewhere. She is currently a 2021 Desert Nights Fellowship recipient from the Virginia C. Piper Center for Creative Writing at Arizona State University and 2021 Philadelphia Writers Conference Fellow. She is originally from Lukachukai, Arizona.
