Conjuring the Past: Artifacts of Memory
Monday, October 18, 7 pm via Crowdcast
About the Event
Two women search for meaning by parsing the artifacts of their family and cultural lives. In White Magic: Essays, Elissa Washuta confronts both her past drug addiction and her struggle of being a Native woman by examining her culture’s spirituality, modern love, and influences like The Oregon Trail II and Twin Peaks. Time Magazine calls the collection “Electric.” Although Lilly Dancyger’s memories of her heroin-addicted parents are rosy, when she looks closer, she sees a different truth. Using her father’s provocative artwork as a guide, Dancyger learns who he really was. Carmen Maria Machado calls her memoir Negative Space, “A lovely and heartbreaking book.”
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Elissa Washuta is a member of the Cowlitz Indian Tribe and a nonfiction writer. She is the author most recently of the essay collectionWhite Magic. Her other books include Starvation Mode and My Body Is a Book of Rules, named a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. With Theresa Warburton, she is co-editor of the anthology Shapes of Native Nonfiction: Collected Essays by Contemporary Writers. She is an assistant professor of creative writing at the Ohio State University.
Lilly Dancyger is a contributing editor at Catapult and assistant editor at Barrelhouse Books. She’s the author of Negative Space, a reported and illustrated memoir selected by Carmen Maria Machado as one of the winners of the 2019 Santa Fe Writers Project Literary Awards, and the editor of Burn It Down, an anthology of essays on women’s anger. Her writing has appeared in The Rumpus, Longreads, The Washington Post, Rolling Stone, Playboy, and more.