Elissa Washuta on Tweeting Her Way to Her Voice

Elissa Washuta is the guest. Her new essay collection, White Magic, is out now from Tin House.

From the episode:

Elissa: The structure was exactly what I wanted, with no really significant concerns about will this sell or not. And even more so than that, I really put a lot of work into getting the voice to sound like me, rather than trying to make it sound like a voice of a memoir. That was a lot of work. It required a lot of stripping down my prose.

Brad: I was going to ask specifically, what do you do to sound more like yourself?

Elissa: Well, I tweet. I realized this a couple of years ago that, you know, I don’t write every day. Just because of the demands of my job and what writing requires of me, I just don’t write every day, or even every week sometimes. But I do tweet just about every day. And I realized that I was putting a lot of work into voice in those little—what is it? Like 140 characters or more now, I don’t remember. But I was trying to sound exactly like myself consistently, and I think that was a really good exercise in distilling the essence of how I sound—trying to be myself online, trying to be myself in person, trying to be myself on the page. I wanted to be myself everywhere because I was so sick of persona in my writing.

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Elissa Washuta is a member of the Cowlitz Indian Tribe and a nonfiction writer. She is the author of 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.