A Lot to Think About
Still processing . . .
Like many others, I continue to reflect on Rachel Pollock’s life and legacy.
Rachel’s accomplishments extended far beyond the Tarot world, as you will see from obituaries published in The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, and The New York Times. But the extent to which she influenced contemporary Tarot really cannot be overstated—as demonstrated by the many reflections posted on her Facebook page.
Last week I set out to compile the series of “Rachel Notes” posted recently on EP—a task I thought would be pretty straightforward. But of course it wasn’t.
I found there were a few more things I wanted to say (or show), so I began to expand the original posts a bit. The result will be forthcoming this week, without fail.
In the meantime, I wanted to welcome new readers. If you haven’t browsed the EP archives, I hope you will. And some foundational posts are showcased on the EP home page.
Quite a few stories have piled up in my Tarot queue over the past several weeks, so I’m beginning a series of Daily Notes—posts that briefly highlight items of interest. Here’s the first installment . . .
I often wonder whether Tarot references really do turn up everywhere, all the time, and I just notice them more than others might because my antennae are tuned to that channel. Or does the universe see to it that random references make their way to my personal attention?
I’m guessing it’s the former, but sometimes it does seem like the latter.
To be clear, the references in question come from unexpected (sometimes very unlikely) sources—not from Tarot blogs or websites. And mostly these references bubble up while I’m in the process of researching other topics, which is noteworthy when the research topic seems far away from Tarot or Tarot-adjacent territory.
But sometimes the references just pop into my Inbox, nestled in one of the many (many) feeds I subscribe to. Here on EP, I’ve written fairly often about writers and artists whose interest in Tarot I learned about from publications like The Paris Review, The New Yorker, and The London Review of Books.
Here’s a new example, recently included in Paris Review’s free Sunday newsletter. It’s from a 2008 interview with then-Poet Laureate Kay Ryan:
INTERVIEWER
When you rode your bicycle across the country you discovered you were meant to become a writer, but what are the practical ways you taught yourself to write?
RYAN
I’d kept a journal of that trip and decided that I would get up every day and transcribe that journal, augment it and fix it up. What that gave me was the habit.
But once that was done I didn’t know what I was going to do. I’d bought a tarot deck—this was the seventies—a standard one with a little accompanying book that explained how to read the cards, lay them out, shuffle them—all those things. But I’m not a student and was totally impatient with learning anything about the cards. I thought they were just interesting to look at. But I did use the book’s shuffling method, which was very elaborate, and in the morning I’d turn one card over and whatever that card was I would write a poem about it. The card might be Love, or it might be Death. My game, or project, was to write as many poems as there were cards in the deck. But since I couldn’t control which cards came up, I’d write some over and over again and some I’d never see. That gave me range.
I always understood that to write poetry was to be totally exposed. But in the seventies I only had models of ripping off your clothes, and I couldn’t do that. My brain could be naked, but I didn’t want to be naked. Nor was I interested in the heart, or love. The tarot helped me see that I could write about anything—even love if required—and retain the illusion of not being exposed. If one is writing well, one is totally exposed. But at the same time, one has to feel thoroughly masked or protected.
Her comments fit the theme of this post: “A lot to think about.”
And there’s even more to consider, when I examine the following bit of serendipity. As it turns out, the person who interviewed Ryan was someone who now writes a Substack newsletter:
I’ve been following her Substack for reasons that have nothing to do with Tarot. But I had absolutely no idea about her fascinating background as a writer until the Tarot led me to take a closer look.
And from Sarah Fay’s newsletter I move sideways to a very different writing blog: Hope Clark’s Funds for Writers. Hope has built this publication into a beloved resource over many years of effort, and it’s very practical—mostly lists of opportunities, with some thoughts from Hope, plus a guest post. I scan over it as an impulse rather than as a habit.
And here’s what I impulsively discovered in last week’s guest post, by Tania Pryputniewicz:
Back in college when my love-life imploded, I discovered the tarot, a tool for looking at aspects of our lives we don't understand. A tarot deck is like a deck of playing cards, only there are 78 cards comprised of 22 soul cards (The Fool or The Lovers), 16 people cards (Kings and Queens modern deck-makers give contemporary names), and 40 "daily life" cards (challenges and triumphs). As a writer, I fell in love with the vibrant imagery and arc of psychological stages depicted on the cards. I journaled to each card, examining my past and present. Over the ensuing twenty years, I stayed with my tarot writing practice and learned to read for others.
I decided to bring that process forward for others and pitched one-on-one tarot consults designed to help writers explore the next step in their creative process. I helped fund my retreats with my earnings and met lifelong friends, one of whom became the publisher for my first poetry collection.
Between retreats, I created and taught tarot writing courses through an online school, using the tarot cards as a map for digging into situations and motivations, inviting students to point the arrow of inquiry to the most pressing part of their lives or writing project. Over the years, students have used their tarot journaling entries to seed writing across forms from playwriting to poetry to novel chapters.
Her website offers a writerly approach to Tarot—plus this snapshot, which I couldn’t resist sharing:
Tomorrow, a quite striking work of Tarot art exhibited at Brigham Young University, along with two items I’ve been promising for quite a while.
Thanks for reading! C