In this issue
- A personal update
- A fabulous guest post about tarot and writing
- A reminder about an upcoming session of The Ceremony
- Book recommendations
- Writing resources to replenish your creative magic
A personal update
Hello! As you read this, I'm recovering from surgery and preparing to return to my witchy writing work. I am eternally grateful for all the support I've received throughout the process—including from today's guest writer!
​Dr. Katy Peplin is the founder of Thrive PhD, where she helps graduate students and academics navigate higher ed with greater ease. Her coaching work, community, and writing challenges like AcWriMo are amazing resources.
Today, Katy is opening a portal into the ways she has used tarot to support her writing practice (and sharing a spreadsheet that I cannot stop geeking out about).
Plus, very soon, Katy and I will be welcoming writers into a workshop we're collaborating on, and it is going to be—dare I say it?—magical.
Without further ado, here's Katy!
My Cards and Me
By Dr. Katy Peplin
my zoom background has gotten a little more magical over the years, but somehow, my most important friends are almost never on view. behind me are three hilma af klint reproductions, stars scattered over the wall, prismatic film in the windows casting rainbows across the room in the late afternoon sun. but directly in front of me, scattered across the desk, are my cards.
i’m not sure the first time i came across tarot cards, but they entered into my life as a tool, ally, and teacher in 2012. on a trip to new orleans, i had a reading in jackson square that was equal parts confronting and comforting, and specifically gave me a lot of insight into my writing process and creativity. and ever since, i’ve been building a writing practice and a magical practice side by side.
of all the tools i’ve used over the years to connect to all the parts of myself and the world(s) i live in, i keep coming back to cards. i love how tactile they are, i love the artistry of the images. i love how their little boxes sit on my shelf with my books and notebooks, and of course, their guidebooks. i usually have a tarot deck and an oracle deck on my desk on any given day, ready and waiting for me to access their wisdom.
i am grateful for all my teachers in this space, but perhaps none more so than lindsay mack. when i graduated from my PhD program in 2016, degree in hand but feeling very alone in a new city with no job prospects, i was looking for something to give me a spark of anything. i was physically and emotionally exhausted, and in the midst of climbing out of my burnout, i found her brand new podcast, tarot for the wild soul, in the summer of 2017. the podcast lead to books, courses, practice, meetups, and a personal practice in a juicy, hyperfixation-flavor i thought i had lost access to forever. i could, in fact, still learn about something! i could research and consider and write and observe and live a new body of knowledge. i could recapture some of the most beautiful parts of my academic self, and integrate them into the new season of my life i was building.
my practice has certainly shifted over the years. in 2019, i religiously pulled one card a day, noting each in my journal, and then later in a spreadsheet so i could see any trends and patterns. (of course you can see it.) when i was in the depths of a medical crisis turned life-reckoning, i poured out pages and pages of reflections and considerations of spreads i pulled at the new and full moons. when my kiddo was just a potato, pulling cards was the one of the few things that helped me connect to previous versions of myself. but these days, my cards are my favorite, most trusted writing tool.
i have what i lovingly refer to as a pinball-machine-brain. i put the quarters into the machine when i sit down to write, and launch a prompt, question, or idea into my mind like a ball from the plunger. that ball bounces around up there in ways i can predict and many ways i cannot, and the outcome builds upon itself as it creates connections, reactions, and pathways through and across the playfield. i love that writing is like pinball, in that i can practice it and improve my skills, but also never fully control the result, either. i’m as interested in getting a high score as i am in understanding how the machine itself works, so even the times when that ball slips right past the flipper, i’m still engaged and entranced.
i am working on a book that uses an ecosystem analogy to think through what it means to create a sustainable scholarly and human life. it is a sprawling, behemoth of a project, and try as i might, it has thus far resisted any of my efforts to impose a writing schedule, outline, or prospectus upon it. but when i sit at my desk, shuffle my cards between my hands, and ask:
- what energy is here today?
- what does the book need from me today?
- what do i need to know about the book today?
- what do i need today?
- what pattern needs my attention?
- what structure wants to be seen?
- respectfully, what the f*ck?
and draw a card, it’s like a stack of quarters in my pocket. i can pop them in the pinball machine and launch that card, that archetype, that image, that passage of writing from the guidebook, that relationship i have with that card, into the playfield. my cards introduce a sense of play, wonder, randomness, chaos, and creativity into a process that can easily feel heavy with urgency, full of stress, and streaked with fear and shame.
call me a hopeless romantic, or multipassionate-hyperfixation-prone-shiny-shiny squirrel, but i believe strongly that our work is our work on the page and off. dirt under my fingernails as i type reminds me that i have work out in the garden, too. when the color of the sky matches the color of the bird on my oracle card for the day, i remember that the deep breath i take while on the way to school pickup is as full of creativity and care as my outline is, as the bird’s nest is. the more i try to create boundaries between what i know as a writer, and what i know as a human, the more the color and magic leaches out of both. the same hands that pull the card are the ones that type the book, the ones that scrawl the notes. and if that’s not magic, i don’t know what is.