Fantasy in Leo
Dear Friend,
It is high summer with all of its electrical storms, madness, and melancholy. It is the season of fantasy.
It has also been my birthday.
I have long struggled to accept this sunny aspect of my own personality. I am a Scorpio rising, and I feel at home in the Goth darkness of that world. But I have begun to accept that I am very much a Leo sun too.
I dress in gold and I am storm clouds.
I tend the hearth and I cast hexes.
🜁🜃🜂🜄
This birthday, I have been given the gift of deep recognition from loved ones. I have been drenched in art.
I was starstruck when my dear friend attended a Kim Hyesoon reading and asked her to sign a copy of her latest book, Phantom Pain Wings, for me.
Kim Hyesoon has written that, ‘perhaps literature crosses into a zone where consolation can’t intervene’ but she has consoled me many times. Her writing has held me and given me a place to live.
She also gives me inspiration to write more ambitiously. In this article about her daily practices, I discovered that she ‘reads old novels all the way through (recently, she was back on Clarice Lispector, a favorite) and new fiction until it bores her (“It isn’t very good”). She watches competitive-singing shows on television, answers e-mails from three continents, and drafts stanzas longhand.’ This gives me the desire to write fiction interesting enough to compete with competitive-singing shows; a task harder than it seems. I am grateful for the spur to creativity!
I also received YL Hooi’s Scorpionic mixtape Water, Cipher Press’s new collection Witch, and a book tracing the connections between Science Fiction, Magic, the Occult, and Queer LA in the mid-twentieth century.
My biggest gift was attendance at a workshop on listening as a devotional practice run by one of my favourite contemporary artists, Claire Rousay. You can listen to her most recent album (with Gretchen Korsmo), Quilted Lament, on Bandcamp.
In the first session, yesterday, I met artists and musicians from all over the world. We came together to share our emotional and personal connections to the work we were making, and to disappear through wormholes in time and space by listening to ambient sounds and seeing where they led.
Inspired by Pauline Oliveros’s theory of deep listening, we explored the idea of listening as memoir, listening as story, and listening as affect.
I have been thinking about how artmaking might be represented in fiction. Another way of thinking about this is asking how other artforms can influence writing. By attending a class with mostly musicians, I found myself considering musicality, phrasing, and immersive aesthetics.
🜁🜃🜂🜄
Leo II: Fantasy
I have been deepening my astrological learning recently, and I have found my way to the decans. They are the ten degree divisions within each sign of the zodiac, and they explain why the same zodiacal season can feel very different at different moments.
If you are interested in learning more, I would highly recommend Kira Ryberg’s podcast, Threads of Fate, where she explores each decan in turn. It was Kira’s work that introduced me to the concept, and it’s a rabbit hole I have tumbled into.
The decans were one of the influences for Pamela Colman Smith’s iconic tarot images, and each decan corresponds to a tarot card, as well as to a planetary deity.
We are just emerging from Leo II (August 2-12) which is ruled by Jupiter, and the Six of Wands.
You don’t need to have a deep interest in tarot or astrology to feel the changes in your bones, or to experience the impact of the changes in atmosphere.
I love the names that astro-scholars have given to these micro-seasons. Austin Coppock calls Leo II ‘A Crown of Laurels’, and T. Susan Chang calls Leo II ‘Your Moment in the Sun’.
She describes this decan as a moment of brief victory, and she advises recipients to ‘accept your position in the limelight with grace, knowing that (1) it will not last forever, and (2) it will surely come again someday!’
I have made my own interpretations of the decans, and I call this one ‘Fantasy’. Something to be enjoyed, fleetingly, and with pleasure. But also, a spur to creativity and action beyond the moment of good fortune.
🍄 Fruit (things that are ready to share)
The incomparable M. Forajter recently edited an edition of Burning House Press on the theme of ‘Art and Annihilation’ which included my piece ‘Mood Ring’. There are many other brilliant pieces in the edition.
If you would like help in unlocking your book, I would love to support you through Slow Practice.
Slow Practice is a year of individual mentorship where we will sink into a project together and hold it up to the light. We will work with slowness, and curiosity, to allow your book to emerge in its most authentic and radical form.
I would love to mentor you to create a lasting artwork, and to share your singular creative world with an audience.
🦠 Spores (tiny ideas)
I have been inspired to use my DIY (and very lo-fi) music skills to make something with my guitar and pedals and Ableton. I might get into my fourteen-year-old boy era.
𓍊𓍊𓍊 Mycelium (relational networks)
I recently judged the annual Ceremony Prize for undergraduate creative writing students at Warwick University, and I was so psyched to read their pieces which all started with the line ‘doors have queer uses’. I loved the range of entries that included memoir, creative nonfiction, fiction, poetics, and critical-creative writing. The two winners, Ivy Huang and Nayanika Saha, were brilliant. I’m excited to see what they do next.
Here is a gift for you: these beautiful drawings by the writer, artist, and performer Candle Hirst.
I wish you a week of deep listening, fantasy, and drama.
Love, Laura
this is microdosing ceremony, a letter from my artist’s cocoon to yours.
find out more about rituals and writing on the ceremony podcast.
explore creative rabbit holes on my website.
🜁🜃🜂🜄