read me
Not that people ask all that often, but I typically don't give writing advice. This is because reading other people's freaks me right the fuck out: the fact that my process consistently works for me does not prevent me from believing that it is wrong, bad, weird, and definitive proof that I am not an Artist or Intellectual of any kind and instead just a girl who's way too interested in her own thoughts. But! I've been doing a thing lately, and it's been working for me, so who knows, maybe it will work for you, too? Or at least give you some insight into the way I work, and help convince you that whatever your process it is is not the weirdest or worst one out there. Certainly not the dumbest, or "most LA."
So, okay, I also don't keep journals, which is sort of hilarious given how much I write, but for whatever reason that's one form that's never interested me-- that, and poetry. (There is an easy joke here about how I need to expect an audience, even a small one, in order to sit down and work.) But recently I started pulling a tarot card or three first thing in the morning, and then I started writing down notes about what question I'd asked or focus I'd given myself and what popped up, mostly as a way of checking myself: was the Hanged Man actually turning up consistently my readings, or was I just imagining that because it felt like it should be? (A: yes, definitely, hand me a deck and I can cut it to The Hanged Man like 50% of the time right now, because it's a card about surrender and like, L O L.)
Because I do it in the morning, I often end up writing a little bit about my dreams, too, and sometimes other bits and pieces that are floating around my mind that I don't have another repository for: song lyrics, conversational fragments, things my yoga teachers said. (Most LA, I told you.) It ends up being a sort of Joan Didion On Keeping A Notebook kind of a practice, in that nothing I write there informs my work explicitly; mostly, what it keeps me is mindful, engaged with paying a specific kind of attention to myself and my life and the detritus trying to cohere in my brain.
I'm aware that a lot of my spiritual practices are... not for everyone, but even if you are no kind of believer I think tarot is worth getting to know. You don't have to believe in any kind of mystical or universal force to use the cards-- in fact, I think one of the reasons they work so well for me is that they're in so many way literary, legible mostly from a knowledge of myth and archetype. On skeptical days I think of reading my cards like talking to a friend or my therapist, nothing more than a way of giving myself new perspective on the stories I'm telling and the questions I'm asking. I'm also lucky that the person who taught me to read cards, one of my mom's cousins at a long-ago family reunion, told me that it was okay to ignore the little interpretive booklets that come standard with every deck-- "there's a reason there's art on there," he said. "You can look at a card and see-- and feel-- what it's trying to tell you." I'm not telling my fortune, reading the future. I'm just trying to sort out what's going on with me in the present before I start each day.
On the other hand, the thing about art means it matters a lot which deck you use! Rider-Waite is standard but because I'm a princess and a magpie and a Capricorn I use the Golden Universal-- similar, not the same. A handful of friends have and love the Goddess deck, if you're into that kind of thing. How did this Tinyletter about writing books turn into a series of links to Amazon and Urban Outfitters? I would say I'm sorry but I guess it's clear I'm not.
Anyway, what did the tarot help me write this week? Nothing! I just told you, that's not how it works.
(I did do this interview with Emma Gordon, though, about writing for money and using other people in my work and whether culture has any value in our current hellscape of a country!! Okay great see you next week!!!)