Enjoy this video of our 2017 memories and imagine yourself escaping to Hawaii in the cold! 2018 dates are February 28-March 6th. Flights are discounted for the offseason, so the time to act is now! We invite you to poke around on the website and apply.
Deadline December 4, 2017.
(With thanks to our photographer extraordinaire, Micael Storm Blue)
If you are interested in using the Tarot to communicate with your muse, here is an example of how you can use it to offer a message for your writing life, process, and work.
This post comes from a limited-series Tarot feature I published on She Writes a while ago. Here, I’m working with the Shining Tribe deck, created by renowned Tarot scholar Rachel Pollack* who taught me that the Tarot “is a vehicle to remind yourself of what you already know.” It’s perfect for writers, and it’s the deck I use for the Tarot for Writers readings I offer with Two Trees.
One of the simplest ways to work with the Tarot is to pull a single card, which answers some version of the question: What do I need to know right now? Today, my version of this question was:
What do we need to remember?
The answer was the card Awakening.
The Card: Awakening is the 20th card in the major arcana: the card of transformation, of realization, and a shift in perception. This “awakening” is to the true self, without doubt. It suggests a joining with others, and responsibility. Unlike the Judgement card in the traditional Rider-Waite Tarot deck, this spirit has come for everyone. All rise!
So what does this card mean for you, as the writer?
Remember that the role of the artist is to shine the light.
What do you see when you look around you? What needs to be addressed, revealed, celebrated or transformed? Where do you see a different, or unspoken, truth? In other words, what do you need to say?
Every person has their own unique perspective, and your writing is rooted in how you experience our shared world. Remember that the role of the artist in any society is to offer that different view, to encourage us to reconsider our commonly-held beliefs so we can grow and change together. Sometimes, our art is a direct challenge; other times, an exploration, a celebration, or a dissection. Your story may be dark or painful, it may seem apolitical and personal, but as long as it is your truth, it matters. Sharing your artistic vision can literally shift the way the rest of us see.
It can also bring us together. All rise, remember? When readers encounter feelings and experiences they share in someone else’s stories, those strangers are no longer so strange. The more stories, the more truths, the more chance that they will find validation in your experiences or your imagination. So, whether you are still dreaming, or writing, or in your final edits, take some time to reconnect with what is universal in your story. Don’t forget: the people in Awakening are standing in the same pool of consciousness. Together, they lit the windows in their world.
Remember this: Do not doubt your voice, or the fact that we need it. Trust the light, and embrace your true self. Only you can tell your story.
How can you apply this card to your work?
Sometimes the cards prompt a new series of questions, or a writing exercise emerges. These may be for your project, your writing life, or something else. I encourage you to find your own connections between the images in the card and what you are working on, and I feel quite comfortable that you will find some!
This time, I want to go back to the card, and answer today’s question very simply:
Remember to transform.
Ask yourself:
Do your characters change over the course of their experiences?
Is everyone safe and the same in the end?
Do you have enough twists in the plot?
Is your reader pretty sure, right from the beginning, that she knows where she is going, and does she get there pretty much exactly as she expects? (If so, you need some surprises!)
Does an image in your poem allow your reader to experience something in a new way?
Does the reader change? Did you make her laugh, break her heart, teach her how to dress a wound? Will she always think of herself now as your sister?
Keep it dynamic. Keep it unique. Keep it true to your felt experience. Keep it connected to the essence of our shared humanity. I suspect that you will hear the cards repeat some of these messages in the coming weeks, just when you most need to remind yourself.
Happy writing!
*The Shining Tribe Tarot: Awakening the Universal Spirit, created by Rachel Pollack, comes with a detailed book that describes the nuances and the inspiration behind each card. If you want to know more, or have your own Tarot practice, I strongly recommend it.
This interview with Reiko was originally published on the Women Authoring Change blog for Hedgebrook, an amazing retreat for women writers. In their own words, “Our mission is to support visionary women writers whose stories shape our culture now and for generations to come. Our core purpose is equality for women’s voices to help achieve a just and peaceful world.”
Hedgebrook: Tell us about your work as a writer—do you write in multiple genres/forms?
Reiko: Sadly, yes. I’m a self-taught writer, so every time I write a book, I have to teach myself to write all over again, and it’s not a quick process. For my first novel, Why She Left Us, I read like crazy and mapped out the books I liked to figure out what a novel was. I dissected them, teaching myself everything from how to end a chapter to how to format dialogue.
When I started my next book, Hiroshima in the Morning, which was a memoir, I didn’t realize there were new rules, new expectations, until the first draft was done and it was terrible. And then I had to look at the central question of the memoir, the reason why I was telling the story so that I could use it to create the skeleton… I’ve just finished my next novel, and now I am working on my fourth: a fantasy, possibly for young adults, though that’s not even clear. With, you guessed it, yet another set of rules and assumptions that I need to learn, to play with, and possibly to break.
Complaining aside, perhaps it is truer to say that I will always have to teach myself to write this new book that’s in front of me no matter the genre, because this new book has the potential to be anything and how else could I find out what it needs to be? And as hard as it is to keep shifting (and failing, over and over), I also expect I would be bored if I was repeating myself.
Hedgebrook: Do you consider yourself an activist?
Reiko: Yes, though it’s taken me a while to realize it. When my memoir was still a manuscript, and Amy Scholder at the Feminist Press asked to see it, I did think to myself, “Why would she want my book? I’m just a mom.” Of course, if you are a woman who believes that fathers can take care of children as well as mothers, that mothers should be allowed to travel for work without being vilified, that you are equal and your voice is important too, then you are a feminist. But at the time, I didn’t consider those views as political statements. They were my experience, my reality. I thought it was just common sense.
Hedgebrook: Would you characterize your writing as activist? Why or why not?
Reiko: I think all writing is activist when you speak from your heart and from your truth. When what you have to say is urgent to you, and when your exploration of an idea or a form or a vision is consuming. I write about motherhood, gender roles, racism, discrimination, historical trauma and war. These topics emerge, regardless of what I think I am writing; I don’t plan them, and especially, I don’t start with them. I start with people, relationships, situations, inheritance. I often find myself circling around identity, with my characters trying to figure out who they are, what they want for themselves, what they refuse to be, and how their sense of themselves is different than the stereotypes and misperceptions others hold.
Again and again, in my books, you’ll find women stuck in roles that suffocate them. You’ll find lots of racism, individual and global. The internment of Japanese American citizens by their own country is just one example from my own family’s history, which is still relevant today. More relevant than ever in the aftermath of this presidential election. Our history is full of times when we created the label “other” for people who were not like us. Full of times when we changed laws and twisted all logic and reality in order to enforce that separation and to justify our acts of racism and hatred. We assassinate, enslave, perpetrate genocide, imprison, drop bombs on entire cities. This history infuses my books, but I keep my focus on people, and on the human consequences of hating, judging and limiting each other.
Hedgebrook: What impact do you hope your writing will have in the world?
Reiko: I hope my readers will experience a new way of seeing the world. Art should be surprising, challenging, exhilarating, and tenderizing. Of all of these, this last is most important to me. Despite my earlier answers, I’m not trying to hit anyone over the head with my “message.” The point is not that war, racism, oppression and misogyny are bad – we know that. To me, the point of reading is to be able to leave your daily life. The world of the book may be wonderful or ridiculous or terribly sad, but that’s how we practice our empathy and stretch our own boundaries. We need empathy now more than ever. And we get it by immersing ourselves inside the character who is suffering, striving, facing down oppression. The character who is just like us after all.
And in a society without enough empathy, a society of fear and separation like the one we live in now, I want to help to give voice to the stories, experiences and people who are not often heard. As a writer, in my subject matter, but also as a teacher, mentor and activist. This is where it begins. We need to hear ourselves, validate our experiences, find allies and community, claim our space. This is the Hedgebrook mission, of course, and I guess my own point here is that society cannot and will not change until the silence is broken. So that’s my mission: to speak the truth I see and help others speak their own.
Hedgebrook: What’s the best feedback you’ve received from a reader/audience member?
Reiko: Some form of, “Thank you for sharing this story that does not get told.” “Thank you for seeing me, and for reflecting my struggles and my experience.” “Thank you for showing me that I too will survive.” I’ve heard from many women struggling to define their own motherhood who were grateful that they were not alone. From children of internees whose parents would not share their own stories. But also from people whose lives are very different from my characters’ on the surface, but who see themselves in a broken family, an adopted child, a family secret. We are, at heart, the same. That connection is everything.
Recently, Beth Kephart asked me to talk about my writing process and rituals, and writer’s block. She shared my answers in her Junctures newsletter. Reading over them now, I find myself wishing to be in that other country: writing. To capture what is coming through in the dark. And you? It’s been a hard post-election year for the country, and a hard 2016 for many of us. What does your 2017 look like? How will you find a way to declare yourself ready for writing?
From the interview:
I don’t write every day. I don’t write every week even. I wish I did. I write long books with worlds to build, that take time to feel my way into and more time to climb my way out of, and I often wish that I was the kind of writer who had lots of ideas, short stories, essays, poems popcorning around in my brain and that I could sit down every morning and one of them would come and keep me company for a while. I’m not talking about ease – that I wish writing was easy – but availability. I’m not talking about validation either. I know I am a writer even when I am not writing because I have written, because I think in terms of story, because I am an annoying person to watch a movie with since I am constantly pointing out the clues that have been dropped to create that satisfying ending that seems surprising but suddenly inevitable (just ask my children), and because when I haven’t been writing for a while I am restless and nitpicky and vaguely unhappy. You’d think, as a writer, I’d be sensitive enough to notice that for myself and correct it, but it’s usually someone else who points it out.
For me, entering a novel or memoir is like entering another country. Just as large, as far away, as difficult to navigate, as exhilarating. Something new around every corner; an unfamiliar map that I have to work to keep in my brain. Which is to say, it takes a while to get there, and once there, I don’t want to be pulled out. If I had my choice, I would keep writing, every day, for six hour chunks (that’s the point when I start getting sloppy and cutting corners), without noticing whether it happens to be dinner time or two in the morning. Indeed, when I am in that space, sometimes I wake up at in the middle of the night and grab the pen by my bed to write down what is coming through in the dark. As a result, I can give you great tips on how to get ink out of your duvet cover.
But having become conversant with that new world, I also have to leave it for long periods of time so I can edit. I have to put my work away for months at a time until I have forgotten enough of it that I can judge it. I need to be able to see past what exists on the page to why it is there in the first place and I need to be able to break myself out of the rhythm and sound of the words so I can cut them if necessary. So, for me, writing comes in waves – in and out.
When I am writing, I often start with a moment to clear my mind and pick a direction. Some people meditate. I tend to pull a tarot card. I ask a question – what do I need to know right now? Maybe the meaning of the card itself is helpful… It’s about refuge, say. Or maybe the image reminds me to pull out the conflict more, or sometimes it’s a message for me as the writer – to let go, or turn something upside down. But really, pulling a card is a way to get out of my way, and also to declare that this time is mine, and this headspace is ready for writing.
You’ve been reading, surely, about authors’ declining income, about our paltry sales figures (even for prize winners). You’ve quite likely read suggestions on the Internet for “making a living” as a writer. But when money “makes” our very lives; when money is the measure of our worth, we are living in Opposite Land. And in Opposite Land, where art equals product, equals sales, equals giving some ill-defined readership what “they” are presumed to want, it can sometimes feel impossible to begin to get words onto a page.
How do we write in this climate of efficiency, productivity and bestseller lists? One way is to embrace opposition, and contradiction, in our writing spaces. If you are looking for a new approach, or some inspiration to energize your writing in a corporate world, here are a few suggestions:
Don’t write: At least, don’t start with the blank page on your computer screen. You’ll find yourself counting pages, or words, and disparaging the quality of your delicate first draft. Instead, grab a journal, and start writing by hand. Try out voices, descriptions; rough out a scene. Cross out, draw arrows, and keep going; messiness can be very freeing. Jot down notes and ideas for later. Record your questions without stopping for the answers. If you brainstorm your way into a dead end, let it be. Your brain is pondering the problem in the background; the answer might sneak up on you in time! You are building pressure in that journal, and when it is bursting with ideas, your blank computer screen will be irresistible. Don’t forget: your journal is waiting for you whenever you want to come back to play.
Don’t edit: Once you are writing, let it flow. If one path peters out, jump to something that feels urgent. Be prepared to be surprised, and to follow those surprises, but try to resist the urge to go back to fix what you have. If the writing is going well, it will keep shifting and changing. You won’t know what each element of the story is supposed to do until you get to the end of the first draft. Revising, and especially polishing, parts of your manuscript too early can be detrimental because you run the risk of making something read so well that it’s hard to see that you are supposed to cut it, or move it, or reassign it to a different character. If that urge to revise is coming from the need to have a product and pages to show for your time: resist!
Don’t isolate yourself: You know the atmosphere you write best in; maybe it’s a wild, quiet garden, or a room with no windows, or a crowded café. But regardless of what you need to do to empty yourself out onto the page, don’t forget to fill yourself back up. Populate your life with books, movies, music, other people; get outside. Exercise your ability to recognize patterns and see how your concerns echo other people’s stories, and the world around you. Plugging yourself into your community will give you energy, and remind you that your writing is meaningful to others.
Don’t focus on success: Which is, of course, what I have been saying all along. With each book I have written (and I am playing with my fourth), I have had to teach myself how to write all over again. The judgment and expectation that come from having or wanting success are the best ingredients for writer’s block. Creativity requires a beginner’s mind, and a willingness to fail, combined with the courage – stubbornness even – to keep learning and playing and trying something new. In our product-driven world, writing, and living, are both processes. Trust the process, and the product will come.
(This post from our archives was written before 2020.)