The Creative Notebook, Post #3
The Creative Notebook, Post #3
Getting out of our own way; a tarot reading for the collective; plus classes!
How are you doing? How is your nervous system? Mine is feeling taxed. (As I typed that, I felt a surge of energy at the bottom of my feet— as if my body was telling me to ground myself?)
I have a few things for you today:
A tarot reading for all of us.
Some ideas for your creative notebook.
News about upcoming courses.
Read on!
Love,
Joanna
Here are the cards I drew for us. I was very interested in the 8 of Swords (the middle card above), which captures pretty well how I felt when I drew these. The figure is isolated and apparently in danger, surrounded by swords and at the edge of some water. But if we look closely, we can see that the “ropes” binding the figure look more like loose strips of cloth. Is the figure ignoring her own agency here by staying bound? Swords in tarot represent the mind and thoughts. They can speak to intellect, but also rumination and conflict. Here we have a figure who is bound and surrounded by the swords of her own mind. In front of her— even beneath her feet!— are the waters of the unconscious, suggesting that there is another, less constricting mode of thought available, if she would only take off her blindfold and see.
We can contrast this with the three joyful figures in the 3 of Cups. This card speaks to community and celebration. Cups represent emotions and creativity, and here the cups are lifted by three women, who appear to be dancing amid symbols of the harvest. When I draw the 3 of Cups, I tend to think about the need to turn to community and friend groups to fully enjoy life and the arts. It’s such a stark contrast to the 8 of Swords. The figure in the 8 of Swords reminds me how it feels to stay up too late reading news on my phone, while the 3 of Swords is the connection that awaits when we step away from our screens and find community and mutual support.
Finally, we have the Queen of Pentacles, a card I love. Pentacles can suggest money, but they are also behaviors, grounding, and the material world in general. The Queen of Pentacles is aligned with the earth signs in astrology and associated with a good use of available resources. She has her feet on the ground, figuratively and literally, and she cultivates habits that help her maintain that grounded quality, seeking a good balance of rest, social outlets, and work. Her appearance reminds us to work with our available resources, both material and energetic, and to recharge when we need to. Connect with the earth and with the beings around you, and remember your own center.
I also pulled an oracle card from Kim Krans’s Archetype deck. The description below includes the line, “It is said that those who cannot see the sacred around them have let their inner flame go out. Think of this card as a call to reignite that fire, to cup your hands gently around those things you’ve forgotten and protect the flame, no matter how harshly the winds around you blow.” This one definitely resonates for me.
On to the notebook ideas!
As we play and experiment in our notebooks, we can begin to get out of our own way. By this I mean that we quiet the inner critic. We settle and start to see what bubbles up from other parts of ourselves. We can begin to hear what’s underneath the constant chatter of our monkey minds, that ever-spinning thinking part that wants to tell us what we should be doing and what could go wrong.
So, how can we help this process along? What helps us get out of our own way? Below are some ideas to try.
Write a letter to another part of yourself. This could be your Higher Self or inner knowing self; a past or future self; or take a page from Internal Family Systems therapy and write to another one of your “parts.” (The video here is interesting on this.)
Write down your dreams and what they make you think of.
Choose a tarot card and write about it. If you like, you can look at this site, pick one of the Major Arcana cards, and intuitively write about it. (You could choose to write on it based on the image alone, before reading the description, or write after reading the description. You could also try an “erasure” piece in which you choose phrases in order from the description and arrange them into your own piece.
Draw a cartoon or comic to express something you find awkward, delightful, absurd, or even somewhat mysterious. (Apparently, if something has one panel, it’s a cartoon. Comics have more than one panel. I tend to call my one-panel drawings “comics,” though…)
If you are a paid subscriber, you can post things from your notebook (along with questions and comments) here in the chat. Either way, thanks for being here!
Note: I’m teaching an online asynchronous class at writers.com on putting together a personal essay called Stringing the Beads. The class has four weekly online lessons and begins tomorrow (Oct. 30th), and you can still join us for the next few days, if interested!
Now on to the MUSE CLASSES!
Saturday November 2nd, 1-3:30PM Eastern
Join me on the Day of the Dead to write about the spectral. We'll consider the spectral traces of memory, psychic inheritances, and all that came before (including our dead).
Forms may include prose poem, flash memoir, speculative nonfiction, and poetic memoir. We'll also consider writing that incorporates found documents and images.
$75/$60 for paid subscribers (write me if you need the code)
Creative Notebook, Zoom workshop #2
This live Zoom meeting will provide an opportunity to work together and explore generative writing, collage exercises, and sharing. You can attend whether you came to the first one or not.
$20; free to paid subscribers
This five-week course with Megan Baxter begins January 12th.
ON SALE for $250 through 12/13/24.
A 5-week introduction to the techniques, tools, and use of research in creative writing, open to all genres. Through weekly lessons which include written lectures, reading, research activities, and writing prompts, this course is designed to help any writer who is embarking on a research journey. We’ll begin by examining brainstorming and associative techniques to help jump-start research then detail the best practices, and practical consideration for conducting interviews, traveling as a researcher, and using source material from books, archives, and online sources.
Finally, we’ll explore how we can use research creatively through world-building, conversation, and collaboration.
This 10-week course with Nancy McCabe begins January 12, 2025
Early bird price of $475 through December 5th (Payment plans available)
This course will help you expand your writer’s tool kit by experimenting with a variety of structures—everything from straightforward, traditional presentations to offshoots of the lyric essay, such as braids, collages, or the many varieties of borrowed forms that we find in “hermit crab” essays. You will read great examples and then try out each shape, if only briefly. Over the course of 10 weeks, you can choose to write about one subject using these different shapes, or let the shapes inspire an essay you hadn’t planned to write.
All the courses are listed here. Feel free to reach out with any questions!
