Tarot Podcast News and April Classes

I got the email today that we are on the verge of having Nimrod International Journal’s issue, Leaving Home, Finding Home in hand. 

I’m honored that one of the commune poems, “Free Box,”appears in the issue. Here’s the link to the page to order from Nimrod International (you can either subscribe or scroll down to order a particular issue).

Sign up for Monday’s 1) Poetry Workshop and 2) Introduction to Tarot Class

Here are links to the full course descriptions for two classes that start next week:

Entering the Tarot Garden: An Introduction to Tarot

Poetry Draft, Craft, Submit!

And here's a podcast from last year, This Choice, hosted by poet Ren Powell, in which you’ll learn a bit about both my poetry history and how I approach the Tarot as a teacher:

This Choice, with Tania Pryputniewicz

Tarot Podcast News

Mary and I will be adding a new feature to Tarot for Two, the blog we’ve been keeping since 2015. We’ve decided to try our hand at podcasting as a format. I will share the link to our first conversation, once we have it, record it and post it. We’ve drafted up some questions to answer on our own, but please do feel free to leave a question for us in the comments here or on our Tarot for Two site and we will consider them for future podcasts. Excerpts from this month's Tarot for Two card of the month writings:

Mary on the Empress:

The Empress is a watery card rather than a fiery one, all those pinks and greens and lotuses and water birds.  But the empress herself is resting in a bower of her own making, an inner bower made of peace and loveliness and happiness, and my desert vacation rests in my memory as a time of airiness and peace and happiness, and the desert with its fierceness has a kind of loveliness of its own.

Tania on the Knight of Cups:

I love most the rider’s wings. I’ve often thought the wings belonged to the horse, but the wings spring from the shoulders of the green-armored knight. The knight holds a chalice to the sky, a red crab emerging at cup’s rim. He’s offering up his heart and the heart’s questions. In the image of the crab I see a layer of protection, the color red so vibrant, a salute to the passionate heart.

Read the rest here:

The Empress and the Knight of Cups

Tarot Prompts and Musings and a June Poetry Workshop

Photo by Robyn Beattie

First Tuesdays Monthly Poetry Workshop at San Diego Writers, Ink

There are still a few spots left in my in-person San Diego Writers, Ink Monthly Poetry Workshop that starts Tuesday, June 7 over at Liberty Station at 10 am (we meet one day a month, first Tuesdays). Our first meeting is devoted to fathers and mothers (considering the roles from multiple points of view). If you’ve worked with me in the past you know I delight in bringing out the best you have to give your poems in the way of vulnerable grit. I only ask that you go the distance in your process to arrive somewhere you haven’t been before. All level of writer welcome.

A few selections I’ll be reading before we begin writing together include First Lesson by Philip Booth, “Lie back, daughter, let your head /  be tipped back in the cup of my hand…” and Thom Gunn’s Baby Song, “From the private ease of Mother’s womb / I fall into the lighted room.” Also Dorothy Parker’s Prayer for a New Mother, “The things she knew, let her forget again— / The voices in the sky, the fear, the cold…” and by Linda Pastan, Marks, “My husband gives me an A / For last night’s supper.” Please bring your own favorite poem to read on the topic of mothers and fathers, roll up your sleeves, join me, and bring a friend. What a way to kick off summer!

Sign up here at San Diego Writers, Ink, and I’d love it if you could pass it on to help it fill. Please do emial me through my contact page if you have any questions.

Photo by Robyn Beattie

Tarot Writing Prompts for You to Use to Deepen Your Relationship to Tarot:

I continue to post a Tarot Writing prompt a week on my main website. We are in the Suit of Disks. Here are the most recent prompts; come join the conversation on Facebook at Wheel of Archetypal Selves or leave a comment on the site if you use the prompts or find inspiration using the exercises.

The Three of Disks, or Art for All

The Four of Disks

Pregnancy, The Five of Disks

Six of Disks Spiral Exchange

Photo by Robyn Beattie

Tarot for Two

One of life’s spectacular blessings is my monthly Tarot phone call with my friend Mary. As I shoo my kitty Luna off the cards, I love to picture Mary sitting in her house all the way in Iowa. I suppose we could use Skype or Zoom, but so far we’ve kept it old-fashioned. Which means it is her voice I drop in and enjoy.  We shuffle, cut, and then recreate the layouts we pull for one another so we are looking at the same cards. It is a gift to share the universal mirror with her and to puzzle out the larger sense of where we meet it with our particulars. At the end of the readings, we pull a card to live with for the month. We share our findings in relation to our card of the month on our blog, Tarot for Two. Here are excerpts from May:

Queen of Cups:       

In the tarot cards water is a symbol for the unconscious.  With the Thoth-deck Queen of Cups the water takes up half the card, it’s all that water below the line.  In the Rider-Waite deck the Queen of Cups is sitting on a throne with a pool of water at her feet; she’s wearing a kind of cape made of water too. Maybe it’s seeing her sitting on that throne that makes me think again of sitting in my own chair in the mornings trying to access the water of my own unconscious as I meditate.  How you get to that water, that unconscious place, and what you find there is what really interests me. 

Ten of Disks:

I don’t know if my children and husband see the magic all around us, but I feel it in the Sundays we rise and hop in the van to drive along Route 75 parallel to the sea.  A four-minute spin delivers us to Katie’s Café where its surfboard sign, hung by a pair of chains, greets us with image of a mermaid resting on her side. In we go past the paintings of surfers emerging from sunlit-backed barrels and tables adorned with glass goblet worlds holding cacti and succulents anchored in multicolored pebbles, miniature clay surfboards at the ready.

Read rest of our post here at Tarot for Two: The Queen of Cups and the Ten of Disks.

Photos are by my poetry movie collaborator Robyn Beattie.

April Tarot Writing Prompts and a June Themed Poetry Workshop for you....

Theme, Set, Go: Monthly Poetry Workshop at SDWI

I know you have some magic words...we all do. Would you like to shrine them in poems? This is an ongoing in person workshop that will meet the first Tuesday of every month starting in June at San Diego Writers, Ink at Liberty Station from 10 am to noon; the first six months of themes, offered as touchstones here, and open to a wide range of interpretations, include: 

June: Mothers and Fathers

July: Travel

August: Harvest

September: Animals

October: Music

While the poetry we write starts as a conversation with the Self, it inevitably becomes a conversation with Other Poets. If we are lucky, that conversation extends itself in front of an audience of Enthusiastic Readers. Come up out of your basement, down from your gable, or away from that crowded coffee shop you frequent. Bring paper, pencil, and your device. Let’s partake of all three conversations and write together!

While we will read and write poems based on a particular theme each month, I invite you to rebel and write the poems hunting you if the themes don’t suit you (though I believe out of the bedrock of resistance emerges some of our most feral, inspired poetry).

Expect to read poetry out loud, write and workshop poems, share ideas for potential submission targets, and grow as a poet. You will come away from each of our classes with enough assignments and started drafts to keep you busy during the month apart til our next meeting. I'll post a link once the course is Here's the link to the course description at SDWI where you can sign up; cost is $30 for members per month or $36 per month for nonmembers. Keep it in mind for keeping your summer writing practice robust; for more information about my relationship to writing poetry, check out this interview conducted by SDWI's Casey Cromwell.

Tarot Tuesday

Here are the latest in the series of Tarot writing prompts I am offering on Tuesdays on my main website. I am working my way through the deck, one card per week. We have moved into the Suit of Disks. I invite you to write to the prompt and share it with us on the Tarot Tuesday Facebook page or in comments on the site:

The Ace of Disks, or the Gift of Preparing to Receive

The Two of Disks, or the Unconscious Juggler

Tarot for Two

Writer Mary Allen and I continue to co-blog at Tarot for Two. We share our reflections on the card we lived with for the month prior, connecting our daily lives to the symbolism of the cards. This month we wrote to Hierophant and  Art/Temperance Cards:

Excerpt from The Hierophant (Tania’s card of the month):

Knowing there were multiple incarnations made this one seem optional, mundane. Traipsing around on our various field trips, I wondered: Why learn about fertilizer for seed crops or butchering methods at the slaughterhouse or chemical mixtures for sewage? Why would we, the chosen children, need to know these things, if we were once Lemurians or Atlanteans? Why did we fall from grace? How was it possible to skin a knee? To lose a cat to a car on a hot tar road in summer? And how am I to know which past incarnation’s work I need to complete in this incarnation?

Excerpt from The Art card, or Temperance (Mary’s card of the month):

This is a beautiful card with many strange and arresting images:  a circle in the woman’s chest holding a clutch of celestial blue balls, a large oval of pale yellow light behind the woman, with writing in it (what does that writing mean? I don’t even know what language it’s in), the woman’s green dress decorated with bees….When this card comes up I think it’s talking, not so much about art as we think about it but about the art of life, the alchemy of mixing things together—a little of this, a little of that, sorrow, happiness, darkness, light, and what you do with all of that—to create a life. 

We invite you to read the rest of both card of the month reflections at Tarot for Two; we'd love it if you dropped us a comment about the writing. I hope this post finds you thriving and taking time to reflect on the moments that brought your joy, or that you find your way back to joy through writing about the challenging moments. Tarot blessings, as I like to say these days.

Photo Credits: Artwork in the top photo is by my poetry movie collaborator Robyn Beattie; the remaining three photos are hers.

San Diego Events for Writers September 2015

Blogging 101: In-Person at San Diego Writers, Ink    

As part of San Diego Writers, Ink, “Fall for Writing” Weekend Conference, I’ll be teaching Beginning Blogging on Saturday, September 12, 2015 from 11 am to 12:45. Today is the last day to take advantage of 10 sessions for $120 member/$140 non-member or purchase each session for $20 member/$25 non-member if you do it before the deadline on Thursday (today). 

Classes offered over the weekend include:

Blogging 101 with Tania Pryputniewicz
Making Memorable Characters with Lisa Kessler
Creative Writing with Jenny Lane
Want to be a freelance writer? with Kevin Brass
Prose Poetry with Ron Salisbury
Brainstorming with Kim Keeline
Scrivener with Kim Keeline
Memoir Structure with Marni Freedman
Scene with Mark O'Bannon
Goal Setting for Writers with Jill G. Hall
Writing Memory with Judy Reeves

Here is the course description for my Saturday workshop:

Blogging 101: It seems everyone has a blog nowadays. It is a prime way for people to share their ideas. And whether you simply want to write a blog or use it to promote your new book, you need to plan how to do it. More than half the blogs that are started are abandoned within a year. Don’t be a statistic. This intro class will help walk you through the steps of launching a blog and keeping it for the long haul. Social media and promotion will also be touched upon.

I also invite any of my former students to come and write with us—I’ll be passing out my usual worksheets but I’ll have some new ones for you. We will write from new prompts in the hat! As you know, the hat always comes to class!

Here is the link for more information and to register for the Fall for Writing Conference.

Creative and Professional Excellence: A Radical Reframe with Jeffrey Davis

Also coming up in late September, Jeffrey Davis of ArtMark will be coming to give an interactive talk as part of the Tracking Wonder Tour on Thursday, September 24 from 6:30-9:30 p.m. at San Diego Writers, Ink at Liberty Station. You may reacall I blogged for a bit as part of an amazing pack of creatives Jeffrey had assembled for us last December. I am so thrilled to have a chance to meet him in person and to hear him speak; he’s changed the way I think about the possibilities for transforming my relationship to my own business artistry. Here’s a link to more information regarding the Tracking Wonder San Diego Tour evening, Creative and Professional Excellence: A Radical Reframe on eventbrite; cost to register for the evening is $20.

Phoenix Seahorse by  Tania Pryputniewicz

For a more personal look at the kind of work Jeffrey inspires, here are links to the posts I wrote as part of Quest 2015; you'll find links to other creatives I met and have come to love at the bottom of these posts: 


Stopping to Start

Blogging and the Shadow Self

Phoenix Eggs in the House of My Father 

A Pilgrim Path and Mentor Dolls 

A Nightmare, A Sky Boat and Serendipity

A Phoenix Seahorse and a Heart Door 

Trusting the Noir Fairytale

Shadow Bags and Joan Swift's Dark Path of Our Names.

Photo by Robyn Beattie

Wheel of Archetypal Selves: Moon to Universe: On-line with Story Circle Network

I’ve had a beautiful year of deepening my relationship to the Tarot alongside my students. My upcoming Tarot/writing course starts on September 21, 2015 and covers the last four Major Arcana cards from the Moon to the Universe. No prior experience with the Tarot necessary; all level of writer welcome. Do join us! Full course description here at Story Circle Network; or you can access the course description here on my website along with links to writing I’ve posted before in relation to the Tarot.

Mother Daughter Writing Exercise and Call for Guest Posts

Photo Robyn Beattie

I have more to say about August’s trip to Ghost Ranch; I’m always grateful for the two-year gap between A Room of Her Own Foundation Retreats. It takes that long and longer to reap the harvest. Here’s a post about the retreat and how Maxine Hong Kingston’s book, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, inspired a writing exercise about the Secrets between Mothers and Daughters. I hope you’ll feel inspired to write in response to the exercise; we are also looking for guestposts generated by the exercise at Mother Writer Mentor.

Tarot for Two: July and August Cards of the Month

Mary and I continue to co-blog at Tarot for Two. July brought us the Chariot and the Prince of Swords respectively.

Photo by Robyn Beattie

Mary on the Chariot:

…I’m very happy in general that my card of the month was the Chariot—it’s saying something good, is pretty much all I’ve managed to take from it in my thinking so far.  Which is often the main thing I look for when I pull a card—is it a good card, or is it a bad card or a boring doesn’t-say-much-of-anything-good-or-bad card?...

Tania on the Prince of Swords:

…We don’t see the rider’s eyes, but the horse’s are blue, wide open. His muzzle and profile line meld into front hoove line. Four propellers, transparent as dragonfly wings, spin on top of the knight’s helmet and are labeled North, South, East, and West. Where is this duo headed with such purposeful haste?

Read the Rest of The Chariot and the Knight of Swords.

August’s card of the month: The Death Card. Period. For both of us:

Tania on the Death Card:

…So Mary and I both pulled the Death card in August as our card of the month. That’s never happened—pulling the same exact card--in the three years we’ve been on this project. And wouldn’t you know, it’s the juggernaut of cards, the King of Kings, the Arcanum Alejandro Jodoroswky and Marianne Costa in The Way of Tarot: The Spiritual Teacher in the Cards call the Nameless One and Lady Frieda Harris paints with vibrancy, such gleeful fervor emanating from her Thoth deck’s dancing skeleton with his black scythe and black bucket helmet tilted askew.

Mary on the Death Card:

…I figured that since the cards gave both Tania and me Death by way of playing a little joke on us, I probably wouldn’t have much that related to it all month.  But I was wrong.  I’ve never had a card of the month that talked to me as much as Death did this past month.  The whole month was like one big ending/cleansing/cleaning up of the past and there was some real death in it too. 

Read the Rest of The Death Card and the Death Card.

My thanks to Robyn Beattie for her beautiful photos and artwork, as always, my gratitude for her collaboration.