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.

March Publications and Tarot Writing Prompts

Robyn Beattie

“Walking the Laguna,” dedicated to Reginald Shepherd, is live in this month’s issue of TAB, A Journal of Poetry and Poetics thanks to Anna Leahy. The poem is up both as a PDF and sound recording. You won’t hear my Siberian Husky in the background of the final MP3, but she gave it her best shot (see Pet Bedlam, Three Takes to Record a Poem)! I love that TAB includes our written words and our actual voices. The issue is beautiful in entirety.

Robyn Beattie 

“When Elder Becomes Child,” is up at Marisa Gaudy’s website as part of her #365Strong Stories thread; I am grateful to the artists and writers I’m blessed to collaborate with thanks to Tracking Wonder's Quest 2016. Marisa is looking for submissions for her Strong Stories series; please do send her your work.

All through December, I used colored pencils while on Quest to sketch out and explore my Tarot Devotions and dreams for my Tarot Writing Business; I’m blessed to be in the middle of teaching my new Wheel of Archetypal Selves Courses: The Many Faces of Love and working on creating new courses around Tarot Deck creation. I'm happily booking  Tarot Consults with writing prompts and giving away a weekly Tarot Writing prompt at my Wheel of Archetypal Selves Tarot Tuesday page. 

Photo Robyn Beattie

I created Tarot Tuesdays with my prior and current Tarot students in mind and also invite artists, writers, and Tarot enthusiasts to check out the prompts. We’re moving sequentially through the deck, starting with the suit of Cups. If you are not a fan of Facebook, you can also find the prompts on my main site (links included below for Ace of Cups through Six of Cups).

Here are the links to far:

Prompt for Ace of Cups

Prompt for Two of Cups

Prompt for Three of Cups

Prompt for Four of Cups

Prompt for Five of Cups

Prompt for Six of Cups

Robyn Beattie

A second goal for this project is an ongoing collaboration with Robyn Beattie—she’s supplying a photo interpretation of each card, and I’m writing a Haiku. 

Last week's Haiku for the Five of Cups:

Grief is a blue cloak

Wicking tears from root-spilled cups

Widow, turn: Friends wait.

It’ll take us a year and a half to create our full deck of Tarot Writing prompts using Robyn’s images paired with Haiku and drawing on the prompts up on the website—but I’m very excited about this project, which seems a new beautiful extension of our poetry movies.

I’d love any feedback about how the prompts are working for you so we can create the best set of Tarot Writing prompt cards possible. Let me know in comments here, on Facebook, or on my main site, how the prompts are working for you.