The Literary Witches Oracle: A 70-Card Deck and Guidebook | 
I asked my litacle a series a questions this morning following my meditation.
Why this? What do I need? Desire? What can I gain? What am I seeking? Tell me.
It did. Y.K. wrote transformative literature within the macabre, dark, and creepy. I read her bio and “A Mermaid‘s Tears.” It was as transformative as you can imagine...how is a mermaid metamorphosing into a human not so, after all?
I‘m open to transforming.
I stumbled across this at B&N on 04/2021 in Tulsa, OK. It was a stunningly-bright day, the kind that makes you blinded with migraines that ring in your ears, pulse in your brain. I was with my husband on a date.
I‘m a Christian. I love Jesus and believe in his life, death, and resurrection.
I‘m also mad with meditation and self-reflection with an MA in English. This seemed the perfect thing.
@KatieDid927 🖤🖤🖤🖤🖤🖤🖤🖤🖤🖤🖤🖤🖤🖤🧡🧡🧡🧡🧡🧡🧡🧡🧡🧡🧡🧡🧡🧡🧡🧡🧡🧡🧡Thank you!!!!! So much !!!!!! I love this all so much 🖤🖤🖤 #basicwitchswap #bws
I'm guessing this is @Chrissyreadit ?! Thank you so much for the #bujo supplies and the oracle deck - I was going to buy it with birthday money so can buy something else now instead! 😊
Today‘s card.The unexplored,submerging,surfacing.Born to Cuban parents,she(1903-1977)was sensitive,magnetic,fashionable-was raised in Europe and NY.In Paris she forged a fluid new literature of female consciousness.Much has been made of her erotica,but chief artistry is in her non lurid works.Her fiction and masterpiece-a lifelong dairy-explore the fractured self,her complicated feelings for her father,psychoanalysis,love,adventures of all sorts.
Today‘s card.fighting for yourself,your values,your community. Born in NYC to West Indian parents,she(1934-1992) proudly proclaimed herself a black lesbian feminist.As an activist and essayist, she was outspoken about racism,sexism,and homophobia.Her work is populated with mothers,children,sisters,anger,cancer,the erotic, unicorns,snails eating dead snakes,witches,fire,and the importance of refusing silence, period.
Today‘s card.The cycle of life,transitions,attachment.Frankenstein isn‘t the garish zombie story we‘ve seen in pop culture.inspired by scientific discussions of the day and the complex feelings she(1797-1851)had about parenting.It‘s a painful tale about the creation of life and what happens to shunned abandoned kids.Her life was as harrowing as her novel, her great losses of her mother,husband,and three kids tried her ideals of domestic harmony.
Today‘s card.Making sense,frames,new ways of seeing.Stein(1874-1946)hosted a popular Paris salon-home to a staggering collection of modern art and famous visitors(Picasso,Hemingway,Fitzgerald,etc).Influenced by the painters she supported,she set out to create cubism in writing.She stripped her poems of narrative and logic,playing instead with spatial relationships and process.She shared her life with her partner and secretary,Alice B. Toklas.
Today‘s card.Independence, barriers, isolation. She(1935-1967)wrote sensual nature-rich poetry,placing her among Iran‘s greatest poets.Heavily criticized for resisting societal norms.She divorced at 21,was the first Persian poet to write explicitly about sexuality,worked as a documentary filmmaker,and adopted a son from a leper colony.Some believe that she prophesied her accidental early death in a car crash.
Today‘s card. Masks,becoming,play.She‘s(1935-2005),a badass of experimental fiction from Kochi Prefecture,is almost entirely unknown among English speakers.Influenced by Kafka and French literature.Her bizarre stories feature ghosts,flying heads,witch masks,incest,and bestiality.Her work will completely freak you out-and provoke you with its fairytale logic and philosophical underbelly. 👻👹
Today‘s card.Your story,the stories of others,listening. When she wasn‘t writing about black women owning themselves,she(1891-1960)was collecting folktales around the South and journeying to the Caribbean. She initiated vodou.She fell into obscurity even before her death but has seen a major revival of interest in recent decades among readers,feminists,and critics as a figure in the Harlem Renaissance.
Today‘s card. Wisdom, good roots, connection.
Happy Earth 🌏 Day!
Today‘s card.Lineage,the past,deep time.She(1949) was born on Antigua,a former slave-owning British colony in the West Indies.She moved to the US at 18 to work as an au pair.Soon after she began writing New Yorker articles and intense,biting fiction and nonfiction,which speaks with tremendous authority and clarity and often repeats images and phases in an insistent invective against the failures of families and colonialism.
Today‘s card.Intellectual growth,delights of the mind,PLAGUES of the mind.She‘s(1950)a proficiency writer of poems,essays,and various literary hybrids-works with themes of lost family members,love and lust,religion,and the intellectual tradition.She‘s also a scholar of Ancient Greek and Latin texts and a champion of fellow witches,having translated Sappho and written about Emily Bronte and Virginia Woolf.
Today‘s card. Wishes, ambition, wandering. 🚶🏻♀️🚶🏻♀️🚶🏻♀️
Today‘s card.Outside forces,events falling into place, acceptance.She(1920-1995)was born to an opium-addicted,traditional,Chinese father and a Westernized mother who learned to ski on bound feet.When 17 year old Chang contracted dysentery,her father dismissed her claims and locked her up in her bedroom for six months;she escaped with the help of her nurse.Witty and stylish,she is famous for her fiction about troubled romance and family betrayal.
Today‘s card. Wit, manipulation, fun. 🦂🌱
Today‘s card.oppression,what frees you,the systems at work.She(1860-1935)is best known for”The Yellow Wallpaper”a story inspired by the disastrous, sexist”rest cure”prescribed for her postpartum depression.A famous social critic,giving lectures on economics,social reform and her unconventional life choices.Her utopian novels and nonfiction are worth reading for their visions as a cooperative society and the place of gender roles in economics.
Today‘s card. Howl! The self without others, a calling, the great expanse. 🐺
Today‘s card.Joys of the body,sorrows of the body, the senses.Born in a working-class Chicago neighborhood to a Mexican father and Mexican-American mother,she(1954) navigates the richness-and misogyny of both Mexican and American cultures.She vowed to never marry and always have a house of her own.Her most famous book,”The House on Mango Street” -a coming of age novel of saturated,sensory vignettes-is taught in schools and colleges alike.
Today‘s card.suspicion,deception,the missing piece. She(1890-1976) wrote nearly 70 detective novels, making her the most popular novelist in all of history.Taking place in a British aristocratic world filled with luxury trains,handsome estates, and butlers,her books keep the reader guessing about the truth behind their murders until the shocking twists are revealed.
💜Todays card.investigating identity,roles,who are you? Her(1940-1992)feminist fairy tales,which draw from stories like “Little Red Riding Hood” and “Beauty and the Beast”are sumptuous tapestries depicting sexual,violent scenes,ornamented with symbols and adjectives.She was fascinated by the performance of femininity, and her works often feature showgirls, trapeze artists, and dolls.
Today‘s card.Taking care of each other,safety nets, exile.Of Pueblo,Mexican,European,and Cherokee ancestry,she(b.1948)identifies most with the Laguna Pueblo culture,holds a vital belief in the universes interconnectedness.explores the tensions between Southwest‘s diverse communities and methods of healing.Ceremony-a young half-Pueblo,half-white man trying to recover from service in WW2-attracted a major spotlight to Native American literature.
Today‘s card. What lurks, electricity, dishonesty.
And I pulled it the day after Janet Frame😲.
Today‘s card.Being at home.Being a stranger. Knowing yourself.She was born(1924-2004) to a large,poor family on a New Zealand farm.Her brother had epilepsy and two of her sisters drowned in adolescence.Misdiagnosed with schizophrenia,she spent most of her twenties on psych wards,200 electroshock treatments and narrowing escaping a lobotomy.She pursued a solitary life and wrote autobiographical fiction about hospitalization and the displaced self.
Today‘s card.Family.Domestic pleasures.Domestic horrors.Partnerships and children.Her(1916-1965) fiction marries the ordinary with the supernatural and often speaks to the inhumanities people endure.Her most famous story”The Lottery”was written after rural Vermont residents painted a swastika on her house (her husband was Jewish).Yet keen observation and a sense of humor pervade many of her works, especially her funny essays on raising four kids.
The card I pulled for today.Solitude😏. Born to Russian Jewish parents in Argentina (1936-1972)she was educated in Yiddish and Spanish but wrote in Spanish.Her poetry of imagistic purity and surrealist influence summons themes of silence,absence, madness and death again and again.Her own struggle with depression led to an intentional overdose of Seconal at the age of 36.Idolized by Spanish-speaking writers,her genius deserves a global readership.
My recent book haul! Someone stop me...
Sometimes a little something says, “go to Bull Moose before home,” and when you listen, you‘re rewarded with something magical like this #literarywitchesoracle deck 🥰📖📚
