"Hope is an action of love"
Charlie Claire Burgess on creating new futures & living as a creative act
Happy solstice! Today we have an intimate interview with , our guest editor for The Star. Charlie is a queer and trans-nonbinary writer and artist working at the intersection of tarot, spirituality, and queerness. They are the author of Radical Tarot: Queer the Cards, Liberate Your Practice, and Create the Future (which I consider an essential tarot read!) and the creator of the Fifth Spirit Tarot and Gay Marseille Tarot decks.
As our guest editor, Charlie is co-piloting the development of the upcoming issue, bringing a fresh perspective to the editorial process and truly up-leveling the quality of the publication. I’m so grateful for their partnership and am in awe of their expertise, creativity, and deep tarot knowledge! This interview covers a lot of ground, from an exploration of their artistic process to the embodied experience of staying hopeful while grieving.
Over the past few weeks, we’ve been working with our contributors on drafts of essays, fiction, and artwork for The Star. We’ll share more updates about our incredible group of writers & artists soon! —
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Hi Charlie! Let’s kick off this interview with some personal history. How did you begin working with tarot, and how has your perspective on tarot evolved?
The first time I started reading tarot was in high school, which was (omg) 20 years ago. I was an aspiring emo-goth teen witch, which was a difficult thing to be when your mom won’t let you wear more than one article of black clothing at a time—and when you live in the Bible Belt. Inspired by The Craft and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, I turned to tarot and witchcraft as an alternate source of power and spiritual belonging in a world that seemed to hate who I am: queer, trans, nonbinary (though I didn’t know two of those three things yet), rebellious, opinionated, and plenty weird.
For a while, it worked! I felt stronger and more hopeful. Being an outsider became a position of magical power. But… it didn’t last long. At the time, I was using tarot fatalistically and expecting cinematic-level results from my spells. So when my readings only showed me hard and scary cards and all my spells seemed to fall through, I decided it was all a bunch of crap and tossed my tarot deck and witch books into a dumpster behind the mall.
After that, I went full nihilistic atheist for about a decade, and I made a lot of bad decisions during that time. When tarot and magic started coming back into my life, I was in my late 20s and in an emotionally abusive marriage. It was through my reawakening spiritually and one explosive tarot reading given to me by a friend that I realized the extent of my unhappiness and finally resolved to get a divorce.
So the second time I started reading tarot, the cards became my partner in getting free. As I was dismantling and then rebuilding my life, I turned to tarot for reflection, awareness, and support, not for predicting the future. And because of that, I found that the cards actually helped me create a future for myself. Now, that’s how I use it all the time, and that’s what I wrote Radical Tarot about!
The Rebis is all about tarot and creativity. How do you define creativity for yourself? What influences your creative process, and what are some of your creative rituals?
Creativity is a way of perceiving outside of the normative status quo. There are a million ways to be creative, but whether it’s creating visual art, writing books, making clothes, cooking food, doing science, or creative problem-solving at work or at home, it all comes down to perceiving unexpected possibilities and then making them real. I think this makes creativity an essentially hopeful and playful endeavor. Hope is what allows us to perceive beyond the constraints of the known world. Play is what vitalizes the ability to experiment, test things out, and fail with joy when things don’t work out.
The non-normative positionality of creativity also makes it super freaking queer, and I think that’s why so many queer folks are artists! For many of us, embracing ourselves has meant embracing that hopeful, playful, non-normative, creative existence against a world that continually tries to shut us in boxes (or closets) and make us behave.
I often think of what bell hooks said about queerness:
“Queer not as being about who you’re having sex with, but queer as being about the self that is at odds with everything around it and has to invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live.”
For me, living is a creative act. That doesn’t mean I’m creating art or writing every day, but that I attempt to approach living with that playful, hopeful, queer creative spirit.
Tarot is a helpful tool for this! I sometimes pull cards when I’m in a rut to look at things from a different perspective, as a creative prompt, or as a way to inject creative spontaneity in my day. For example, you can pull a card and then do something inspired by that card that day. If you pull the Queen of Cups, visit the nearest body of water. If you pull Death, go on a walk in a local cemetery. If you pull the Ace of Coins, work in the garden or bake something, etc.
Lastly, I think it’s important to remember that creative output requires creative input. Reading books, watching films, visiting museums, listening to music—all of these are necessary creative sustenance without which the creative spirit will go hungry. Life experience is also creative sustenance. So instead of forcing creativity to happen on demand, go out and live! Inspiration will come when it’s ready.
In an interview on Little Red Tarot, you said your journey as an artist/illustrator began when you “messed around in a drawing app one night and accidentally started a tarot deck,” which eventually became the Fifth Spirit Tarot. Can you share how it felt to “accidentally” begin that project and how it took shape? What did you learn about yourself—and about tarot—as you worked on it?
It felt absolutely wild to start the project that way! I’d wanted to make my own tarot deck for years, but I didn’t think of myself as a visual artist—I literally didn’t think I could draw! So I sort of put those deck dreams in a box in the back of my mind and assumed it would never happen. Then, when I unconsciously doodled that Ace of Cups, something just clicked and I decided to give it a shot. I’d been inspired and emboldened by the booming indie deck scene and all the deck creators who weren’t classically trained artists but were producing awesome decks anyway. And that’s what creativity is all about, anyway! It’s not about classical training or knowing how to do things “right.” It’s about being inspired and figuring out how to bring your vision into the world using whatever tools you have.
And making Fifth Spirit required a lot of creativity, indeed! I illustrated it on an iPad so ancient that Apple didn’t make updates for it anymore. I had to figure out a way to trick the app store into letting me download a legacy version of Procreate (an art app). The legacy version would only let me have 6 layers at a time. (That will mean nothing to most people, but if you know, you know.) My iPad was so old that it didn’t support the Apple Pencil, so I had to find a third-party Bluetooth stylus that worked ever so slightly better than drawing with my finger. Anyway, the point is that a lot of creative scrappiness went into illustrating that deck!
The whole process of making Fifth Spirit was like that. I didn’t have a clear vision at first; I just kind of plunged in and figured it out along the way. I didn’t think it was going to have people in it because I didn’t think I could draw hands and faces. I thought it would be monochromatic because I didn’t think I could do color theory. Obviously, those things changed! Fifth Spirit was a non-stop series of surprises. It taught me so much about tarot and even more about myself—and not just that I can draw! I think its most valuable lesson was to screw perfection and just do the thing. Figure it out. Let it become. I’m not interested in doing things “right” anymore. I’m interested in doing things well if I can, but more than that, I’m interested in doing things, period.
You recently launched your second deck, The Gay Marseille! Can you talk about the similarities and differences between the creative process for that deck and the Fifth Spirit Tarot? Did your relationship with any of the cards change during the creation of the second deck?
My process for both decks was similar. Like I said above, it can be boiled down to just do the thing! Play. Experiment. Sketch cards and then scrap them. Revel in the process. Release day is great, but I live for the unfolding and discovery as a project takes shape! Some planning is part of my process, of course, but I tend to treat plans and outlines as suggestions instead of directions. (Hello, I am an Aquarius sun with a Gemini moon!) The end product almost always looks different from what I expected at the beginning, and I find that delightful! Each project has a life of its own—they come through me but aren’t mine, if that makes sense. So my job and my pleasure is to get out of the way, let the project tell me what it wants to be, and usher that life into the world.
My relationship to the cards is always changing, but creating The Gay Marseille was a welcome challenge to step outside my RWS comfort zone and take a new look at the cards. I found that some of my interpretations that had become solidified by RWS-specific imagery were opened up to wider possibilities with the Tarot de Marseille (TdM), particularly with the Minor Arcana. The way evens and odds are interpreted in TdM leveled up my approach to the numbered cards across the board.
My relationship with some specific cards blossomed with The Gay Marseille, as well, especially the Devil and the Tower. Fifth Spirit highlights the controlling/compulsory side of the Devil and the destructive/deconstructive aspect of the Tower, while The Gay Marseille shifts the focus to liberation and pleasure in the Devil (in drag!) and liberation and revolution in the Tower (as Stonewall!). In a way, the two represent the before and after of these cards! The tarot shows us the Devil so we can face what’s controlling us and free ourselves from it, and it shows us the Tower to acknowledge a former way of life is catastrophically ending and sometimes that’s a good thing.
I consider your book, Radical Tarot: Queer the Cards, Liberate Your Practice, and Create the Future, to be an essential tarot read. Where did the idea for this book come from, and what was it like to work on it?
Radical Tarot came from the same place both of my decks came from, and the same place my next book Queer Devotion comes from, which is an immense amount of love for queer people. When I was teaching myself tarot as a teen and then again as an adult, my biggest roadblock was a lack of books that included queer people and other marginalized groups in their discussions of the cards. The interpretations in most of the books that were available to me were inescapably cis-heteronormative, with card interpretations that focused on things like marriage, children, career advancement, and home ownership. Not that queer folks don’t get married and have families, careers, and houses—we do!—but we don’t always, and there’s way more to all of our lives than that, anyway. The same is true of card imagery in most decks still to this day, despite the wonderful outpouring of queer decks, Global Majority decks, fat decks, and other diverse and inclusive decks. I got tired of having to read around cis-heterosexist card imagery and interpretations. So I did something about it. And I hope other people will do the same!
But Radical Tarot is also deeply rooted in my own experience of using tarot to demolish and rebuild my own life. When I was getting that divorce I mentioned earlier, I wasn’t interested in knowing my future. I was in the process of changing my future! So I ended up using tarot to support that process by facilitating all the self-inquiry I’d been avoiding for years. The cards helped me face fears, grief, anxiety, trauma. They helped me deconstruct my own assumptions and conditioning. It was truly a radical process of unlearning and transformation, a real Tower-Star arc. I wrote Radical Tarot to share that way of using tarot with other people, because I know from experience that it can be life-changing.
In your chapter on The Star in Radical Tarot you cover topics like hope, uncertainty, resilience, vulnerability, and radical openness. You write that hope requires “staying open despite agonizing uncertainty.” What informed your writing on The Star for your book?
Whew, this is a big question and I have a big answer! But I’ll try to simplify it: life did. I used to hate hope. Hope was horrible. Hope made you long for things you could never have, or never have back. Hope was a tantalizing torture that kept you writhing on its hook. It was foolish to hope. Better just to accept the facts and be realistic. But eventually, I came to understand that my struggle with hope was actually a fear of grief, born of unprocessed loss and a heaping dollop of PTSD.
When you open yourself to hope, you open yourself to disappointment, but you also open yourself to possibility. In The Star chapter of Radical Tarot, I quote German philosopher Ernst Bloch, who wrote that hope is not hope if it cannot be disappointed. Meaning that if it’s a sure thing, it’s not hope at all. Sure things don’t need hope. Hope is fundamentally uncertain and essentially bittersweet, and that’s something I didn’t understand for a long time. I thought hope should be fortifying or comforting, that it was a feel-good emotion, but it’s not. Hope is the taste in your mouth that makes you hungry, so you plant a garden. It’s desire and longing that drives concrete action. Hope is not complacent; it’s generative. Hope doesn’t give up; it fights back. In a world that wants to close us off so we get in line and behave, staying open to hope is an act of resistance.
Can you share your personal experience of “staying open despite agonizing uncertainty”—what does that feel like for you on an embodied level?
When I was 22, I went on a road trip with some friends across the US, and we visited the Grand Canyon. You see it all the time in photos and movies, but you truly can’t grasp the mind-boggling vastness of that space until you’re there. Standing on the edge of the canyon, I felt like my stomach was utterly blown out of me, like my navel just dilated into a gigantic donut hole and all the roaring winds from the canyon were blowing straight through the center of me.
Staying open despite agonizing uncertainty feels kind of like that. The instinctual body has the urge to protect itself, to drop into a crouch and crawl away from the ledge. We shy away from the knowledge of our own smallness in the big, big world, and we fear all the many parts of it that we cannot control. But in doing that, we only make ourselves smaller. If we don’t keep ourselves open, if we don’t stand on that ledge, we won’t be able to experience all that terrifying beauty. When I feel myself starting to close off, I think of that feeling I had of my belly as wide open as the canyon. I remind myself that if I’m a little bit scared, I’m doing something right.
I think of hope as a muscle sometimes, and a muscle needs to be used or it atrophies. Similarly, hope has to be acted on or it dwindles and dies. So the best personal practice for cultivating hope is simply to do something, anything, to act toward the object of your hope. What do you hope for in your life? Make a list of reasonable things you can do to work toward it, and do one of those things this week, no matter how small.
When it comes to bigger things that feel impossible—changing-the-world things like fighting against racism, sexism, transphobia, and the modern-day empire of capitalism—the same thing is true. Every small action is a meaningful action. It may feel like a drop in the bucket, but look at the Grand Canyon. Every one of us is a drop of water in the Colorado River, carving that canyon over eons. That fact that change will take time is no excuse for hopelessness or inaction. We can’t lose hope just because satisfaction is not immediate.
In your beautiful epistolary project with fellow Rebis contributor Stephanie Adams-Santos titled “Letters from Between: On Tarot, grief, and the queer heart,” you write that “we tend to think of grief and hope as opposites, as polar extremes, but I think they may just be love viewed at different times of day.” How are both grief and hope showing up in your life right now?
The past four years have been one giant “both/and” experience for me. The Kickstarter for Fifth Spirit Tarot was originally slated for March 20, 2020, the week the pandemic shut the world down. Obviously, I canceled it. Then, I did the Kickstarter two months later in May to resounding, unbelievable success, and in the middle of the campaign, my grandmother died. Two months later, in July, as I finalized the card art and wrote the Fifth Spirit Tarot Guide, my grandfather on the other side of my family died. They were my last living grandparents, and I couldn’t say goodbye. I couldn’t even travel to their funerals because of COVID. In the midst of the greatest success of my life so far, in the middle of a dream come true, I found myself in a depression deeper than any I’ve ever experienced. Meanwhile, Black Lives Matter revealed the decrepit core of racism in all of our systems. Meanwhile, COVID claimed the lives of millions. Meanwhile, I had created something lovely in the world.
I really, really struggled with those extremes. How could my dreams be coming true while the world fell apart? How could I find joy in my success while also mourning all that death? The answer, of course, is that the world is always falling apart and dreams are always coming true. Joy still exists, even alongside death and grief. These are not mutually exclusive and not in conflict; in fact, they’re connected. Joy is an experience of love; grief is an expression of love, and hope is an action of love. That year was a huge teacher for me, and the years since haven’t let up on the lessons. It took time, but I learned how to feel joy at the same time as grief, and I found that if I felt my grief—really felt it and accepted grief as a shade of love—it only carved out more room for love and joy in my heart and my life.
It also emboldened me to love even harder because I was less afraid of loss—not because loss won’t happen, but because it will happen—and to show up more hopefully for what I know is right and good, despite the potential consequences. For example, I had several people tell me I was brave for writing that piece with Stephanie on Palestine and queer grief. And maybe it was brave, but for me, and I think for Stephanie too, it was easy. Not that we didn’t work hard on it (we did), and not that it wasn’t gut-wrenching and that we didn’t both weep into our keyboards (we did), but writing that piece was an easy choice because it came from love. Easy as that.
Do you have any advice for centering creativity, art, and beauty during times of immense grief and uncertainty?
Art can feel futile, or indulgent, or silly to make art in the middle of loss and despair, and sometimes we can be too devastated by our circumstances to have the time, energy, ability, or resources to make art. But when we can, I know from experience that it can be life-saving. When I hit the bottom of my pit of despair during summer 2020 and was having suicidal ideation, I was not able to make art. But after a while down there, I saw a glimmer of something, some emotion or creative impulse, and I followed it like my life depended on it. I spent three days writing a poem and making a tarot zine about grief, and at the end I wasn’t okay, and the world wasn’t un-fucked, but I wanted to be alive in it.
Art is alchemy. It takes our rawest emotions and senseless experiences and transmutes them into beauty and meaning. Creativity can be a space for processing all those difficult emotions, and creativity is also a life-giving act. When you create something, you make something that didn’t previously exist in the world. You give something life. Maybe artists are all necromancers, raising life from all that death. But that’s how nature works too, remember: death always feeds life.
So my advice would be to follow that glimmer of creative impulse when you feel it, and feed all that grief and rage and howling uncertainty into whatever art begins to find shape there. Let your creativity digest those emotions and turn them into fuel for living. And if you feel creatively depleted, make something anyway. Buy a macrame kit, build a model airplane, cook a recipe you’ve never tried before. Making something is a generative act, and that soothes the soul. And don’t forget that when you make art (and it doesn’t have to be “good” art), it can sustain and inspire other people too. We’ve seen this with protest art, art for Palestine, memorial art for Black people killed by police and trans people murdered in hate crimes, art that gathers people to it and inspires and fortifies them. Art has ripples. It can be healing for the artist, but it can also help foster healing change in the wider world.
We are honored to have you as our guest editor for this issue of The Rebis. Why were you interested in working with us? Can you share how you’re approaching your editorial role?
I actually wanted to submit to last year’s Chariot issue, but I ran out of time to get my submission together! So I was thrilled when you invited me to guest edit this issue with you. The thing I find so enchanting about The Rebis is the way it functions like a kaleidoscope, refracting a card you thought you knew into dozens of different shapes and hues, so when you look at the card again it’s enlivened by all these diverse perspectives and possibilities. I think the creative angle is especially fruitful for deepening one’s relationship to a card, because instead of having a card’s “meaning” explained to you, you get to experience it through art, or a poem, or a story. It takes tarot out of the prescriptive box of keywords and definitions and makes it experiential and embodied.
For this issue, I’m super excited about bringing the weird, visionary, eccentric, experimental side of the Star and exploring multiple perspectives on hope and transformation. What does a hopeful future look like during climate apocalypse? How do we embody the transformation from the Tower to the Star? What hopeful seeds are sprouting in the Tower’s ashes?
Another thing I’m super excited about is the number of trans and nonbinary voices we have in the issue. Where some publications tokenize trans folks by drawing the line at only one “trans story” (while including an entire masthead of cis stories), I’m thrilled to be able to feature multiple pieces about the Star through the lens of trans and/or nonbinary experience, as well as many more contributions by trans, nonbinary, and queer authors and artists about totally different Star themes, because there’s more to us than just our identities! And the fact that I get to edit all these submissions during Pride month has felt really special to me. The Star is a super queer card, in my opinion, so it all feels right!
Final question: Do you have any favorite pieces of art or writing that embody The Star's archetype?
Rebecca Solnit’s Hope in the Dark.
Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel.
Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin.
Octavia Butler’s Earthseed series (and really anything else by her too).
The TV series Battlestar Galactica. (I’m realizing most of these are sci-fi. Sorry not sorry.)
“Under Pressure” by David Bowie and Queen if you actually listen to the lyrics. (Also just David Bowie and Queen, period.)
Drag, period. Just any drag show. It’s art. It’s creative. It’s transformative. It’s hopeful. It’s The Star.
Thank you for your support, Rebis readers! The Chariot, our second anthology, is still available for purchase. This print publication contains 120 pages of personal essays, fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, prose, erotica, original artwork, a ritual guide, original tarot spreads, and journaling prompts. All profits are redistributed to social justice orgs fighting for reparations and reproductive justice. Learn more here.
This interview! Wow wow wow. Glad I saved this one for reading.
Such a great conversation! Thank you Charlie and Hannah! ‘Queering The Tarot’ is in my list to read