On Tarot, Community, & Satan: A.E. Osworth in conversation with Jeanna Kadlec

Welcome to the newest offering from Astrology for Writers — monthly conversations with spiritually inclined writers and creatives who utilize astrology, tarot, witchcraft, and more in their personal and professional lives. I’ve wanted to bring this interview series to y’all for a long time, and I couldn’t be more excited about our first guest. 

Novelist A.E. Osworth joined me over Zoom for a conversation about their upcoming debut WE ARE WATCHING ELIZA BRIGHT, intersections of spirituality and creativity, and their newest projects about trans witches and Satan. (Yes, you read that right.)

If this were a magazine profile, I might add that we showed up to the video call in matching black-and-white flannels. It’s almost like we’re queer. 

This interview has been edited for length.

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Jeanna: AUSTEN! I know you as one of my dearest friends, but would love for you to introduce yourself to folks reading this. 

A.E. (Austen): I publish under A.E. Osworth, but friends like Jeanna, and now all of you, can call me Austen.

I'm a novelist. My first book, WE ARE WATCHING ELIZA BRIGHT, is coming out on April 13, 2021 from Grand Central. I’ve also had a now-nine year freelance career, which is mostly creative nonfiction in the queer community, specifically with Autostraddle.

And I am a Gemini sun, Leo moon — which is not surprising to anybody — and then also a Gemini rising. It really, truly is a wonder that I have any friends at all.

Jeanna: I love Geminis; you’re some of my favorite people. And I love having you, specifically, in my life. I think this is just going to be us telling each other that we love each other. 

Austen: Yeah, just twenty minutes of “I love you.” Honestly, the truest glimpse of me and my friendships that anyone could possibly get.

Jeanna: So, to actually dig in. What is spirituality, to you? How does it connect with your creative life? 

Austen: You’re hitting me at a time of flux. I can tell you about what spirituality is not to me — it is not a way to self-flagellate or beat up on others. It is not connected to manufactured consequences. That has not worked for me. 

What I feel like spirituality is for me, right now, is what’s on the other end of that, which is generative and grounding and gentle. Specifically, for me, it’s about connecting with the world and with my communities. I do believe that the world is deeply magical; too many amazing things have happened in my life for me to not think that. But that magic comes from here and us, not from an arbiter of right or wrong that is foisted upon us. 

Jeanna: I love that. Considering, then, how the magic does come from the “here” and the “us,” what tools or practices are part of your life, your creative work, your daily routines or rituals?

Austen: Well, you can see the tarot decks on my coffee table. That is my main connection, and honestly, I have to laugh. I'm a novelist, and what’s a tarot deck? A deck of 78 archetypes. So I'm sitting here connecting with my intuition and with my spirituality and with this deeply magical world, entirely on the basis of story. 

Jeanna: You’ve given me some incisive readings over the years. Given how long you've been working with the tarot, how do your readings and relationships with different cards inform your own work?

Austen: The first 90 pages of ELIZA BRIGHT were my MFA thesis. I was still learning how to read tarot then, and tarot really became one of the things that I used to connect to my cohort. I used to bring the Wild Unknown deck to the bar after class, and I would post up in the back and people would just sit down and talk with me. Writing is not a solitary activity, and spirituality is connecting to community.

I do, however, have two other books that I'm writing — one about Satan and fate and one about witches — so I’m fulfilling a lot of trans stereotypes right now.

Jeanna: Multiple WIPs is so Gemini rising, we truly love to see it.

Austen: The one about witches, I wrote — am writing — nonlinearly. I’m polishing the last act right now. But that book, I wrote by pulling a tarot card to guide every chapter. Also, the characters for that book were generated entirely with tarot spreads. I know what their arc is, what they’re feeling, because of the spreads I did for them. And each character had their own deck. For the overall writing process, I used MANY QUEENS because it's a particularly trans deck. My coven of witches is trans, and that deck felt right. It always felt like the words came easier when I touched that deck. 

The MANY QUEENS tarot by Lettie Jane Rennekamp

Then for the Satan book — mostly, writing Satan has felt like channeling. My characters are waking me up at night with lines of dialogue. I’ve now had years of practice tapping into this really intuitive part of me, so now I experience that in a more free-flowing way. And I think that that only comes with having been intentional and building that muscle for as long as I have been.

Jeanna: It makes sense that different books would have different processes. Can you say more about what exercising that intuitive muscle looks like for you, and what that journey has been like?

Austen: It’s been a journey of self-compassion. It's been one from, yelling at myself into a book to deciding that I can actually center joy and ease in my writing process. It is hard fought. It is not perfect. Like, I just spent the whole week berating myself. It’s not a linear journey by any stretch. 

It’s almost like the Strength card. The lion is there, or the bear or whatever, and the person is not using reins or shouting or a chair, like we're not looking at a bullfighter or a lion tamer in a circus. We're looking at someone with gentle hands on that creature, guiding them. Essentially, I’ve had a journey from The Chariot to Strength.

Jeanna: You mentioned that you didn't use tarot as much with ELIZA BRIGHT, but I do want to ask because the subject matter is really intense — it tackles workplace hostility, sexual harassment, doxxing, and includes #gamergate-style plot points. How did you take care of and ground yourself when writing and editing this kind of story? 

Austen: One of the narrative voices of the novel is a Reddit community, the “mannosphere,” that’s a gamer community, but is also full of incels and pickup artists. They are heavily misogynistic. I am not a man, and I am not a part of these real-life communities in this way, and a question I was once asked was: Was being steeped in that voice for five years harmful? What I came up with was, we all have that voice anyway, because this voice on the internet is simply a crystallization of the larger structures that are at play in our society. 

What drafting this book allowed me to do was to be able to point at it. The act of drafting was, in itself, an act of care for me, which I didn’t know until I was almost finished. I was like, cool, this isn't actually coming from me, this is coming from these guys over here, and I don't endorse it, and it is also now external to me. 

Originally, that [Reddit manosphere] was the only narrator in the book, and it was saying something about communities and the Internet in a way that I did not agree with, in that I don't think the groups of people are inherently this toxic. I don't think collectives mean this in all circumstances.

So another act of care was a drafting choice that I wound up making with the support of my editor, Seema Mahanian, which was to add a second narrator who is still a collective narrator. And that narrator is the Sixsterhood, a queer art collective that lives in a warehouse in Queens and approaches everything with kindness and abundance, even when that is challenging and annoying. That narrator is also not perfect, but it comes from a really different place.

I spend most of my time in real life with people who sound like the Sixsterhood, and to be able to essentially draft a voice in response, to be able to say something back to the manosphere narrator — that was an act of care, as well. 

Jeanna: Having learned what you learned from ELIZA, and having really grown spiritually in simultaneity with it as your first book, how have you approached your work since? Are your current WIPs conscious responses to where you wanted to take your work? 

Austen: I declared to myself that after writing such a challenging book — because, like, I will not pretend that sitting in the Reddit voice isn't hard — that I wanted a romp. That’s how the trans witch book came about… and it is not a romp. Essentially, it’s become a meditation on what it means to have a body. You know, light fare for a trans person.

Jeanna: How is something you write not going to end up being this incredibly gorgeous philosophical question that's also very artful, because that's just who you are?

Austen: Thank you. I mean, I'm pretty integrated in terms of my work — like, what I'm doing when I am writing fiction is playing pretend. The thing about playing is that that's how humans learn. So if I’m conceptualizing fiction as “sitting at my desk and playing pretend all day,” that means, for me, that I am learning about myself while I do that. The things that come out are questions that I'm crunching on. 

So, the trans witch book. I largely wrote it in 2020, and I was deep in transition. I had top surgery in 2019. I started testosterone in 2020. So, of course, I'm going to sit here and think deeply about what it means to have a fucking body. When I play, that's what I'm crunching.

Jeanna: Last question. Is there a particularly magical creative moment you've had in the last year?

Austen: Yes. The Satan book on Thanksgiving Day, last year. 

I had a tremendous personal upheaval in 2020 that required rescue, and my friends in Portland, Oregon, came to my rescue. They drove 10 hours to California to get me out of a situation that was really bad during a pandemic, and 10 hours back, and then I lived in their guest room, which put us five in a house. So, needless to say, I am extremely close with my pod in Portland. 

A nice thing about being in a pod is that we can celebrate holidays together. None of us celebrate Thanksgiving, though, because it's racist, and none of us want to throw a party for genocide. So we decided to drive to the coast and hang out on the beach. 

Oregon is beautiful. It's absolutely gorgeous. Everything is green all the time. Everything feels fecund and alive. Things just spring from the ground, even in the city. And we were driving to the coast on these winding back roads, listening to HADESTOWN, which was the first time I'd heard it. The other thing to know about my pod is that they're all singers. It's like being in a pod of whales, it’s so beautiful. And so we're all in this car, packed together shoulder-to-shoulder, and people are singing. We come up on a hill, and I can tell you the exact line in the song where we crest this hill — it was,

“And brother, do you know what they did? They danced.”

The trees fell away, and the ocean was on my right side, and I just started weeping. And then Satan popped into my head — a version of Satan who is deeply misunderstood and is making the best possible choices that he can make, who has fallen in love with someone mortal. 

It was this moment of looking out the window, starting to weep — and then a whole book hit me in the body.

Jeanna: That is pretty fucking magical.

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You can follow Austen on Twitter at @AEOsworth. And be sure to pre-order their brilliant debut from your local bookstore! WE ARE WATCHING ELIZA BRIGHT comes out April 13, 2021.

P.S. ICYMI, Early Bird registration for the spring session of Astrology for Writers: How to Make Your Writing Work For You has reopened! Early Bird pricing expires on March 15.