on trusting what happens in the dark: meg jones wall in conversation with jeanna kadlec

and on tarot, religion, chronic illness, and more

Those in tarot, occult, and witchy circles almost certainly know the Instagram handle 3am.tarot and its instantly recognizable visuals: the goth grey-and-black backgrounds, inclusive card readings, and innovative tarot spreads. But there is a person behind the account that’s been teaching all of us for so long: Meg Jones Wall, whose debut book Finding the Fool: A Tarot Journey to Radical Transformation comes out March 1st.

that’s my girlfriend!

My relationship with Meg is probably a little different than yours — they’re my partner. Even though we both lived in Harlem at the time, practically neighbors, and had both lived in Somerville at the same time years before, we didn’t meet until 2018 when we both attended Autostraddle's A-Camp (RIP) in Ojai, California. Timing: it’s everything. We became fast, can’t-live-without-you friends once we were back in the city. Friendship didn’t turn to love until 2020, but oh, what a foundation friendship is. And tarot. And witchcraft. And sharing a religious background. All of which we get into here. 

Meg is one of the most private people I know, the night sect to my day, and the spotlight is admittedly not her favorite place. But their work is brilliant, and has impacted so many, and I am so, so excited for her book to be in the world: for all of you to get to hold their words in your hands. Her knowledge is as deep as it is vast. I learn from them every day.

It is a privilege to invite you all into our home, and into an intimate conversation/interview about religion, tarot, chronic illness and creative practice, and so much more. I hope you enjoy.

This interview has been edited for length

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Jeanna Kadlec: Hi Meg.

Meg Jones Wall: Hi Jeanna.

JK: So I know I love you, and we're literally sitting at our house.

MJW: We are sitting in our house.

JK: On the infamous pink couch couch, doing this. But for anyone reading the newsletter who may not know who you are and what you do, could you introduce yourself in your own words?

MJW: My name is Meg Jones Wall, and I use she/her and they/them pronouns. I am a tarot reader, a writer, a photographer, a creative multi-hyphenate person who makes things.

JK: Just for the sake of indulging me, because I know that you are someone who is into astrology, would you mind sharing your big three with us?

MJW: Yes. I have the highly celebrated, always appreciated, never maligned Big Three of Gemini Rising, Scorpio Sun, Leo Moon. I'm everyone's favorite person.

JK: You're my favorite person.

MJW: You're my favorite person.

JK: And I think that those are three wonderful signs that are too often maligned by people who don't understand their complexity.

MJW: I would agree.

JK: As evidenced by the fact that I love you.

MJW: *laughing* This whole interview’s gonna be —

JK: I'm putting all of this in there. This is going great. I also need to say, you're drinking your tea. You've already done a podcast interview today. And I am, like, on the couch with ice and heating pads. This is the most informal setup ever.

MJW: Look, we're relaxing at home. We've got a fake fireplace on the TV. We've got like ten candles going, we've got tea, you've got your emotional support beverages. I have my emotional support beverages.

JK: It's a perfect setup.

MJW: A classic standard Sunday.

JK: And this is the kind of conversation that we'd have normally. So this is just a more formalized version of it. 

But I want to ask you for the sake of like, publicness, what is spirituality to you, right now, in this moment?

MJW: So in this particular moment, when we have had a particularly brutal few months, I think spirituality right now is very much just — 

JK: Can you quickly expand on what the brutal few months — 

MJW: Oh, sure. We have been living through some real Tower months over here. 

We have each had health issues. I have had some flare ups of chronic health issues. I have a fibroid in my uterus that I have written about before. We had a pipe burst in our apartment and a lot of water damage that escalated into a lot of negotiating with our building management, struggles with our landlord, calling housing court, talking to lawyers. We both got COVID again. Jeanna fell down the stairs a few days ago. Some scary things happened in the neighborhood. 

We have just had a lot of upheaval and a lot of destabilizing things compounding to the point that we are now just a little fried. Maybe a lot fried.

Normally I would say spirituality is for me finding what can be spiritual and connective in everyday activities. I find spirituality in cooking. I find spirituality in pleasure. I find spirituality in sensory experiences that give me joy and a sense of community. And that's not untrue. 

But since the question was right now, my answer is simply: spirituality is what makes me feel safe in this particular moment. What makes me feel held and okay. That’s often as simple as rest or cuddling on the couch with you or finding a meal that's going to feel pleasant to cook but isn't going to stretch me too far, you know — which is not quite the sexy answer that I would normally want to give, but I think feels very true to this particular moment.

JK: I like that you address that sense of safety as being really foundational, because I think there's so much in the spiritual and the occult world that doesn't necessarily address that foundational importance of safety. And also, we both come out of religious backgrounds where safety was not necessarily always present, but God was still number one. 

And this is one of the ways we were friends before. One of the initial reasons that we became friends so intensely, so quickly in the first place was because we were both ex-evangelical.

MJW: We all find each other. 

JK: We find each other.

MJW: We all have a look on our face.

JK: You can see the scars of the church!  *both laughing*

MJW: You can see the emotional damage. It's like, oh, here, come hold my hand. Let's pray about this together.

JK: So yeah, we both grew up in the evangelical church. And so considering that now you are articulating a sense of safety as being so important for spirituality, to engage and to feel present in life, how did your upbringing inform that?

MJW: I think I've been very fortunate, especially in the last few years, but probably in the last decade, to be reading and engaging with and working with and learning from a lot of people who would use terms like animist around their spirituality and finding the spiritual in the everyday. 

And I would take it as far as finding the spiritual in the mundane, like to make magical the mundane. Not that every single thing we do has to have this spiritual veneer over it, because that sounds exhausting. But to be able to find beauty and wonder and spiritual pleasure and meaning in the mundane, in the moments when that is appropriate and feels good. 

My upbringing was very, we are religious, our spirituality is tied to religion and faith, and it means conversion and it means preaching and it means service. It means having a very specific worldview and a very specific mold that we fit into. It’s following these rules and regulations and having very specific beliefs. There are some places where your beliefs can differ a little bit, and that's still safe. But if your beliefs start to edge too far in any particular direction, things start to get a little iffy and your faith might start to be in question. “That doctrine doesn't align with our theology or our statement of faith” or whatever. So it was very regulated, in that this is what you can believe and still be considered a Believer. 

So I think that when I tried to start to move away from the beliefs that I was raised in, it was very disorienting to not have new rules to follow. I felt like I needed a different set of rules. So it was like, okay, what rules am I comfortable with? 

That’s part of the reason, and I talk about this a little bit in my book, that I started looking into tarot, because there were a few years between when I was like, I'm done with the church, I'm done with Christianity, and [then] finding the tarot. And those years were very sad and very hard, and I just felt very alone and unmoored, untethered. I missed community. I missed having something to believe in. I missed having a relationship with the Divine, but I didn't really know where else to find it. I didn’t know what else to do if I wasn’t in this very specific church structure.

JK: It's like rules give safety, and that's it.

MJW: And I didn't feel empowered to make any of my own rules. I didn't feel like I knew enough. I didn't feel like that was going to be safe. If they’re rules that I've made up, how do I know that they're acceptable or that they work?

JK: Or that they're real?

MJW: What am I trying to protect myself from? I didn't quite know how to think about all of that on my own. I just felt very drifting. 

And so when I found tarot, I liked that it felt like a tool I could use to tap into spirituality with some kind of guide and methodology. But I immediately ran into all of these new rules. Some of them made sense to me, but some of them felt very arbitrary, and I didn't understand why they were in place. And after so long of just accepting the rules and not really challenging them, I was very reluctant to start following a new set of rules [where] I didn't know where they'd come from. So it took a while for me to navigate that, and it took years before I was able to be like, Okay, fuck this rule. I'll make my own. 

But that took a really long time. I don't know that it's my natural impulse or not. I do think that when I'm not sure about something, my reaction, my instinct is still, okay, well, what's the rules? What are we supposed to do? How has this been done before?

JK: I totally feel that. I remember I bought a book in 2015, that was a very witchcraft-y book, really around the time I started reading tarot, like a year after. But it was winter when I bought it, which makes sense because I do a lot of my deep stuff in the winter. But it was such a book that was based on, you have to be physically grounded outside doing all of this stuff. And we lived in Boston and it was a terribly snowy winter, so I couldn't just sit on the ground — 

MJW: In a snowbank!

JK: In a snowbank, like doing grounded cord meditations. And so again, with how literal we had grown up, I was like, oh, well, I can't do this because I can't literally sit on the ground like by a tree and like, imagine a cord going into the earth from my spine. So I guess I have to wait till spring to do this whole book. It set me back ages, because so many of the [practices] were not doable in a city, or not doable in a particular season. 

We share so much of this [impulse] to just follow [rules] and be like, Oh, well, you know better than I do because I'm new to this. I don't want to fuck up and I must not know, so I'm just not going to [do it] at all.

MJW: And I think that in some cases, especially when it comes to magic and [especially] ceremonial magic, there are reasons that some of those lines are drawn in the sand. But I think for others, it's just super gatekeep-y and super gross in a way that I really don't like.

I have way more tarot books than I have magic books, and I don't do a lot of ceremonial magic or anything like that. But I was just talking about this with someone — [the random] you have to have your tarot deck wrapped in silk and it has to have been given to you and you need to store it in a special box and you need to use the Celtic Cross and all of these different rules that it's like, who decided this?

JK: I was gonna ask you, what are some of the arbitrary rules in tarot that you get really annoyed by?

MJW: I mean, you know the one that I get the most annoyed by is when people say you have to start with the Rider-Waite-Smith [deck]. That's my biggest pet peeve, number one. 

There were just so many things and it's like, okay, I have to start with this deck I don't like, and it has to be given to me, but I want to do this privately, I want to do this on my own. I didn't tell anyone I was going to buy the deck the first time I went out and got one. And I didn't want to ask someone to buy me a deck! The whole thing felt so weird to me. But it was the same thing; it kept me from buying a deck for months because I was just like, well, the very first step of this — am I really going to deliberately do it wrong and like, set myself up to fail? And it took a few months and I was like, fuck it, yes I am — *both laughing* — but that stopped me in my tracks, you know? And I'm sure we're not the only ones with stories like that.

JK: Yeah. If you grow up in a system that's incredibly retributive, whether that is a model of original sin or what have you, but where there are severe penalties for going outside of the system. That’s a very, very hard pattern to shake. 

MJW: It is.

JK: And we do carry that.

MJW: I mean, when the punishment for your fuck up is eternal damnation, it really makes you rethink what rules you're going to break. And that becomes the barometer for being queer or being happy or feeling safe. 

If your choice is, this thing will make me feel safe or, this thing will make me loved by God, how do you make a decision between those two things?

JK: So how are you dealing these days, Meg, with the consequences of eternal damnation? *both cackling* 

MJW: You know, I'm sort of fine with it. We’re queer women in 2023. 

in our apartment // photo by michelle agins, courtesy of the NYT

It’s taken a lot of research and study and expansion to be able to be like, okay, this is not the only system of belief that exists. This is not the only god I can have a relationship with. There are so many other ways of viewing the world, and just because I got one drummed into my head really hardcore for the first 25 years of my life doesn't mean I cannot grow beyond this.

JK: You, too, can become a witch and write a book!

MJW: You, too, can be a gay witch that doesn't go to church!

JK: Before we more fully get into the tarot stuff, though, I want to wrap up this religion conversation, because there is the other aspect of church: it's where so many of us who are writers got to explore a love of reading and literature and story. 

I did want to ask how the Bible, how Sunday school, how church, how youth group influenced you in that way?

MJW: As soon as I knew how to read, I always had a book in my hands. Summers were great, because I literally would just read for 12 hours a day. I’ve read every single day of my life.

And so I think that the church really gave me a lot of permission — not that I needed permission to read for pleasure; that’s never been an issue for me — but it did give me the ability to make precious time to sit by myself and meditate on things that were bigger than what I could see and feel and touch and smell and experience with my senses. 

As much as the church did harm to me, and being in the church in the way that I was felt like a very harmful experience, I do think that there's something really beautiful in instilling that desire to meditate and pray and worship and cry and connect with people in a faith-based or spirituality-based community. And to have time to do that on your own, but also to come with people together and talk about things that can't be proven. 

I do think that the best faith-based and spirituality-based communities make space for the dreaded discourse word, but for real, engaging conversations. Not “gotcha” conversations, but like real deep, what does this mean to you? How does this feel in your body? What do you do with this? What does it mean for you? 

JK: So, to bring in tarot. You talk in your Introduction to Finding the Fool about the different things that brought you to tarot [after several years of drifting post-church]. But specifically within the framework of the first line of the Introduction, which is so striking, and which I have literally never read in any tarot or occult book ever, and I love the sheer honesty of it: “The first time I held a tarot deck in my hands, I didn't feel a fucking thing.” It’s a sentiment I have heard people say, but privately. That is not something people admit a lot out loud and in public. And here you are, a celebrated professional reader with this incredible book coming out. You have huge fans, and this was your journey. 

I would love to hear, if you can expand on it for folks who don't know, what your journey to tarot was like, and given the fact that that was your first experience, how you ended up doing it professionally?

MJW: Sure, sure. Those years after leaving the church were very lonely and very sad. I have Major Depressive Disorder, so that was also a part of it. I was not in therapy or medicated yet. Yay therapy. Yay meds. 

But it was just a very sad, lonely few years of really craving spirituality. And I did try to go to some more affirming churches in that time, and was really looking for community. But I just wasn't comfortable in any of them. I couldn't turn off the voice in my head that was saying that this wasn't right. The theology felt too baked into me. I just couldn't get past it. I didn't feel safe. Even though my brain was telling me I was safe, my heart and my body were like, You're not safe here. I knew that I needed to find something else that was going to help me. 

For me, tarot just started showing up more and more in the media I was consuming. I was seeing it in books and TV shows. I list a lot of the books that I read in the Introduction. It even started showing up in my dreams, which I don't even sleep, so if I'm dreaming about something and I remember, I notice because it does not happen very often, but the Death card kept showing up in my dreams and I was like, the fuck is this? 

I had never had a tarot reading. I hadn't held cards in my hand. I didn't know anyone that read. I didn't know anyone that had had a reading, at least that I knew about at the time. And so it felt like this very distant theoretical thing. But the more it was showing up in the media, the more I couldn't stop thinking about it. And I started researching it and reading all these books about it. 

JK: Very Gemini Rising.

MJW: I'll just research the shit out of this!

It just kept coming up more and more and more until I was finally like, maybe this is a way to engage with spirituality that is going to still feel safe, but will also feel like mine. It has nothing to do with the church. I don't know anyone that's involved with this, which made it attractive to me. I think sometimes diving into something you have no experience with can feel really intimidating or like, Oh, I need an access point. And I think it did for me at first, but the more I researched it, the more I was like, this could just be my thing. This could be my private little weird thing that I just do on my own.

I spent a few months stressing about the rules and trying to convince myself to buy a deck that I didn't like because it's what everyone said I needed to buy. And eventually saying, fuck it. I went to The Strand and bought my first deck, which is The Wild Unknown by Kim Krans, which I still have and use. I brought it home and I was so nervous and excited and I unwrapped it – and I didn't know what to do with it.

a recent photo on meg’s instagram featuring the wild unknown deck // photo courtesy of MJW

All of my reading had not prepared me for not feeling [that] lightning strike, or for my intuition to start buzzing. I was living in West Chelsea at the time with my ex-husband in this alcove studio, and I remember just sitting on the bed holding these cards in my hand, being like, so I just shuffle them and pull one out? And I did, and I was like, it's a stick. It was the Ace of Wands or something. And I was like, I don't know what this means. I used the guidebook, and I was like, Okay, what do I do with this?

I remember just looking at it, feeling absolutely nothing. It was a picture on a card, and I didn't understand it. I could look up the meaning, but it didn't mean anything to me. All of these books and resources that I'd read were like, I bought my first deck when I was 12. I was giving professional readings by the time I was 13. It was these people that seemed to innately know exactly what to do with the cards the second they picked them up. And I do think that if you were not raised in the church, or you were not raised in a really restrictive place that polices your intuition and internal monologue and inner thoughts then you might not have this particular issue.

But I do think that even if you're not raised in religion, “read intuitively” is a really open ended, not particularly practical thing to say to someone who doesn't know what they're doing yet. 

So to get to the Introduction [of Finding the Fool] and that first line, which I also had to fight for a little bit. I wanted that to be the first thing people saw, because I wanted that confirmation [of], it's okay if you don't know what you're doing. There's nothing wrong with not knowing what you're doing. Everybody has to start somewhere. And just because you don't pick up the deck and immediately understand what to do with it doesn't mean that you can't still learn that. But it might mean that rote memorization or just listening to whatever your brain might say about a stick on a card — that might not be enough. You might need some other stuff. And that's what the book is.

JK: When you say you had to fight for it, can you talk about that a little bit?

MJW: So writing a book is weird, as you know, and publishing a book is even more weird, as you also know. There’s just a lot of moments where you have what you think the book is going to be in your head, and then you take it to an agent and you say, this is the book I want to write. And they say, okay, and they help you clean it up. And then you take that to a publisher and the publisher goes, cool, yeah, we'll give you some money, I guess. And then the publisher has their own expectations of what they're going to turn that book into. 

Then you go through the whole process of finishing the manuscript, revising the manuscript, all the things that you do with the manuscript. Along the way, a lot of people are going to get their fingers in it, and different people are going to like different things about the project, and different people are going to feel that different pieces of the project are important to the overall book. 

So as the writer, as the author, you are the one that knows what you mean about the things that you say in the book, which is a gift and a curse. Because you know everything that sits behind each sentence. The editors are there — especially if you have a good editor — to help make sure that anyone reading it is going to get as much of you out of each of those sentences, so that the book is clear. But it also means that there are going to be people that look at something and go, That's not important. We can take this out. This is too long anyway, let's just cut these lines. 

The Introduction just poured out of me when it was time to write the first draft. That line has been in there since the first time I wrote this. And it has not changed. 

JK: Which is a sign.

MJW: Yeah, exactly. But there was someone that looked at an early draft and was like, I don't think we need this. We want to position you as an expert. And I was kind of like, yeah, now! I can be an expert now. I don't really describe myself that way, but like, yes, I'm writing a tarot book; I must have some authority. But I didn't start that way. 

It was just so important to me to open with, I didn't know what I was doing. 

JK: You wanted to open with vulnerability.

MJW: I super did. I felt like it was really, really important. I know that there's actually a lot of me in this book, but it's not a memoir. You know? It's not my story, even though my story is woven through it, if you know where to look. I think you and a few other people can see me pretty clearly in the book, but the book's not about me. And I try really hard to not insert myself too much because I want it to be a tool that people can use for their own journey. 

order finding the fool

So the Introduction was really the place where I just got to tell my story [about] not knowing what I was doing, struggling that first year, quitting several times and just being drawn back to it like a moth to a flame. I couldn't get rid of it. That is part of my story, and finding numerology and having that give structure and shape to the way I understand the deck was just an imperative and essential piece of my story. I can't take these pieces out. I'm not going to pretend I'm sprung, fully formed, out of Zeus’ head.

JK: The isolated genius in the tower.

MJW: I struggled. I think it's important to name that. I think I talk about this in the 8 of Pentacles section — we really celebrate and admire people that are really, really good at things, because we don't usually see the messy beginning or the days and weeks and months and years and decades of practice and devotion. The scraped fingernails and calluses and tumbles and the hard part of learning something. But that is an essential piece of the process. You don't just magically get to the end. Most people aren't prodigies; most of us have to work really hard to get to where we are.

JK: Even prodigies still have to practice.

MJW: And even prodigies still have to learn how to use an instrument. They might be really good at it once they figure it out, but someone still has to show them how to do it. 

JK: That's so beautifully put. And I think this is somewhere where our values are so aligned [with] how passionately we both feel about visiblizing the creative processes and the business processes that are gatekept and that are just tucked away like they're shameful or like they don't need to be seen. 

But like what you were describing with how everyone's a beginner — that reminds me of your reading that you recently shared with me from Maeg Keane with the wine analogy, and visibilizing the part of the winemaking process where it’s still fermenting. And that's an incredibly vulnerable thing to do. Not a lot of people, not a lot of experts — which you are — are willing to open up and share the process where they were fermenting with their audience. But you have done that at every step. And I think that's part of what makes your work so special, and that really draws people to it.

MJW: I think it's just really fucking important. And yeah, if you're not following Maeg, please do. They are just absolutely brilliant. Just like the most poetic, brilliant stuff. 

JK: Shoutout to Maeg Keane.

MJW: But yeah, we were talking about fifth house stuff and the grape on the vine versus the deep dark fermenting process versus the finished wine that gets to be part of the celebration, and how every part, from the planting to the cultivation to the pruning to the harvest, to the fermentation, to the tasting. Not ready yet not ready yet not ready yet to the bottling, to the sharing and the imbibing — like that is all part of the wine process. And that is all essential to the wine process. And if you go on a tour to a vineyard, chances are what you're going to see is nothing, because what you're going to see is barrels. You might get to tour the fields, but everything that's happening is happening in the dark, and it's happening over time, and it just has to do its thing and you have to trust in the process. I think that's tarot. 

JK: And the bottle you’ve created at this moment in time is a beautiful book where you've poured so much of yourself and your wisdom into it for, for all of us.

MJW: Actually, along that line. This was part of the Introduction that did actually get cut. But I have a master's degree in gastronomy In one of my first wine classes, I will never forget this wine master was telling us about tasting, and how one tastes wine. He was affirming us because he said if you pour yourself a glass of wine, and you sniff it, and you swirl it, and you taste it, and you spend time with it, and you are able to identify a note, and you know for sure that that is what that note is, whether it's bell pepper, whether it's river rocks, whether it's salt, whether it's apple, whatever it is — if you taste and smell that note, if you experience that note while enjoying that glass of wine, it is there. Even if no one else that's drinking a glass from that same bottle tastes it, even if it's not in the tasting notes, even if the winemaker never mentions that note — if you experience that note, it's in the wine. It exists for you. 

JK: Wow.

MJW: And I have thought about that so much when I'm reading cards because if you pull a card and you're like, this is what my intuition is telling me, or this is my experience with this card, and someone else is like, that's not how I read that card at all, it doesn't make you wrong. It just means you have a different relationship with that card, and that is just as valuable as whatever someone else might see in that card or what I might see in that card or what you might see in that card. Like that tasting note, that perception, that experience that you have — that relationship that you have built with that particular card is just as important as anyone else's perception of that card. As long as it's coming from an authentic place, you’re not wrong.

JK: I'm tearing up over here. Also, your next book is titled The Tasting Notes of Tarot. 

MJW: Thank you so much. I'll write it up and send it to my agent. 

I wanted to get that in the Introduction, and it just wasn't quite right; it landed on the cutting room floor. Next book. We're doing wine and tarot. This is what I was always meant to do.

JK: I mean. A lot of our time together involves wine and tarot, so I think this is not wrong. 

So, you've mentioned this a few times: the fact that you don't sleep, which is so tied to your history of reading and your relationship to books and literature. A lot of people know you by your screen name first, which on Instagram is 3am.tarot, which you have said is inspired by your lifelong idiopathic insomnia and chronic illness. Can you say more about how your relationship to the body, to illness has impacted your creative practice? And can you also probably explain what it is?

MJW: So for the uninitiated, which, why would you know what this is? Idiopathic insomnia is a very severe form of insomnia. I think what is important to note about it first is that — and I will not give a whole lecture on insomnia — but it is a primary illness. It is not a symptom of something else. 

My insomnia is not a reaction to or a result of restless leg syndrome or sleep apnea or anxiety or chronic pain or anything else. It creates lots of other problems, but the illness itself, the disorder itself, is sleep. That's the problem. I don't fall asleep well. I don't stay asleep well.

JK: You've never slept eight hours in your life.

MJW: No, not even with mono. Not even with bronchitis. Not even as a baby.

JK: You didn't nap as a child.

MJW: I did not. My mom stopped even bothering to put me down for naps before I was one. I've been like this since I was a baby; I will be like this until I die. It is just part of the fabric of who I am as a person. 

So what that means is that I am awake a lot, and I am alone a lot. I get to have a lot of time to myself, and it's not necessarily productive time, but it does mean that I have a lot of time to observe, to reflect, to think about my life and my choices, and also to just think about anything I want to because most people are not awake all the time.

JK: What is a good night of sleep for you hours wise?

MJW: If I get five or six hours, I'm stoked. Between three and five is pretty average. I can survive on a week of two to three hours a night. If we get below two, it starts to get dicey. If we get below one, we have a countdown.

JK: Which we have had recently.

MJW: Which we have had a lot of recently. Nights that I get two hours or less, I usually do one hour or less, we do a countdown because there will start to be really severe impacts on my physical, mental and emotional wellbeing by day three. By day five, I can't safely leave the house. It's not generally super safe for me to be in the house, either. I can't cook. I walk into walls. It's not a good place to be. I cry at everything. I'm just physically ill. It's not great. But yeah, a good night of sleep for me would be five or six. But that's unusual.

JK: Yeah, I was going to say three or four is standard.

MJW: Yeah, it's pretty standard. 

So in some ways that can have a decent impact on my creative abilities because if I am having a week or two of not sleeping well, even if I'm getting enough sleep to survive and be safe, I'm not necessarily going to be in this creative flow state where I'm just like generating all this profound shit. It's usually like, okay, I gotta eat. I gotta take care of myself. I have to do the things that I do on a daily basis, but I'm probably not going to get much more done. 

So what that ends up meaning for my creative routines and my writing routines is that if I have a good day, I generate as much as I can, because I know that there's going to be a bad day at some point. Fortunately my brain, the way that my creativity flows, is fairly conducive to that. I don't know if that's a learned behavior or not, but I know you've been able to see this more now that we have been living together for a while. But I will have days where I don't really write much at all, and then I will have days where I crank for eight hours.

JK: You can crank.

MJW: I can crank. It’s been very funny; I've had a few comments when I was [sharing] all the things that have been going on, the challenging things that have been happening and how hard the last few months have been. I've had multiple people be like, there's been no break in your content, I had no idea. And I haven't quite had the heart to be like, well, yeah, it’s because I wrote this months ago, or I wrote the outline of this month ago. I just had to tweak it before it went out. That's how I operate. 

I do think it's a response to chronic illness, but I also just think it's how my brain works. If I'm in a flow state, if I've got good ideas, I get them all out as much as I possibly can so that I can go back to them later.

JK: You like to work months ahead in a way that I never have, which I very much admire. You'll be like three or four months ahead on your newsletter in a way that I'm like, Are you fucking kidding me? 

MJW: I mean, it depends. When I can be organized enough and I'm like, Oh, I'm going to just make a quick template. I'm going to copy and paste what I can and spit ideas in. Right now in my drafts, I have everything for March, April and May, and then I have skeletons for June and July for the essays.

JK: I wrote my New Moon in Pisces newsletter this morning.

MJW: And it was beautiful!

JK: Then I did one pass on it and was like, this is good enough! and sent it.

MJW: Look, if I could write something that gorgeous in one sitting, I would do that, but I don't work that way.

JK: These are the two genders.

MJW: I loved your newsletter this morning. I occasionally can write something that I love that much and just spin it off. I remember the Wheel of Fortune essay on timing that I wrote the month after we moved in here.

JK: That was so beautiful. 

MJW: And it was very much like, I would get a flash of an idea and whatever we were doing, I'm like, I just gotta sit down and write for like half an hour. 

I've never been able to just be like, I'm going to sit at my desk at this time every day and write. I've always had to be like, Well, I'm going to do something else until I get an idea. And some days I just wake up and have it and know what I'm going to do and I just crank through everything. And other days I'm like, I'm just going to fuck around and read or cook or play video games or go for a walk and see what comes through. And if nothing does, then I hang out.

JK: The self employed life.

MJW: The self employed life. You’re never quite working. You're never quite not working.

JK: On that note of how your relationship to creativity is very, you know, you have a fire third [house], you have Mercury in Sagittarius, all of that good stuff. Have you had any particularly magical creative moments this last year? Even with all the hard stuff.

MJW: Even with all the hard stuff. It’s still finding its form, but I have been so into elemental studies this past year or two. I've read so many books that I have just obsessively loved this year, but I read In Our Element by Lindsay Fauntleroy, on traditional Chinese medicine and the five elements. And it just got me so fired up. I was so excited about what I was reading. It gave me so many ideas for my own work. 

I get so much inspiration out of seeing what other people are doing. It brings me so much joy to find someone's work at a moment when it intersects, no matter how big or small that intersection is, with something that's been on my mind lately, because it just feels like a gift from Mercury. It feels very like, Oh yes, this is exactly what I needed right now! This was the missing piece. My reading with Maeg was like that. This book from Lindsay was like that. I read The Flowering Wand by Sophie Strand exactly when I needed to read it, and it was so beautiful.  There have just been a lot of cool synchronistic moments around my [new] work, which is still finding its form. Someday I'm going to figure out what it is. But yeah, it's been really energizing and exciting to engage with.

JK: And last year was a Mercury year for you. I love that. Thank you for sharing, babe, and thank you for taking the time. In our house. 

MJW: Any time. We’re going to turn this off and just keep talking.

JK: But this was so fun and I love you so much and your book is so brilliant and EVERYONE SHOULD BUY IT. Putting that in all caps.

MJW: No, thank you for having me. I love the [author interview] series that you do so much. You ask so many good questions, and these interviews have just been such a gift. So it's an honor to be among them.

JK: Well, I mean, not to play favorites, but like, you are my favorite.

MJW: You’re my favorite. 

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You can pre-order (although it is shipping early some places) Finding the Fool from Bookshop or wherever you most like to buy your books. And be sure to follow Meg on Instagram!

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