the full moon in cancer for writers
Hello beloveds,
I hope 2023 is treating you all well so far. ICYMI, the 2023 Year Ahead for Writers is OUT and it is comprehensive — the longest horoscopes I’ve written for y’all so far.
Also also also: returning soon! My signature, self-paced course, Astrology for Writers: How to Make Your Writing Work for You, is dropping later this month. Sign up for the waitlist now!
As a heads’ up, this newsletter contains brief, non-graphic mentions of some of the more difficult themes and plot lines of some fairy tales.
Xx,
Jeanna
Once upon a time.
Four words. Four little words. Four little words that are so, so powerful, that invite a host of sensorium and memory.
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Today’s Full Moon arrives at 6:07p Eastern, at 16* of Cancer. It is a neutral culmination of what we’ve all been nourishing since the New Moon in Cancer on June 28, 2022. Moons, and the planets, can be rude that way: what we pay attention to is what we’ll grow, consciously or unconsciously. If you’ve been tending your relationships, your projects, your creative practice, your relationship to play and rest, a mindfulness practice or a new crocheting hobby — you’ve likely seen progress in the best way: increased peace within the self. If you’ve been tending grudges, self-sabotage, or such other pursuits — well. That, too, is its own path, and one that can easily be turned around.
This moon cycle is a hard one to ignore. What is going on with the moon always points us back to our bodies and our emotions, but in her home sign of Cancer, she is potent. Make no mistake: Cancer is the gardener, the caretaker, but a ferociously protective one, just as concerned with security and guarding the battlements as her twin sign, Capricorn.
Right now, fighting against feelings is both difficult and obvious. Here, all of the hardness of our collective shells comes up against just how soft that underbelly is. The tenderness and earnestness that, in a social media climate that prioritizes a blasé cynicism, is afraid to come out.
Applying to an opposition with Mercury Rx in Capricorn, this Full Moon is particularly pushing us to consider how we feel about the information that has been being revealed these last few weeks. What is our body telling us at this moment? What are our feelings revealing? What do we think we intellectually know? What do we feel to be true?
These next few weeks invite us to sit with our individual and collective (whichever collective(s) you belong to) emotional and even ancestral knowledge.
One of the primary places we can look for the lost stories, even the lost stories within, is through folklore and fairytale.
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So many children here in the United States “grow out of” their Disney phase, which is America’s standard canon of fairy tales. But I didn’t. Over the years of my adolescence and young adulthood, I continually returned to fairy tales, a landing place in times of depression, of familial trauma, of needed comfort. I created academic excuses for my interest, designing an independent study in high school around feminist fairy tales, then centering my undergraduate English Lit honors project on versions of Snow White and Rapunzel. The stories allowed me to process and cathartically move through difficult parts of my life, which I passed off as purely intellectual interest, even as those around me often commented (sometimes with envy) at how cool it was that I was “getting” to work with stories that were so beloved. In truth, I was subconsciously trying to work through family relationships I couldn’t have begun to articulate at the time.
After coming out and leaving the church, I taught Disney’s Frozen and Malinda Lo’s queer Cinderella Ash to undergraduates. Years later, more therapized and conscious of what I was doing, I pitched and somehow convinced Longreads to let me write a Disney column, writing about empire and heteronormativity in Frozen II, motherhood in Maleficent, and queer villainy in Pocahontas before shakeups with the editorial staff led me to leave the publication.
Fairy tales allow us to speak aloud and process what is seemingly unspeakable. Folklorists have written about the trauma contained within the stories for decades; these days, teenagers on TikTok make pithy soundbytes like, did you know that Snow White is really about child abuse, about a mother who hates her own daughter? Or that in some versions, Sleeping Beauty wakes up while giving birth, having been assaulted while unconscious? Then, there are the stories that never made it to Disney: Bluebeard and all of his dead wives, or Donkey Skin, whose father wishes to marry her. Then there are all the lesser known tales of old, like the Bohemian story The Wise Judgment in which, upon finding out that the woman they were raised with is not their biological sister, a King’s sons all compete to marry her.
Some of these stories are dark like the night sky that is the backdrop for a full moon, illuminating the corners of our psyches where we lock memories away. Those are the corners where the child or adolescent self still crouches and hides, needing to know they are safe after all these years.
Stories can help.
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The Full Moon in Cancer is not just nourishing like a good meal, or a warm blanket. She’s not just a mom character on a sitcom, although those seem nice. She’s Artemis, or Diana: the huntress in the forest searching for her lost sisters, stalking those who harmed them and delivering vengeance, caring for — and protecting — all in her encampment.
Imagine if the queen’s hunter in Snow White/Beautiful Girl stories was, instead, a huntress who protected the innocent child and went into the forest with her: that is the energy of the Full Moon in Cancer.
Once upon a time, you were a child. Once upon a time, you were a teenager. Once upon a time, perhaps, you wanted or needed care and, perhaps, did not receive it. Once upon a time, perhaps, you had feelings that you did not know how to or were not equipped to process. Because time, and age, and all other sorts of things.
This Full Moon in Cancer offers the chance to, over the next few days, receive the knowledge your body is telling you. Reread or rewatch the stories that help you receive comfort and care, that help process and integrate those feelings. Give yourself, and your child self, the care that you deserve, without judgment or condition.
Honor your stories.
Writing Prompts for the Full Moon in Cancer
What stories do you tell yourself about yourself? What stories have been told about you that you have sought to change in adulthood, or even just in recent years? What stories did you flock to as a child to help make sense of things? How do those stories feel, now?
For you, as a writer, what myths, legends, folklore, and fairytales — if any — are or feel like recurring motifs, patterns, or themes in your own work?
What were you beginning on or around June 28, 2022’s New Moon in Cancer that now feels like it is coming to a head? Look to the Cancer house of your chart for more detail on what areas of life may be involved. (And, more broadly, to your Year Ahead 2023.)
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I love this post. Such a great discussion! Thank you for sharing! ✌🏼
I just sent a delicious hour reading all the fairytales you mentioned 🫶 Thank you!! Happy Full Moon!