Hello!
If you are interested in working with me this fall, there are a few ways to do so! Here are my upcoming courses:
You can pre-order the brand new, self-paced version of Astrology for Writers: How to Make Your Writing Work for You! Everyone who pre-registers gets exclusive, never-before-taught bonus modules on Venus (aesthetics). The deadline for pre-orders is October 23rd.
Non-astrology: I’m teaching a 4-Week Online Nonfiction Seminar on Understanding the Book Proposal with Catapult. This one is live and runs Monday nights October 18th-November 8th. There are still a few spots left!
And now, time for the New Moon!
Xx,
Jeanna
“Art is crucial to [the] ethical work of just memory.”
So writes Pulitzer Prize-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen in 2016’s Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War. Just memory, for Nguyen, opposes the ethnocentric nationalism that ignores both the humanity of the “other” and the inhumanity of one’s own — the kind of nationalism that is the most powerful and dangerous form of identity politics. “A just memory… [recalls] the weak, the subjugated, the different, the enemy, the forgotten,” he argues.
Nguyen is talking about how national memory (and industries of memory) function both during and after war, his case study being the conflict in Vietnam, the country in which he was born. But the argument also has implications for systemic oppression. “The powerful fear art’s potentially enduring quality and its influence on memory, and thus they seek to dismiss, co-opt, or suppress it,” he writes. Memory is a strategic resource, and consumers “hooked on nostalgia” are easily fed a steady diet of kitsch, sentimentality, and spectacle by the entertainment war machine.
Which, of course, includes publishing.
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Today’s New Moon in Libra arrived at 7:05a Eastern. New Moons are, generally, a time for seeding, for planting, but this one should be done with care.
I bought myself a bouquet of roses yesterday, and some of them had not been entirely de-thorned, resulting in me pricking myself rather like Aurora while arranging the bouquet. I don’t mind; I like flowers with some bite to them. But it’s an apt image for today’s moon, one that arrives with a Mars cazimi — Mars, the planet of action and conflict and heat and inflammation and all things war, situated exactly on the New Moon itself.
It is the balance of perspectives that gives Libra its signature edge — its ability to sift through everyone and everything, to sort the wheat from the chaff. This is its strength. But we sometimes forget that Libra sifts because Libra is interested, principally, in justice. Harmony doesn’t come, can’t come, before justice, before restoration, before the wrongs have been addressed and redressed.
“Peace” is too easily purchased, a compromise that too often ignores Nguyen’s inhumanities. Justice is the real thing.
With Mars involved in today’s New Moon, there is an activation, a seeding, that sparks something that will not quit. This will become more apparent once Mars moves into Scorpio at the end of the month, where its powers are heightened, but this is not a quiet moon, not a moon that wants you to sit at your desk dithering over syntax. This moon wants to get to the heart of the issue, wielding the sword of truth and the scales of justice.
Libra is all about creating art that remembers the humanity of others, and the inhumanities of ourselves and our own. The full picture accounted for — without sacrificing aesthetics.
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In reading Nguyen’s book, I’ve often thought of that famous line from Rent’s “La Vie Boheme” — “The opposite of war isn’t peace; it’s creation.”
Much of Nguyen’s work discusses the crucial processes of remembering (which is to say: re-membering) fuller pictures: of others, yes, but perhaps most especially of ourselves and our own. Dismantling the agreed-upon, inherited national, cultural, and familial mythologies is profoundly important, difficult work. (A good Mercury Retrograde project, no?) But also difficult is the process of recreating, from what can feel like scratch, that more cohesive picture that accounts for our own faults, our parents’ and grandparents’ and people’s flaws and mistakes and even sins.
But this is the Libra of it all: to bring out the scales of justice, to weigh it all, and to then, as an artist, be willing to take responsibility for painting a picture that paints a path forward for a kind of empathetic, just memory that remembers it all — that refuses the singularity of nationalism, of the oppressors’ single story, of inherited, harmful stereotype and easy dismissals.
“The powerful fear art’s enduring quality” precisely because of this: its ability to heal.
Writing Prompts for the New Moon in Libra
Which of your memories and mythologies — familial, cultural, religious, national — could stand to be put under a microscope (or Mars’ blade, or journal’s pen) in this moment?
What areas of your life are you in the process of remembering // re-membering and recreating // re-creating in this moment? How role does writing play for you in this process?
What seeds are you planting that feel tied to themes of justice and creation?
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