Lindsay’s Q&A with Kate Scelsa, author of Luminary
I met the beautiful Kate Scelsa when I was a guest teacher for The Tower gathering at Jeff Hinshaw and Bakara Wintner’s Brooklyn Fools Tarot Intensive in 2015. It was a fateful night! I met Jeff Hinshaw for the first time (one of my best pals), and would later go on to co-run those gatherings with them in 2016 and 2017. I also got to connect with some wonderful folks — Kate among them.
She and I connected instantly. Over the years, it’s been a joy to be her pal, watch her publish her beautiful books, and witness her move through several big expansions with grace, honesty, and vulnerability. So, it was truly a delightful full circle experience when she asked me to be the interviewee for the Tarot section in her incredible new book, “Luminary,” which is out now!
With “Luminary,” Kate has truly written the book I would have given anything to have had as a younger person. It’s full of Kate’s signature wit, wisdom, and depth, and is full of conversations with some truly extraordinary helping folks. It’s so validating and comforting to anyone moving through challenges and struggles, and are seeking to find that deep source of wisdom and guidance within themselves.
I feel so lucky and honored to be a small part of it, and was so grateful that Kate was willing to be our first ever interview on the Wild Soul Journal!
Below is our conversation, with links to purchase “Luminary” at the bottom of the page!
Hi Kate! Thank you so much for taking the time to answer these questions about your gorgeous new book, "Luminary." It's absolutely the book I wish I had had as a young teen. I'm so grateful that you wrote it, and I'm so honored to be a part of it!
To start, what gave you the inspiration to write this book?
Thank you so much, Lindsay! “Luminary” actually grew out of years of journal entries and notes that I had taken about my own experiences using both mystical and practical tools for self-care. I wasn’t sure for a long time why I was taking these notes, or who they were for, but they were very direct, almost like instructions. Then I started thinking about young readers who have written to me because they related to my writing about depression in my novels, and how much of a mental health crisis young people have been experiencing for the past half a decade or so, and I realized I was really addressing them. I suddenly felt I had an urgent responsibility to communicate to them everything that I could about the ways in which these tools have helped me learn to navigate my own mental health.
I think centering the reality of the creative process is so important. What was your process in writing, creating, and publishing this book?
I always take a lot of notes to save for later on projects that I haven’t even fully articulated for myself yet, like leaving myself a little breadcrumb trail. That way when I sit down to write there’s often already a puzzle I need to solve. So those journal entries about all of these tools were waiting for me to pull them back out and engage with them when I was ready to finally tackle this project. Once I started organizing my thoughts around those notes the structure for the book became very clear. I wrote up a proposal and some sample chapters and my book agent worked with me on really getting that as clear and polished as possible before she helped me shop it around to some editors. I got very lucky on this project, and we were able to find a perfect home for it with an editor at Simon & Schuster who was really a kindred spirit. It doesn’t usually happen so smoothly! Of course there are years of rewrites and edits on anything that’s going to be published, but this book came to me the most fully formed of anything I’ve ever written.
What made you decide which topics to feature in this book, as well as who to feature for each section?
It was a pretty selfish decision-making process – I wanted to include things that I love to talk about and people that I love to talk to! It was also important to me that I wasn’t presenting myself as an expert on any of these topics, or even as a singular advice-giving voice. So much of the book is about questioning authority and singular narratives, and so it only made sense to bring in as many different perspectives as I could. I sold the book on proposal close to the beginning of the pandemic, and I didn’t even realize then how meaningful it would become for me to get to connect with some of my favorite people in this moment of intense isolation. And, not to brag, but I know some pretty cool people! The wisdom that I received through those conversations was so invaluable, and it meant so much to me that everyone I asked agreed to be a part of the project. I’m especially grateful that you agreed to be interviewed for my chapter on tarot – it was one of the first conversations I had and it actually helped sell the book!
Was any chapter in the book more challenging than the others? If so, how did you work through that?
I wrote a chapter on working with energy and spirit guides, and I had a really hard time digging in to that topic at first because it felt so vulnerable. It’s probably the most “out there” of the tools I chose to write about, and I do try to ground the book in more tangible tools in order to kind of ease more skeptical readers into doing this kind of work. But talking with Aja Daashuur, a practitioner who works with spirit guides, for that chapter helped me contextualize my thinking in a really helpful way. She welcomes skepticism when it comes to all magic, and she feels that, even if we are simply communicating with our subconscious when we use these tools, that is still a really valid and helpful path toward helping ourselves. I have really come to feel that way about all magical work. The “realness” doesn’t concern me as much as the depth of the conversations we’re able to facilitate for ourselves with the present moment. Communicating with the non-tangible can be contextualized in a lot of ways, and psychology is just as magical to me as anything else.
How does it feel to have the book out in the world? What are you hoping it will offer to the readers that engage with it?
I honestly still can’t quite believe that this book has been published at all – it was always my witchy rantings against the ways in which capitalism makes us feel small and inadequate in order to separate us from our true magic – not the most likely sell to a big publisher! But now that it’s actually published, it feels like I have really sent it out there to find the people it is supposed to find, and at this point that has very little to do with me. The book has had its own clear mission from the start, and that’s to find people who are looking for an alternative way of thinking about their lives and mental health, one that empowers them to define their own ideas of success, health, and happiness, and gives them a way to see their lives (and themselves) as existing in a constant state of flow and change.
You speak about this in the book, but I would love for you to share how you got started with the Tarot, and what it means to you as a tool?
I had always loved having my cards read, but I never thought that I would start reading myself. It felt like magic that needed to be facilitated for me by someone else. What I didn’t realize was that I was protecting myself from some very old worries around giving into my full witchy nerdy desires. Then, back in 2015 my friend Bakara Wintner (now of Everyday Magic) was co-teaching a class with Jeff Hinshaw (now of Cosmic Cousins) called the Brooklyn Fools in which they were going to focus on a different card of the Major Arcana each week. I signed up, thinking it would be a fun way to support my friend, and after only a couple meetings I quickly realized that the magic of the tarot was becoming deeply personal and very real to me. I started doing readings for myself and for others, and the wisdom that was coming through was so clear and practical, I couldn’t quite believe it. Just the act of approaching my deck with a question, laying out cards and piecing together the narrative of a spread quickly became a hugely therapeutic act for me. There is something about being able to sort through the jumble of our brains to lay something out in a really organized, tangible form that always helps me put any problems in perspective.
What Tarot cards (if any) do you regularly turn to for anchoring and bolstering in your own life?
There are so many cards that have brought really intense wisdom to me over the years - the Five of Cups, the Eight of Pentacles, the Three of Cups, Temperance. The Hermit and the Empress are two that I often come back to when trying to find balance in how I experience my life. And I have a pretty intense relationship with the Tower, which of course is not unusual, but it has showed up in some huge moments in my life, and every time I know that I am in for a major shedding of some very old karmic baggage. I have very deep respect for the Tower at this point, just because it has dragged me through hell, but always left me with so much abundance on the other side.
And just because I think normalization of this is so important -- are there any cards that still challenge, confound, or confuse you?
The court cards are always challenging me when they show up, just because my understanding of them is so vague and tends to change so much based on the context. I am someone who still consults a guidebook when I read, and I often look up card meanings online when I feel stumped. It takes a long time for cards to attach themselves to meaning for me. The only one I feel like I really get is the Page of Pentacles, because a theater friend of mine once called it the “stage manager” card, which just paints a whole picture for me of what kind of work is needed when she shows up.
And lastly, any brief advice or words of wisdom for the writers and creators out there?
I always say, figure out what your writing and your creative process mean to you and then protect that feeling at all costs. At the end of the day your practice has nothing to do with any outward success or opportunities and everything to do with why you create in the first place and what it does for your heart, mind, and spirit. If you have a strong enough foundation in this sense of self, you will be in a much better position to weather life’s inevitable complications and rejections. Success is not one thing, and outward markers of success have very little to do with how people feel about themselves or their art. I have a chapter all about this in “Luminary” so obviously I could go on all day about it!