Summer of Bibliomancy

Daisy Alioto announces Dirt’s newest collab with the online tarot platform Moonlight.

Welcome to the Summer of Bibliomancy, a collaboration between Dirt and Moonlight! Moonlight is an interactive platform for tarot sessions, where you can book a personalized reading or run your tarot practice as a vetted pro. It was founded by Danielle Baskin, our partner and co-conspirator in this special project. 

Bibliomancy is, historically, “foretelling the future by interpreting a randomly chosen passage from a book.” Here, we’ve sort of reversed the process. 

Earlier this summer, six writers received a tarot reading with 4-5 Major Arcana cards. The writers then wrote something––ranging from personal essays, to poetry, to dialogue––inspired by their readings. Contributors include Miriam Gordis, Vivian Medithi, Katy Kelleher, Terry Nguyen, Evan Grillon, and Michelle Lyn King. 

As part of the Summer of Bibliomancy, we’ll also be launching an interactive Dirt x Moonlight tarot deck, coming soon. Passages from the essays have been incorporated into the deck’s guidebook. 

Below, some words from Daisy Alioto on what makes the Summer of Bibliomancy so special. 

Sign up to be the first to know when everything launches. 

In a poem based on his tarot reading, Vivian Medithi writes: “i am the slime mold ariadne gave to theseus and you are the minotaur.” In 2012, researchers reported that “Even without a brain, a slime mold can essentially remember where it's been, helping it navigate past complex obstacles.” They compared the ooze to the thread that Theseus used to find his way out of the Minotaur’s labyrinth.

Most of the writers in this series point to the similarities between tarot and their profession. “Like all good storytelling, tarot relies heavily on potential, on identifying fertile and existing threads that could be drawn out to realize their full force in the universe,” writes Miriam Gordis, “The randomness of tarot reading functions less as a kind of divining in this description of it, and more as an opportunity to remake the unfolding of the world.”

We pull cards for the same reasons that we write: To comfort ourselves, to remember who we are and to communicate with the absent. To find our way toward the light from the center of the maze. 

Michelle Lyn King, who also teaches creative writing to high school students and college undergraduates, encourages her students to finish a first draft before they “even attempt to understand their stories.” She draws parallels between the “cards” and “reading” of tarot and the “plot” and “story” that make up everything in fiction. 

“For a long time, I’ve associated my sense of self with creation,” writes Katy Kelleher. Creation is part of the self-narrative of a writer. “I’m a mother, after all. I write. I make big pots of borscht on a regular basis. I like to embroider little nature scenes and watercolor geometric squares for fun. It flatters my sense of self to think I’m a person who makes. I craft and cook. I’m generative, not destructive.”

I am generative and not destructive. 

“Finding a straightforward moral in things that happen to you is a way to narrativize, but when you tell a story, it is easier to give it a structure and a point,” Miriam adds. Later, she continues, “Perhaps creative work is an insufficient way of devoting yourself to other humans.”

As Ada Limón writes in her poem The End of Poetry:

enough
of the kneeling and the rising and the looking
inward and the looking up

At a certain point, you have to stand up from the table (or the tarot software platform) and start living, no matter how futile it feels. “Do you believe in fate?” Terry Nguyen asks her partner, Evan Grillon. “I sort of think of fate as a train bearing down on me, and I’m strapped to the tracks,” he says. “Thank you, but I’ve got enough metaphysical commitments already!”

I hope you’ll take a break from your metaphysical commitments to immerse yourself in this series, which would not exist without the collage artwork of Christine Shan Shan Hou. You’ll hear from the artist next week, and have a chance to own a limited edition interactive tarot deck with the Major Arcana cards they designed. 

In the meantime, please enjoy our Summer of Bibliomancy playlist––each of the 22 songs corresponds to a card in the Major Arcana deck. Send us your best guesses…