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When I began reading Chelsey Pippin Mizzi’s second book, Tarot for Creativity: A Guide for Igniting Your Creative Practice (Chronicle Books, October 2024), I wondered if she’d been in the divination panel at AWP in Seattle, which was so crowded the fire marshal asked a portion of us to leave. Instead of continuing as a few attendees were escorted out, the panelists declared that they didn’t want to present if some were excluded, perfectly illustrating the camaraderie that imbues the divination/spirituality writing community. As we clustered in the hallway outside the empty venue, we learned that each attendee came from diverse practices with equal curiosity about the other—and all of us were searching for ways to meld craft with tapping into the divine.

Turns out Chelsey wasn’t in Seattle, although perhaps some of her clients were. Currently based in Avignon, France, she coaches creatives from around the world, many of them writers who, with Chelsey’s facilitation of tarot for creative practice, find their way through the stuckness and go on to publish debut novels.  

Over Zoom, Chelsey and I discussed her work with tarot and how she developed the methods she shares in this book. 

—Hillary Adams

 

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Hillary Adams: You tell the story of your first encounter with tarot in the introduction of Tarot for Creativity, saying that it slowly helped you “get the magic back,” but you also had a complicated relationship with divination. What changed your mind?

Chelsey Pippin Mizzi: Before I discovered the tarot, everything about divination turned me off. The experiences I’d had with coworkers and acquaintances felt invasive and inaccurate. Thankfully, a longtime trusted friend who was learning the cards asked if she could practice with me. She suggested asking it a low-pressure question, perhaps something about the novel I was currently drafting.

When she laid the cards down in front of me, something happened.

Looking at those cards, I immediately recognized that tarot reading is the simple act of looking at an image and finding meaning in it—a practice I was actually quite familiar with, having turned to art for inspiration in my creative life for years. It was instant magic for me. I thought, this isn’t scary, this isn’t force-feeding me something. I can’t believe it took me until my late twenties to discover this thing that speaks my language.

 

HA: You ended up working as a journalist (New York Magazine, Creative Boom, METRO, The Bookseller, and BuzzFeed). What led you to coaching other creatives and how did you develop the concept for this book?

CPM: I spent my early career working across a range of creative fields—among other roles, I’ve worked as a theatre reviewer, a gallery assistant, a librarian, and I spent several years covering culture, lifestyle, and books at BuzzFeed UK. There, I instated the office’s emerging writers’ program in which I led my colleagues in coaching graduates to develop their writing careers. The red thread of my career has always been about connecting people to art, uplifting other creators, and sharing what I know and what I love.

So, once I’d gotten to know the tarot and started reading it for others, I quickly found that—like the rest of my work—I was most interested in having conversations about creative living. I didn’t feel at home reading for clients who came to me with financial questions or looking for love advice. But I did deeply enjoy working with clients who had creative problems. I would be smitten with their creative work and want to talk well over the time we had booked.

It became clear over time that applying my creative point of view to the tarot was the calling for that business, and so I tailored my services to combine my growing tarot expertise with the experience I had to offer from over a decade of working in creative fields.

I began to focus on holding space and creating resources for other creatives. I built a community online and started offering creative workshops and one-on-one readings aimed at helping creatives unlock blocks and generate ideas.

In the autumn of 2020, I created a short ebook that cast every tarot card into a creative context: for example, the Ace of Wands as an invitation to come up with a new idea or start a new project, the Queen of Pentacles as a reminder that creative work is a long-term investment, and the Magician as a directive to gather the tools you need to bring a project to life. I tested the book with beta readers and launched it on my website. But after a couple weeks, I asked myself, what am I doing? I want to see this as a whole book. In print. On shelves.

So I took the ebook off sale. I sought out resources on developing book proposals, joined a community to help me stay accountable, and began the process of bringing a book about tarot for creativity to life.  

 

HA: How is Tarot for Creativity different from other tarot and creative spirituality books?

CPM: My book enters into a long discussion about tarot and its relationship to creativity—anyone writing about the tarot is, by nature, engaging with it creatively and therefore aware of its creative power. But, as a reader, tarot practitioner, and writer, I was frustrated that many published resources about tarot and creativity were more theoretical than practical.

So I wrote what I’d wanted to find in books during the period I’d spent building my personal practice and later, my business: a practical, action-focused, workshop-style guide to putting the tarot to use as a creative tool that could help me generate ideas, finish projects, and feel more at home in my creative life. It became clear that if I wanted that resource in the world, I was going to have to create it.  

 

HA: Within this “workshop in a book” you include an appendix with seven additional spreads, including a Story Builder Spread. How are writers able to solve plot holes and create stories with the cards using this spread?

CPM: I work with a lot of writers, at many different stages of their process. Our work together ranges from helping them return to projects they abandoned to getting over a fear of the blank page, from untangling tricky plot problems to building up the confidence to query agents or submit to publishers. But one of my favorite things to do is help writers build a new story from scratch.

One approach I often take to do this is to pull tarot cards in line with classic storytelling structures—like “The Hero’s Journey,” “Save the Cat,” and “Into the Woods.” The Story Builder Spread is inspired by one of my favorite guides to story structure—Story Genius by Lisa Cron. Cron posits that a good story has three “rails”—what’s going on internally, what’s happening externally, and then the third rail: what is connecting the internal and the external.

The spread takes this concept and maps out a kind of tarot storyboard; it’s a series of nine prompts inviting writers to pull cards to help them generate those internal, external, and connecting rails of their story.

 

HA: Like all writers, you must have struggled with writer’s block during this project, perhaps in the dreaded middle. When did you find yourself blocked and how did you use the tools in this book to conquer your own creative blocks while writing?

CPM: When I was writing The Major Arcana material for the book, which includes an essay, creative prompts, and a spread for each of the twenty-two cards, by the end everything started to sound the same.

The card I really struggled with writing about was The Moon, a card that, in my mind, is all vibes—its power and wisdom aren’t easy to articulate through language. I felt like I couldn’t do it justice. To solve this problem, I took some advice I often offer to people who want to get creative with the tarot and sketched my own version of the card, which is very embarrassing because I’m not good at drawing. But it worked: I needed to take the pressure off saying something perfect about this card, and drawing forced me to express how I felt about it imperfectly.

I gave myself permission to depart to another medium and stay with this idea even if I can’t articulate it. This is what I tell my clients: Stay with the card, look at it, be with it. The same goes for an idea you’re blocked around: Stay with the idea. Look at it, be with it. Let what comes, come.

Art making isn’t about rushing to the next word count, it’s being present with the art that you’re trying to create, something I had to remind myself of often throughout the drafting process. 

 

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Essay by Hillary Adams •

I’ve been reading tarot, or teaching myself to read tarot, for six years now. I learned tarot to understand the stories in my life that I had no control over, like why the guy I loved ghosted me, or when my life would turn a luckier corner.

It began with hours of 3 a.m. insomniac scrolling of YouTube tarot readers on my phone. Then I taught myself the cards, a secret obsession even my sister didn’t know I had. Hearing their messages felt familiar, like I’d channeled them other times as a teacher and even in front of my church when I was young. I draw cards for myself, my inner circle, and sometimes my skeptical yet fascinated teenage daughters, who still come near when they see the cards out on my bed.

We all want to know what’s going to happen, what we should do. Making choices is rough.

I began reading for others in grad school, when I brought out a new deck at residency after I heard a group in the fiction workshop discussing how their professor had used card pulls to generate story ideas in class. Soon I was reading for anyone who was curious and open—at breakfast, at the bar. Some wanted to know about career changes or publication news. A few were wrestling with story.

Although many of the writers I know would call themselves some level of atheist, most are also open to the curiosity that oracle cards and tarot provide. In a room full of writers I’ve learned that almost all of them know their main astrological placements. Not that they rely on this information to direct their lives, but they understand how a variety of perspectives can enrich their art.

As creators we rely on possibility.

I wonder if all other writers have rituals and good-luck writing corners, barstools, or sounds that have summoned the muse when they’re blocked.

During the pandemic, I found that ten minutes of yoga before sitting at the keyboard helped me finish a manuscript. Years before, I walked for an hour and then wrote, still sweaty with my kids hanging on me, earbuds snug to stifle their complaints until I could get those new thoughts on the page.

I’ve held a tiny jade elephant my dad brought home from a business trip when I was a child, tried room changes, dimmer lighting, a playlist that had sparked my brain when my project was fresh.

All this time I’ve been looking to tarot to guide me through mysteries outside of my control, why have I never sought its help for my creative work, the one thing I can control?

Could I use tarot to hack the muse?

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After our interview I decide to pull out my classic Rider-Waite deck, the one that always seems to know what’s up in my relationships before I do. This is also Chelsey’s favorite deck, and the one used in the descriptions of each card in the book. I tell myself I’ll pick one card from the top and one from the bottom, then practice her spreads and prompts for each.

The Hermit—Follow Your Creative Vision

He’s the sage of the tarot, willing to retreat to seek wisdom. I hate when I’m in hermit mode, which is most of the time. But Chelsey’s description of The Hermit reveals a more Obi-Wan Kenobi vibe. She summons Gandalf too, a call to adventure, like The Fool (a leap of faith) but with wisdom and a lamp to light the way.

The creative prompts:

Go on a solo trip and record the experience.

Create a self-portrait that depicts you at your best.

Create your own Hermit’s lamp (3-D structure).

Journal unfiltered about exactly what you’re thinking and feeling in this moment.

The spread invites the creative to ask four questions about their current work/process:  

1. What creative journey do I need to take on my own terms?

2. What barrier might get in the way of my light?

3. What can I do to stay my own course?

4. How can I invite others on my journey without getting off track?

I have piles of books on the craft of writing, some of which I found helpful, if a bit painful to digest. Tarot for Creativity is the first book on creativity and writing that gives such an expanse of ideas for reflection, creative prompts to bring the writing in a new direction, and tarot spreads that ask practical and insightful questions. Her mini workshops showcase how tarot provides possibility to breathe into work that has grown tedious. Even the titles for each two-page card “chapter” bring a fresh interpretation for the cards and can be used as the “message” for the card to a creative who has less time to get unstuck.

Of course, stuckness hits me while drafting this piece. As I transcribe our conversation, the soft deadline looms, I’m fighting a severe sinus infection, and a high-pressure grant is due at my day job.

I draw a card to test the tools. The Eight of Swords.

For those unfamiliar with tarot, this card traditionally depicts a woman standing bound and blindfolded, unable to see that she could easily free herself if only she leaned against one of the swords to cut through what binds her. This card often brings the message that you’re stuck in your thoughts (represented by swords) but there’s a way out—you’re not as trapped as you think you are. The title for this card is “Set Your Creativity Free.” I draw the cards and journal and sit with the cards in a novel way, which brings me clarity to carry on.

Beyond providing my writing brain a new hack, the practice of Tarot for Creativity has opened a lighter experience of the cards to me—more play, less weight of destiny. When we look to the tarot for possibilities instead of absolutes, we invite the muse to play, which is the part of the creative process we often lose while editing, refining, and seeking publication. 

 

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HILLARY ADAMS writes across the creative nonfiction spectrum, from hybrid personal essays to reportage, with a keen focus on experimental forms. She holds an MFA from the University of Nevada, Reno at Lake Tahoe where she also worked as managing editor for the Sierra Nevada Review. She is a Community of Writers alumna, and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Entropy, The Normal School, and oranges journal. Find Hillary on Instagram @Hillaryadamsa.

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CHELSEY PIPPIN MIZZI is an author and tarot reader living in Avignon, France, after spending a decade working in creative and cultural sectors in London, England. She has worked in concept galleries, libraries, theatres, schools, and newsrooms, and consulted for global brand design firms and social enterprises. Today, she uses her fifteen-plus years of experience working in the creative industries with tarot and spiritual practices to provide inclusive, supportive, and playful resources for artists, writers, and creative entrepreneurs. Her writing has appeared in BuzzFeed, New York Magazine’s The Strategist, The Bookseller, Creative Boom, and other publications. Her first book, The Tarot Spreads Yearbook (2023) was ranked a number one bestseller in Amazon’s Hot New Release category. She also publishes The Shuffle, an independent magazine at the intersection of spirituality and creativity, on Substack. Find Chelsey on Instagram @pipcardstarot.