Tarot for Creativity
Morning Pages/Morning Cards
Hello friends! I am writing this from the darkness, Day 10 of no electricity after Hurricane Helene. I am safe and we have been very fortunate, but I’m also heartbroken over the devastation in Western North Carolina. I wrote the following piece before the storm and finally have enough cell signal to post it. Stay safe!
The intersection between tarot cards and my creative life has only recently become apparent to me. As a writer and English professor, I like to think of myself as open to all aspects of creativity when in reality, I frequently get stuck in my ways. When other writers mentioned using tarot as part of their writing process, I didn’t get it. I didn’t need another process. I am a morning writer, a loyal member of the 5 A.M. Writer’s Club that you may see hashtagging around Twitter (or wherever writers hang out now). I developed a daily writing practice before I learned about Julia Cameron’s “Morning Pages,” but I also eventually latched onto Cameron’s term so fiercely that I named this space “Mourning Pages.”
Most recently, I faced a different kind of journey: editing my debut novel, Doll Parts (forthcoming from Sourcebooks in 2025). Editing, as I understood it (deadlines! contracts! editors!), did not feel like a generative, creative process. I needed to put my head down and get to work. Maybe make a spreadsheet or two. Editing was not creative at all, I used to think.
I quickly learned how wrong I was.
Enter Tarot for Creativity: A Guide to Igniting Your Creative Practice by Chelsey Pippin Mizzi.
As a morning writer, it’s no surprise that in the last year, when I started to develop a daily tarot practice, I chose first thing in the morning to pull one card as a focal point or guiding light for the whole day. Morning Pages, Morning Cards. This daily pull often replaces my morning journaling, though sometimes it works as the topic for my journaling.
When I realized the amount of creativity and collaboration involved in developmental edits, I soon became overwhelmed rather than excited. Both, I mean. I felt it all. My perfectionism especially threatened to swallow me like quicksand. Not only was I unsure where or how to begin the editing process, new issues like insomnia and Imposter Syndrome showed up overnight. I needed a new tactic to move forward. Not a new distraction, not a new schedule, but a way to take what I was already doing each morning, and make it work for me.
Tarot for Creativity was the exact challenge and inspiration I needed, with multiple tarot spreads, creative prompts, and practical support for every stage in the creative journey. I’m not saying it was a cure for all my anxieties because really, I didn’t need a cure. I needed a hand to hold as I acknowledged and worked through the overwhelm, every step of the way.
Need guidance on killing your darlings? What about creative blocks and defending yourself from distraction? Here is Tarot for Creativity with a mirror and a map. There are also spreads for creative abundance, building structure, and taking risks. My favorite part of Tarot for Creativity: the breakdown and spread for each card in the deck, all seventy-eight of them, not just the Major Arcana.
With the editing process for Doll Parts underway, I began each morning in the same way, with a cat nearby, a mug of hot coffee, and a quiet house. I cleared my mind and pulled a card, excited to see what the day held for me and my novel.
How it used to go: I asked a question like “What should I know about today?” or “What should I pay attention to today?”
I asked and the cards answered. Usually, though, I had no idea what they’re saying. Half the time, when I finally figured out what a certain card meant, it was days later. This isn’t a bad thing–it is how many people learn–but it made my morning routine feel less helpful in the moment.
It feels important to note here that I am a tarot beginner in many ways, despite my high school obsession with the cards and the number of tarot podcasts I listen to. I am drawn to tarot guidebooks in the way I am also drawn to books about the craft of writing. I want to hear what everyone has to say. I take what works and leave what doesn’t.
Before, I had a process. But once I incorporated Tarot for Creativity, I started to understand the process.
Take the Eight of Wands, the card I pulled my first morning with Tarot for Creativity within arm’s reach.
Many guidebooks instruct that the Eight of Wands means a message is coming. I always took it very literally, and even though I had read numerous other interpretations of the card, it never made complete sense to me. I spent the day waiting for a literal message. But what was this card trying to tell me as I faced my deadline and my edits? What did I need to know to fully embrace the lesson or the medicine of the card?
In Tarot for Creativity, the Eight of Wands is paired with the phrase, “Start and Finish Strong.” The Wands suit, as Mizzi writes, is “rife with enthusiasm, littered with celebrations, and full of big, unapologetic energy.” It’s ruled by fire, a celebration of creative sparks.
Mizzi broke down the Eight of Wands as a card of both beginnings and endings, the most perfect description of my editing process so far. I was so close to the end of the process (literally editing the end of my novel), but also beginning a new stage in the road to publication, one full of collaboration with my editor and exciting milestones along the way. The line that resonated most about the Eight of Wands: “Beginnings and endings take a special kind of energy and alignment…There’s a synergy here, a sense of connection that helps kick things off on the right foot, and then brings things neatly to the ground when the end is in sight.”
This is one of the many places where Mizzi’s book reframed tarot for me. Not only was it an interpretation of the card that resonated with my creative thinking in a practical way, but it suggested another spread to go deeper and understand the card even further. I kept going, waiting for a moment of confusion or contraction that never happened.
The four-card spread for Eight of Wands gave me even more information to reflect on. I pulled the Two of Cups, Temperance, Ten of Pentacles, and Seven of Pentacles, cards that in the context of this particular spread reminded me to embrace partnerships and avoid creative burnout while putting in the work. They also reminded me to celebrate along the way. For one of the first times in my tarot practice, each card clicked. They made immediate sense to me but also gave me enough material to journal about and keep reflecting on throughout the day, all in relation to my creative work.
There is a line in one of my favorite poems by the late Molly Brodak that I find myself reciting lately: “The sky is open/all the way.” These are, in fact, the first lines of Brodak’s poem, “In the Morning, Before Anything Bad Happens.” I have it pinned to the bulletin board above my desk. I stare at it every morning because morning is still my time. Sunrise colors, or, better yet, almost darkness. A quiet house. A mostly quiet mind. Before anything bad happens.
I’m not ready yet for that next part. But I will be. The weather is finally cool enough to open the windows and feel whatever is coming next.
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Just checked out this book….glad to see your words on it.
I have recently started a Tarot obsession, and I also love collecting books and seeing what different people think. Also, I've somehow morphed from a morning person to a night person (I have no idea how that happened), but I have always told people that the world is a better place in the morning because nothing has gone wrong yet--so now I need to check out Molly Brodak!