Interview has been edited for length and clarity. Feature photo by Meg Jones Wall.

I had the pleasure of interviewing Meg Jones Wall about their new book, Finding the Fool: A Tarot Journey to Radical Transformation, which Dani Janae reviewed and which is out now. Meg will also be joining us as our featured author for the A+ Read a Fucking Book Club on May 3rd. We talked our personal histories with Tarot, the nuances and necessities of reading “bad” cards and about divesting from patriarchal Tarot traditions.

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Nico: Let’s kick it off by pulling a card. Do you have cards you wanna pull from?

Meg: I have so many. Let’s see. This is the problem; I actually have too many decks. I have reached critical mass.

Nico: Yeah. I was like, what deck will you choose?

Meg: God, there’s so many. It’s out of hand actually. I need to cull them badly. They’re so pretty, and I love them all. And that’s a problem. So what’s your shuffling method? How do you pull?

Nico: I shuffle and set the intentions of the spread and the questions I’m asking as I’m shuffling. But then I will fan them out and I’ll feel for a card. So, I don’t pull from the top.

Meg: Oh, I love that. I love different shuffling methods. I think they’re all so interesting. Like, people do things that are a little bit unexpected or unconventional. I don’t think there should be a “normal” way people shuffle. But I love to see how people decide which card they’re gonna work with. I think it’s really cool.

Nico: How do you do it?

Meg: I do overhand, but I also do bridge style. I generally divide into three, choose the middle stack. I like to put my hands on it and kind of breathe, get into the zone. My partner only reads jumpers. She gets a ton of jumpers in her readings. And it’s very interesting, cause when I’m reading for myself, I don’t get a lot of jumpers, but if I’m reading for her, even if I’m using a deck of mine and not one of hers, the cards will jump for her.

Nico: Interesting! I read mostly with this Thoth deck. It’ll do jumpers for people who aren’t in the reading. Sometimes like, cards will like fly out while people are shuffling and float and then land in front of someone else.

Meg: God, that’s kind of rad.

Nico: It’s a sassy deck. Once I was reading with my sister, and my mom was just like drinking on a chair and getting belligerent. Not super, but you know, inserting herself, and then she got a jumper that floated under her feet, and I was like, “pick it up, pick it up.” It had landed face down. And it was, um, I think it was the eight of swords. In the Thoth deck, it has the message at the bottom on it, right? And it said ‘interference.’

Meg: Just a casual little drag. That’s very funny.

Nico: So what are you asking or what intention are you setting with this pull?

Meg: I think I’m gonna ask what should we be thinking about during this conversation? What’s something we could tap into or what’s something to explore or to keep in mind?

This is the Gentle Tarot. The court cards are seed, root, flower, harvest. And I pulled Harvest of Stones, which ends up translating to the King of Pentacles. The King of Earth. I kind of like that. It gives us some room to grow.

Nico: So what does that tell you then? What are you feeling having drawn that?

Meg: So to me, the suit of Pentacles or the element of earth is this really steady, kind of intentional, responsible, long-term thinking sort of element. It’s like the roots and the things that live underneath our feet and the things that make us feel tangibly physically grounded into a space. I’m also connected to a place in time. I see Kings numerologically as being five. So I see them as card 14 of their suits. So, one plus four brings us to five, and so for me it ties to higher fives and Temperance Energy. Five in numerology is this pivot point, right? It’s the midpoint of the cycle of one to nine. So I see fives as thinking about where we’re coming from, thinking about what boundaries need to be broken, thinking about where freedom and movement is needed to kind of break through friction and where that friction’s gonna bring us.

And so thinking about long-term legacy, what kinds of changes need to be made to create future stability? And doing that in a really earthy, deliberate, careful, thoughtful, responsible and patient way that still keeps in mind ideas like generosity and abundance and community care. As opposed to, you know, the king of Wands, which might be much more bright and dynamic and fast-moving. This is very slow, like, okay, what systems are broken and how can we repair them or rebuild them or leave them behind? And how is that gonna impact not just this generation, but future generations? It feels very grounded, intentional. How are we moving and what does that movement mean, and how does that impact everyone around us? So as a conversation between two Tarot readers in the queer community, that feels kind of cool.

Nico: That’s really interesting.

What does this card sound like? Or what does it taste like? What does the card smell like? What does it feel like to be anchored in this moment with this particular card? I think that can also be a really useful experience when you’re thinking about what this card might mean for you when you pull it out in a reading.

Meg: We’re talking about long-term shifts, and we could be talking about all kinds of things, but thinking about how ideas of Tarot might be shifting or how the conversation around Tarot is shifting. And how queer creators might be part of that conversation. We have pushed it in a certain direction.

Nico: I got, so it’s interesting. Um, different suit, completely different card. Six of Swords.

It’s ‘science.’ Which to me is, you know, it’s about a journey in a lot of ways, and it’s much more intellectual as far as the suit goes, because it’s air. But it’s interesting tying into what you got, because it’s asking questions of, where have we come from? Where are we going? What are we actively cutting away and discarding in the name of pursuing something better? Thinking about how that ties into the work you’ve done with this book and the work that queer people are doing with Tarot and asking, what are the systems that we are sort of saying are antiquated or not working for us? And what kind of new methods can we apply to the Tarot and create for ourselves? I think in the Rider Waite, they are literally in a boat in this card, on a journey.

And it’s, it’s an Aquarius card too, so it’s definitely that sort of fixed that get-through-the-middle part, which is really interesting in when we think we’re talking about, like, this book is finished and complete and it’s like, actually no, the book being finished and complete is the midpoint. So that’s a really interesting revelation.

*laughter*

Meg: It’s a little terrifying. Publishing is so confusing. I just can’t stress that enough. I don’t actually know what comes on the other side. This is a book. Now that it’s in the world, that messy middle, you don’t necessarily know what’s gonna happen on the other side. You just know that it has to be done and to be present.

Nico: It lives and evolves as more people read it and have their experiences and bring their interpretations to it.

Meg: It’s now its own entity. It’s its own thing. It’s gonna go and have its own adventures, and it’s gonna go build relationships of its own. But the people that buy it and work with it…I helped make it, but they’re not having a relationship with you. They’re having a relationship with the book. Or they’re having a relationship with their cards, with support from the book.

Nico: Aw, that’s like the book is its own little Fool.

Meg: Yeah, exactly. It becomes this Fool, and it’s like sending a kid off to college or something. It’s very you’re in, you’re done. Go do your thing.

Nico: That’s so funny. Thank you for that.

As I was reading through the book and experiencing how you’re talking about the cards and also the broader aspects of the text and journal prompts and things like that, it caused me to reflect a lot on how I had learned about Tarot, which started in the 1990s. And of course, the literature at the time was very heteronormative, very white, very ‘some of these cards are going to be blonde people,’ and this card represents ‘a happy, healthy marriage with kids.’ And so a lot of coming to Tarot as a queer person was reading between the lines of a lot of the meanings I had been working with in order to be like, well, what would this kind of energy mean to me?

And then, reading the book was super refreshing because I didn’t have to do that. I could just engage. This caused me to realize I had been doing a lot of something like translating in my head when reading other Tarot texts. And I really loved that about it.

What were your goals for this book, and what did you set out to do? And how do you think that this adds to the canon of new and queer Tarot books that are out there?

Meg: So much of what you’re talking about is actually what I wanted to set out to do. Cause I didn’t pick up my first step until 2016, and I had no idea what I was doing. But I had similar experiences, even though I feel like there were more accessible, inclusive resources. But a lot of the resources that were so often recommended were still really heteronormative. And I had the same experience of, okay, if I can only see this Page as a blonde young man, what does that mean? Is this supposed to be a person that’s in my life?

I mean, court cards are their own confusing thing, I think, but I didn’t really understand how to engage with cards, and I was like, I can read these meanings, but I don’t feel like I’m learning Tarot. I feel like I’m just trying to memorize and internalize what someone is telling me this thing means. If I’m learning to read in this way, then what is the value of me reading for myself if I’m just actually utilizing someone else’s understanding of the cards in my own readings? What’s the point of me reading? Why wouldn’t I just hire a reader to do this? What am I bringing to the cards?

I was missing something. And it took me a long time to figure out where I could live in the experience of reading my own cards. I write about it a lot in the introduction, but this idea that you pick up the cards and you just should know how to read them — I found that really isolating because I didn’t know what to do with them.

I didn’t really know what to do. It just ended up meaning that I was researching all these different meanings and trying to find one that felt like it applied. This can’t be how one reads Tarot. I did feel like I was finding really great resources and slowly piecing together the things that felt supportive for me and learning how to read. I wanted a book that made me feel welcome and made me feel like this could be a tool that was actually for me, not just something I was trying to take and pick apart and translate into my own life. So I think that was kind of where the idea for the book started. And then anything that I started to include in this grand vague idea of what this book would eventually become was all sort of in service of: How can I make sure that anyone reading this feels like they could use this book to help support whatever their Tarot journey is going to be? How can this serve as a companion that’s encouraging and supportive?

So I guess in terms of Tarot canon, it felt to me like a lot of the 101 books had similar information or similar rules or similar structures or similar recommendations. That’s why I was kind of like, okay what if we don’t base the book on these same ideas? What if we think beyond that? What if we make space for, hey, do you not like the Rider Waite Smith either? Cool, let’s talk about that. I wanted to have a resource that existed in that space that felt like it was making room for lots of different kinds of Tarot experiences and lots of different ways to use the cards. A resource that would celebrate that. That’s expansive and making space for things instead of being like, this is the narrow box.

Nico: I think Tarot books treat the Rider Waite Tarot as the default and then everything else is like a reworking or divergence from that as opposed to just maybe accepting that if an artist creates a Tarot deck, that can be its own thing, right?

Meg: Yeah. Because the Rider Waite Smith’s not even that old. But it’s become so definitive. I think that if people like that deck, that’s fine. And I use a lot of decks that are based on that system. We do ourselves a disservice when every time we see a card, the first meanings that come to mind are only based on this one deck. I think it’s easy to get really narrow and like, okay, four swords rest. And nothing else, you know?

Nico: What did you learn about your own practice while writing this book? Did it impact the way you read Tarot as you went through this process?

Meg: I didn’t want the minors to feel small. Some books are the majors and then the minors get a little paragraph or something. When I was trying to figure out what felt like it was missing from the book, I was like, I want to talk about sensory experience and what it feels like, at least for me, to sit in the energy of each card.

And I actually wrote those separately. I wrote it in one big document as: This is a sensory story of what it feels like to move through the Major Arcana and then through each cycle of the minors. And then I split that into sections to put with each card. Having that sensory component as an exploration of the energy of a card and the feeling of the card and the experience of the card felt really important to me. How is sensory stuff and tangible physical experiences, how is that part of my practice? It turns out it’s pretty important to me.

That was a bigger revelation that I think I was expecting, but I think it is a cool aspect of the card descriptions that I’m really proud of. I like that it’s in there.

Nico: There’s a couple things in that that I really like that I really appreciate and also think belong as a divestment from patriarchal norms when it comes to viewing the cards. Because you talked about, for example, the Major Arana being something everyone is really focused on, right? And those are about big, big events or big things happening or big concerns, but the day-to-day is where we live. Why wouldn’t that be just as important as something you can write down in a history book or a newspaper? Why wouldn’t your day-to-day life be really important to you? Disregarding that is really patriarchal.

Meg: What does it feel like in my body to feel like I’m in a Three of Swords place versus a Six of Swords place versus a Nine of Swords place? Your physical experience of that energy, no matter how you interpret the card, is going to be different. I think sometimes we don’t always have language for how a card feels, but we might know how our body feels. If our breath catches, we might have an experience with the card that even if we don’t have the language for it, we might have a sensory experience of it. And I think that can be just as valuable, especially if we’re struggling to find language around it.

What does this card sound like? Or what does it taste like? What does the card smell like? What does it feel like to be anchored in this moment with this particular card? I think that can also be a really useful experience when you’re thinking about what this card might mean for you when you pull it out in a reading.

Nico: So the book is “a Tarot Journey for Radical Transformation,” and I was thinking a lot about radical growth through Tarot and divestment from harmful forces in Tarot. When I first came to Tarot, I was growing up in a Catholic household and, I don’t know how my friend and I were allowed to have this deck.

*laughter*

Meg: Did you have to hide it?

Nico: It was a Greek myth themed deck, so I guess that was okay. So no explanation other than they were just like, ‘yeah, let those nerds have their Greek myth thing.’

Meg: Honestly, that’s incredible.

Nico: It was the 90s, Xena was on, Hercules.

Meg: Kid in the 90s. It’s gonna be Greek Mythology.

Nico: It felt very forbidden, but also it was an interesting tool for starting to crack open the world and look at it from the different angles, angles I wasn’t fed. I know you have an evangelical background, right? I was wondering, what part, if any, the Tarot has played in your growth and healing beyond that, and how you maybe see that as a potential part of the journey for other people, especially queer people?

Meg: I’ve written a few essays about this, but I think I’m still trying to figure some of those things out. I do think there is such joy in having something tangible and tactile you can use as a form of reflection and meditation and introspection, and even personal interrogation and examination. The way I was raised, anything you didn’t know was just like, well, that’s where faith comes in. And so it felt like there was a very neat answer for things. Because if the people I was asking my theological questions didn’t know, they were like, well pray about it.

It often felt really dismissive. We just suppressed the shit out of that. Of course, that did not work out super well for me, and eventually I left and started therapy and got healthier again. I think finding Tarot left a lot of space for, I don’t know, “that’s actually fine.”

It was giving me space to ask similar kinds of questions over and over, getting different answers, and thinking about how the different cards that came up could reveal different aspects of my question or different versions of answers to that question. It gave me all of these new avenues to explore different things. And it’s not necessarily definitive like, yes, this is, this is your question and this is the answer and that’s it. But this is an opportunity to have an ongoing conversation around this topic and to see as I grow and change and experience new facets of myself and learn to understand myself in new ways. It felt like the Tarot could grow with me, instead of restricting or putting a cap on the questions I was allowed to ask.

I think the framework of my personal experience with evangelicalism felt very restrictive. Tarot just continues to feel like, yeah, sure, let’s open that door too. Why not? And that feels very exciting. And also safe in a different way. It doesn’t feel like I can stumble into something I’m not supposed to be looking at, which is how church often felt for me.

Nico: Oh, no.

Meg: Ask the wrong question, and you’re going to hell or something. But with Tarot, it’s like let’s find out. And every new reading has a new opportunity for some different answers, sometimes expected. And it always keeps the conversation going. I don’t usually feel like my cards are like, ‘no.’ They’re like, ‘ah, how about this?’ And that is exciting to me.

Nico: The cards are very deep, right? You can just peel back layer after layer after layer of meaning and esoterica and all of these different things and bring your own meaning and have your own relationship to them. That’s very liberatory, right?

Which takes me to a question I had about your approach to “negative cards.” But you know, the ones we’re all afraid of getting, Ten of Swords or the Tower or, when I first started reading as a kid, I would get The Devil a lot.

I imagine this has been something you’ve really had to develop a healthy relationship with, because I’ve only read for other people a little bit, but people will get scared, right?

Meg: And [to be read for] is such a vulnerable experience, too. How will you sit in this weird, vulnerable, tender moment with me and interpret this tool? I never take that lightly. I always wanna make sure I’m translating with compassion and involving them in the process. And it feels like a very collaborative thing.

There are cards that are universally scary for most people. I think that everyone has a card or two that even if it’s not a traditionally negative card that has negative connotations or has sticky connotations or makes them feel some kind of way when they come up. I’ve had to do a lot of thinking about: What do these cards have to offer? Why are they here? I have had this conversation with people that have asked: Why can’t I just take these scary cards out of my deck? And I was like, oh, really? Sure. But then it’s not a Tarot deck anymore. I would gently invite you to buy an Oracle deck.

There’s nothing wrong with wanting to come to the card solely for comfort. But if you’re not prepared for any card to come up in your reading, you should not pull out your cards at that moment. For me, the negative cards just feel like part of the experience of being a person.

The cards are a mirror, not a crystal ball. And sometimes it’s really nice to have the cards be like, Hey, this thing sucks. And to be able to be like, thank you, it does suck. And so I find that often those negative cards or scary cards can actually help me identify what the shitty feeling is.

Do I need to just sit in these feelings and just let myself feel bad? Do I need to take action to walk away from something? Do I need to let myself dream and think about other possibilities? What’s at the heart of what my problem is?

Nico: I think an important part of reading Tarot is like having that healthy relationship to each of the cards.

Another great thing about reading this book for me was that I found some nice moments with cards that I tend to be like, ‘ah, you again.’ I just have been getting The Emperor a lot lately and I’m just like, why is this guy here? What do you want, man?

Meg: In my experience, if a card won’t stop coming forward, it’s like you’re not listening. You’re missing something. Keep going. Keep digging. What layer have you not looked at yet? What conversation have you not had with this card yet? Which can be really annoying, and most people don’t like that answer, but I think, in my experience, that’s what’s generally happening if a card keeps showing up,

Nico: It’s like an exorcism of sorts. You almost have to keep working with it until it’s ready to be released.

Do you remember when you first started reading what cards were recurring for you? What cards have been recurring for you lately?

Meg: Well, the King of Pentacles has come up for me several times. I’ve been getting a lot of kings across suits, but especially, King of Swords and King of Pentacles, which I have mostly been taking as ‘you are well resourced. You are Okay.’

Keep protecting yourself, but also keep moving towards change, keep moving towards expansion, keep questioning what’s happening, but you don’t have to do it quickly. You don’t have to do it immediately. These can be long-term goals.

When I first started reading, Judgment came up a lot. My first deck was the Wild Unknown and in the deck Judgment is this black and white card of doves. It’s less angelic, like it is in the Rider Waite. And it’s much more like doves flying free into a big sky.

And I was like, what the fuck is this, and in retrospect I think I’ve really come to see this card as an awakening card, but also a forgiving the self card. I think it’s very tied to me feeling guilty about leaving the church and wanting something for myself and being afraid to be all in on the Tarot in case it was somehow bad for me. Or if God didn’t want me to be reading the cards. I just had a lot of sticky feelings when I got my first deck and was trying to find myself within it and figure out what it was gonna mean for me. Now in retrospect I’m like, oh yeah, that card’s just trying to affirm my choices. ‘You’re okay. Take the big step. You’re fine. You’ve already done half of it.’

Nico: That card is just like ‘jump, jump, jump.’

Meg: I think it’s actually one of my favorite cards. But at the time, I was like, uh, big scary angels, what’s happening?

Nico: One thing that was really interesting that you talked about in your intro and then that played out through the book was this nonbinary approach to reading the cards. Do you want to talk a little bit about that and how you approached writing about the cards and reading them without talking about the divine feminine, the divine masculine, and this and that.

Meg: Even before I started using they/them pronouns as part of my little personal set of pronouns, very early, within the first year or two of my Tarot practice, I was like, I don’t like all this gender stuff.  I didn’t love it with the court cards, but especially with the majors and especially with some of those challenging really classically patriarchal figures of The Hierophant and The Emperor. I had such a hard time because those cards made me so uncomfortable, these figures that reminded me of every oppressive man.

I was like, I don’t want these in my deck. I can’t build a relationship with these cards if that’s the only lens I have to see these cards through.

What if we just let all of these cards have gender neutral pronouns and we break them free from these gender binaries and let them be every archetype? Gender neutral or nonbinary or gender expansive. As soon as I started doing that, it just made it so much easier for me to feel safe working with them.

Instead of feeling like this card is here to oppress me, this archetype is here to oppress me, it just gave me a lot more room to actually work with a card in a way that felt, I keep coming back to safe, but I think that really is the right word for it. And then once I started doing it with the majors, I was like, why wouldn’t I do this with every card? Why wouldn’t I do this with the court cards? Why can’t I be a King of Swords? Why can’t any of these cards go beyond these genders?

It just gave me a lot more space to engage with the archetypes and the minors and the court cards too as energies and ideas instead. I did not want to be limited in such a narrow version of what this card could be. I wanted to be able to see myself or find aspects of myself in every one of the cards.

Nico: No matter how you identify, drawing The Empress does not mean that I have to be a fertile woman.

Meg: What else could fertility mean if we’re not just talking about physical pregnancy? What about the whole idea of fertility in general? What about abundance in generosity; there’s so many other ways to use that language that can be a lot more constructive and also just a lot more expansive. But it shouldn’t mean that this card feels out of reach. Right? Or an energy you can’t work with. Because every time I’d pull The Emperor, I’d be like, I don’t wanna be in a room with this guy. What would I look like embodying this energy? How would it feel for me to embody this energy? And what would that mean? How would that guide my choices or impact my actions or my decisions or the way that I look at something? That’s a totally different conversation.

Nico: The book contains a lot of awesome prompts for reading for yourself. And I was just wondering if you wanted to share any tips for anyone who wanted to read for a friend or another person. Is there anything you do differently?

Meg: If I’m reading for a friend, I often want it to be a very collaborative process. So especially if I get to do it in person, I’ll invite them to look at the card and be like, how does it feel for you to look at this image? What comes up, what comes to mind immediately? A lot of my friends do read Tarot, and so they might immediately have their own interpretations, which can be fun. But especially if we’re using a deck they’re not familiar with or, or if it’s someone that hasn’t worked with Tarot much at all, getting to see what they observe in the card and what feelings it evokes and what memories it brings up I think is a really powerful tool for thinking about what that card might mean for them in this moment.

I like to have a conversation with them about the card. I might explain different ways to see it. Sometimes it feels like this is the meaning that feels important, and I don’t know how to explain that other than that’s just years of trying to figure out what my intuition is trying to tell me.

I do think it can be really useful to be able to tap into multiple interpretations or ways of reading. To your point again, sometimes the Empress comes up and you’re like, okay, this is a person that just had a hysterectomy and is nonbinary. And me talking about fertility from a lens of physical pregnancy is not gonna be super constructive or useful. But this card is also tied to Venus and values community and the number three and raw expression and not worrying about perfectionism, but instead being really authentic with what is being shared and making something physical that’s been an idea up until now. And sharing that process with other people and collaborating creatively with other people and creating systems of love and care and mutual aid.

There’s so much that can be wrapped into that card. If you have the ability to explore that again with someone, it often turns into a really rich conversation that ends up leading to something that often I find then will come up in later cards in the spread.

What if we just let all of these cards have gender neutral pronouns and we break them free from these gender binaries and let them be every archetype? Gender neutral or nonbinary or gender expansive. As soon as I started doing that, it just made it so much easier for me to feel safe working with them.

Nico: Awesome. So, do you wanna talk about your writing for Autostraddle and how it’s tied into the book or influenced it?

Meg: I started reading Autostraddle in 2016. In 2018, I went to A-Camp and didn’t know anyone. I got put in Heather Hogan’s cabin. A few months after that, we were at a podcast recording in Brooklyn, and we were just chatting after the recording and Heather was like, would you ever consider writing about Tarot for Autostraddle? I was so flattered, and I was so honored.

The first Tarotscopes column was in January 2019 for Aquarius season. Then my Instagram started growing from more exposure and I started getting more people commenting and reading and engaging with Tarot with me on the internet. People kept asking like, how do you read? And how does this work?

Finally, Nanowrimo came up in November, and I had been turning this idea over in my head of the Tarot book I wished I’d had when I started that felt inclusive and expansive and supportive and queer. So I just wrote it for Nanowrimo. Let’s see if I can get 50,000 words out of this. And I did. That was all the same year with the start of Tarotscopes. And that was the first draft of Finding the Fool.

In retrospect, I think it’s really interesting that Tarotscopes and the first draft of Finding the Fool both happened in the same year. It really kind of got the ball rolling mentally. My Instagram had been started as private. It was just a journal for me. And then I had some friends ask if they could look at it, so I was just like, I’ll make this public. No one will ever see it. It’s fine. When I started doing the Tarotcopes, it just got out of hand. It’s great, but there’s a lot of people that follow me now.

Nico: And through that whole process, like getting comments and talking to readers you learned what kind of questions people have.

Meg: Yeah. Totally. We all have our comfort zones and our points from which we like to view the world. It’s just finding that viewpoint. How does this help? What if I adjust a little bit? How do I help? Does this help you see it clearly if you stand right here?

Meg’s Finding the Fool playlist: