Back Home with So Much to Tell You
Back Home with So Much to Tell You
Wordcraft and Movies with the Stars
Hello friends,
How have the first few weeks of Autumn been treating you?
I’ve felt it slowly seeping into my skin; the slight chill in the morning, the yellow and red-dotted hillsides, the desire for soup and pumpkin bread. It’s a cliché for a reason, the love of fall time, and I embrace it.
I want to spend the season baking, studying another form of divination in my spare time, reading through John Crowley’s Aegypt series and reminding my friends in myriad ways that I love them. Turn inward toward the good stuff. Work on all the projects I want to finish (a fixed star essay collection and a What’s the Vibe? Astrological Planner). Put the last touches on my book draft.
I have just returned from my month away. I spent September in Albuquerque, New Mexico to work on my book on the Behenian Fixed Stars, a DIY writer’s retreat. On my road trip back, I contemplated my time away, all that I experienced, and all it took for me to get to this place. Writing has always been a huge part of my identity and what it felt like to be me from an early age— probably when I first learned to do it. That being said, for years I struggled to write anything at all beyond school assignments. I was plagued with the inner critic, the perfectionist, the comparer, anything that could stand between me and the words.
It took a lot of faith, work, and, quite honestly, magic, to get to where I am today: writing a weekly newsletter for over four years, releasing guidebooks regularly, and in the process of finishing my first book with an actual publisher. I have written astrological essay collections, published a book on food writing with a friend after spending a month creating it in the cliffs outside of Rome, and single-handedly created a contemporary theory of astro-fashion and put it into three volumes.
I am by no means a glitzy author nor have I ever been part of any literary elite. I have no inside connections. I have never worked a formal media job, nor do I know how you get one. I just kept on doing something so vital and important to me until people began to notice. I still don’t quite get how that happens. Yet here I am.
Upon talking with trusted friends, I realized that other people still want to know how I make this happen, so I want to communicate to you what I can.
Today I am announcing a new newsletter series, Wordcraft: notes on a writer’s retreat, crafting a book and the daily work of creating.
I will get into not just how I planned and executed my New Mexico retreat as well as my daily rituals there to finish most of my book, but also how I became the writer I am today and my process for getting into the zone and creating.
Some current newsletter ideas include:
How to Plan Your Own Writer’s Retreat
Choosing a Place (or Letting it Choose You)
Watching the Omens
How I Organize my Writing and Which Tools I Use
The Ins and Outs of My Process: Research, Rituals, How I Actually Just Write
and the Magic of Stepping Outside of Your Normal Context (9h stuff with a dash of the 12th :))
I hope y’all are excited for a Fall-time deep dive into place, the artist’s life, craft. I’ll share all sorts of tips and rituals and resources to shed some light and share some of what works for me.
Thanks for following along 💖
At the Movies with the Stars: Death Becomes Her and Antares
One of the things this trip inspired me to do was notice the connection between certain films and fixed stars. Renaissance magician and astrologer Marsilio Ficino said the nature of a single fixed star is less like a person and more unto a city. A film, with its sounds, sights, narratives, characters, immersion, is able to capture a bit of the sublime nature of the fixed stars.
When I watched movies over my trip, my writing seemed to invoke the exact right picture to show the nature of the fixed star about which I was writing. One of my first encounters with this phenomenon was with Antares, my heliacal rising star, whose essay I was finishing during my trip. I felt the sudden desire to rewatch the Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn flick Death Becomes Her. As I watched, I felt an eerily similar resonance between the movie and what I was just writing about the star.
The movie is about Hawn and Streep as two competing beauties who both pay an exorbitant sum to become ageless and immortal, only to maim and disfigure their bodies in improbable ways. Antares the star is the heart of the scorpion, deep, red, bleeding, concerned with life and death, martial power, and the great wisdom of what remains.
I want to focus specifically on Lisle von Rhuman, pictured above, the character played by Isabella Rossellini, who I just knew had an Antares connection ( at 10º Sagittarius, the star is conjoined her ascendant). In the movie, her chest is draped in heavy jewels and she wears a red sarong around her waist. She lives in a lavish castle on the outskirts of Hollywood waited on by handsome, shirtless men. She is the holder of the elixir of immortality, as well as a living embodiment of the ageless ideal that those in the public eye would die for.
But, she also knows that pain always comes with beauty, or vice versa. In Antares’s case it means that being gifted a heart requires that one bleeds. She sums up the star’s gambit in this exchange with Bruce Willis’s character, who stands on the precipice of undergoing the immortalizing procedure. To begin, she needs his blood so she pricks his finger, leading to this exchange:
Dr. Ernest Menville: What are you doing?
Lisle von Rhuman: I’m loving you.
To embrace the wisdom, the riches, the eminence of Antares is to embrace death, and all the pain that comes with intimacy with the Scorpio. To know the love of a beating heart is also to know its capacity for harm us. To dishonor the fragility of even immortality, the potential for wounding and pain, is to become living reminder to one’s own hubris.
Interestingly, from another light, the women in Death Becomes Her also align with the archetype of the Monstrous Woman, particularly that of the Monstrous Venus. In our latest release, “The Monstrous Feminine Guidebook,” Heloïse and I explore four astrological planets/stars through the lens of the unruly, demonized feminine, mining both her power and perils. With Venus in particular, we must contend with a double vision: on the one hand, Venus is the ingenue, the prize at the end of the hero’s journey, the value that the patriarchy must protect. Venus is the beauty queen, the popular girl, the object of desire.
But, on the other hand, we Venus’s beauty fades. Our culture has a funny way of punishing our it girls the moment their facade is revealed to be constructed or their imperfections become apparent. In the case of this movie, we see the monstrous Venusian in both of these women, who forsake their friendship, careers and mortality for the desire of a man, Willis’s character, over whom they spend the movie fighting. Willis, a plastic surgeon, represents the constant tweaking and work they must undergo to maintain this unchanging facade. Of course we can blame these foolish women who must spend eternity in degrading bodies, but what of a world that demands such monstrosity to keep up with its feminine ideals? What of a society where so many people would rather stay young and beautiful forever, even as their loved ones die?
I really enjoy this movie and always appreciate how it leaves me meditating on the lengths we feel we must go to maintain beauty, desire, worth. If you want to learn more about the Monstrous Venusian, check it out with spooky season 🦇
Learn more about Monstrous Venusian, plus an exploration of the Moon, Saturn and the Serpent Stars (Algol and Alphard), in our Monstrous Feminine Guidebook, now available for purchase.
For each of the four archetypes, this volume contains:
- an essay exploring its facets and manifestations
- real life examples of famous maligned and misunderstood women
- features and qualities of each archetype to help you identify which one you most embody
- rituals and practices to connect with each monstrous feminine manifestation.
May this zine guide you through your own inner richness and beyond.
Until next time,
Love,
Chloe