Haunted Space Exploration: Rochelle Hurt

Astronauts perform some strange superstitions before they shoot off into orbit to explore the vast expanses of space. NASA commanders play cards with the tech crew the night before a launch, continuing until the commander loses a hand. Russian cosmonauts pee on the right rear tire of their transfer bus on the way to a launch. These are strange quirks, but they are crucial for these space-explorers to feel comfortable before and during a mission.

Writers also have rituals that must be performed in order to shake off bad vibes and get into a zone where they feel comfortable putting words on a page. When we read a great book, we only see the final product, and not the obsessive care put into the work environment that allowed for its creation. In SPACE EXPLORATION, our goal is to demystify writers’ environments and explore the ways in which they’ve been created and curated, and how they affect the mental spaces of the authors who inhabit them.

We asked writers to tell us about their necessary spaces; the physical spaces as well as the desired headspace to write. We asked about their rituals— special meals that have to be eaten pre-writing sesh, only writing in purple ink, lucky pieces of clothing that may have once inspired a particularly powerful passage. We asked them to engage our senses and tell us which aspects of process must be deliberate and what is arbitrary. These are the spaces they shared with us.

This is the one of five features from select authors in our HAUNTED issue, this time featuring Rochelle Hurt, whose essay “Terror Mirror” will appear in HFR 67.

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Writing with Tarot

I don’t have any writing rituals. I’m more of a game person. I like the rush of chance more than the predictability of ritual--though I suppose the two aren’t mutually exclusive. Reading tarot cards, for example, is a ritual of chance. Mostly I read into the cards as a form of meditation, but sometimes divining feels like a game, a riddle, a quest for clarity--not unlike my writing process. As Selah Saterstrom explains in Ideal Suggestions: Essays in Divinatory Poetics, reading tarot is dealing in “disarray,” a skill that requires “working with what you’ve got to create the most poignant result.”

When reading for myself, I often do a three-card spread on past, present, and future--but these pulls sometimes lead to follow-up pulls in which I ask for clarity, as if the deck was a teacher handing out an assignment. (I’m still working on my divinatory skills--and let me take this opportunity to caution that I am not a tarot expert.) So why not ask the deck (my hands, my brain) about an essay I’m writing? Who was I then, who am I now, who will I be by the end?

I can think of several possibilities for simple writing spreads: a 3-card narrative spread for fiction on protagonist, antagonist, and central conflict; a 3-card braided spread for essays with one card for each thread; a 2-card draw for cause and effect; single-card pulls when you’re stuck on connections, plot points, latent images.

To show you how this might work, I’ll take you through a recent tarot reading I did while working on an essay. The essay was still inchoate, but I knew I was writing about horror films, porn, and the childhood friend who introduced me to both. The last sentence I’d gotten down was a memory of being twelve with this friend (let’s call her B) and biking through our rust belt neighborhood until we got intentionally lost, then picking up cigarette butts from the ground and smoking what was left of them, feeling like a new world had opened up. I had hit a wall in the essay, so I was hoping the cards might show me a secret passageway. 

[Image of Blood, Bread, and Poetry by Adrienne Rich and Ideal Suggestions: Essays in Divinatory Poetics by Selah Saterstrom, along with The Book of Thoth tarot deck]

The deck I’m using (The Book of Thoth) is new to me, and it’s different from the traditional Rider-Waite deck that many people use, though the figures overlap quite a bit. I shuffle, cut, and draw a single card: The Magician, of which my little booklet says, “Love of danger. Game of chance. Dangerous friendships.” I’m struck--it’s too perfect, eerily so, almost distastefully on-the-nose. Alright, I think, you’re listening. (You meaning I, inhabitant of you, the deck.) Maybe I’m being asked to write into the danger of this friendship. B was my introduction to smoking, to sex, to sneaking out at night. I suddenly recall being paired off at a party with a boy I’d never met and getting fondled on B’s aunt’s bed. I write it down. In the card, the magician holds a wand over a table on which stands another tiny magician—the version of himself he writes, maybe.

I shuffle again, thinking of narrative (not my strong suit). What is the central conflict here, among these memories and threads? I draw Light: “Solidarity. Friendship. Explanation.” The notion of solidarity interests me. What were B and I both up against, being girls, and thus targets? Solidarity was a weapon, or at least a shield in our danger-seeking. But B was up against much more, in truth--familial abuse and incarceration. By the time I was applying to colleges, she herself had been locked in juvie a few times. Our friendship slowly dissolved as our contexts grew further apart. For the first time, looking at the somber face of the sun on the card, I realize that danger was a game for me, but maybe not so much for B. Herein lay a conflict.

But I’ve been hiding something: this is also a love story. One of the first short stories I ever wrote, before I knew that fiction was not something I would pursue, was a queer love story about my ambiguous friendship with B, and our mutual denial of it. I return to the memory of that ambiguity and denial now from the vantage of a woman who’s only recently come out as bi. So maybe this essay is in some ways a queer coming-of-age narrative about solidarity among women and girls. I dig out my old story (narrative!) and bookmark Adrienne Rich’s “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” for the essay.

So far I’ve lucked out with Major Arcana cards, though I’ve been shuffling the full deck. I keep shuffling, thinking ahead to an ending. I draw two cards that don’t offer much: King of Chalices and Strength. I’m not seeking wisdom or courage, I tell the deck, myself. No neat endings. Fine, it seems to say, and answers with The Tower.

[Image of three tarot cards: The Magician, Light, and The Temple]

In this deck, it’s called The Temple, but I recognize its doom in the imagery--fire and falling buildings. I don’t need the booklet, but I can’t resist: “Loss of goods. Accident. Collapse of convictions.” Ah. I understand now that the essay is about collapse in the end--collapse of identity, collapse of vision, collapse of expectations. It’s about fucking up (other people’s idea of) the future and flipping the household upside down. Danger and queerness. I see in the card a whole town behind the burning fortress, a once-nice neighborhood like the one B and I had been trying to get out of when we rode our bikes until we got lost, when we watched sex and gore on screen like a lesson in pushing boundaries, when we touched eachother to see past the walls around us before we burned alive inside. I don’t know if she ever made it out.

Rochelle Hurt is the author of In Which I Play the Runaway (Barrow Street, 2016), which won the Barrow Street Poetry Prize, and The Rusted City: A Novel in Poems (White Pine, 2014). Her work has been included in the Best New Poets anthology and she's been awarded prizes and fellowships from Crab Orchard Review, Arts & Letters, Hunger Mountain, Poetry International, Vermont Studio Center, Jentel, and Yaddo. She lives in Orlando and teaches in the MFA program at the University of Central Florida.