On Encouragement

A Tarot reading for a creative nonfiction class reading The Querent.

Yesterday a friend and reader of this newsletter wrote to tell me about how a friend of hers who teaches a creative nonfiction class for undergraduates had included my essay “The Querent”¹ in her readings, and that the students had loved it in particular. Did I have any words of encouragement? And so I decided to address an open letter to these students at the request of their teacher and to publish it here, in a newsletter named for said essay. And as the essay is about the Tarot, I begin with a reading.

To the creative nonfiction students at the University of South Florida:

I asked the cards about encouragement for you, a class on creative nonfiction.

The first card here is the Ace of Cups. The second, on the left, is the Moon—the full moon in this deck, the Pagan Otherworlds, which may even refer to the date of the next full moon—April 12th, the Pink Moon. The third card in the reading is the Ace of Pentacles. Below, the Seven of Swords. Above you is The Fool.

The three cards at the center line remind me of how an idea comes to me as a feeling first, and which I then explore through writing, using intuition and imagination to guide me more than reason (the Moon) and how eventually the feelings become an essay, even if it is just the idea for one (Ace of Pentacles). The Seven of Swords is the act of stealing the enemy’s weapons in the night so that when you meet, only two swords remain—the card for Truce, hidden inside this card—note the two swords in the front, the other five hidden behind a banner. The Fool above is a reminder that sometimes you just need to begin and to let yourself be guided by your own innocence of what might be next. But it is a sacred innocence the fool carries, animated by something like the love that came into being with the Ace of Cups.

I find myself however drawn to another meaning for the Seven of Swords.

To explain: Yesterday was the day of the Hands Off! protests around the country, 1200 or so around the country, more globally. The protests had a scope as wide as Trump and Musk’s attacks on immigrants, international visitors at the border crossing, healthcare, NATO and the EU, Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid, the shutting down of the Department of Education, the seizure of student Gaza protesters in unmarked vans by masked men, the destruction of USAID, the NIH, the NEH, the ending of IMLS funding for libraries, the EPA, the CFPB, the National Parks system, the CDC, Veterans healthcare, disability benefits, due process, the retaliatory tariffs, which crashed the world economy, and throughout it all, the Constitution.

There’s a lot of reasons to be afraid. And the Seven of Swords can be a card warning of someone taking or pursuing an unfair advantage. Sabotaging Social Security’s computer system so that it doesn’t work and thus doesn’t pay out benefits owed to people who have paid into the system for years, for example, could be a way to see this. Or worse: DOGE creating a system that allows them to punish anyone for their political beliefs, withholding any number of benefits and services at the push of a button, in the way the administration has undone the student visas of international students recently. No discussion, no pleading. Just gone. This means they are immediately vulnerable to Trump’s deportation proceedings because they are here with no visa.

But there’s a way with this reading that I am thinking though of another meaning, one which came up at AWP on a panel I was on about blind spots.

These cards seem to be warning you of self-censorship or asking you to emerge from it and in many ways that is every writer’s biggest challenge, especially now. You begin as the person who steals your own weapons, essentially, your own power—to demilitarize this idea. You do this when you pretend to be less than you are in order to make someone else more comfortable. You craft an identity that is a kind of lie of omission, a closet. You participate in your own self-erasure with the untested idea that it will make someone else more comfortable with you. Someone you may not even know. Because that is how conforming to a status quo works. It asks that act as if you are the conventional person the culture believes is productive, useful, desirable, but with no offer of community and only the loosest sense of belonging. A belonging that can be brought down swiftly, especially now.

There are lots of reasons for vulnerable people to commit to silence as a way to protect themselves but avoiding being a target isn’t the same as surviving or creating the conditions to recuperate fully—it is a hard place to live even if the alternative seems harder. What we saw yesterday with millions of protesters coming out to protest what is happening is that they are people who found silence unacceptable. People who needed to speak out, partly to find each other. Partly to show up for those held currently in ICE detention, those held in prisons in other countries, “deported” to countries they did not come from, those whose cancer treatments were cancelled by the end of the NIH funding that was paying for their experimental treatments, those whose AIDS medication will not be funded, whose food assistance was cancelled, whose FEMA aid was kept back or not even promised.

The current administration engages in resilience targeting, removing a community’s ability to recover from a disaster as a way to break down their independence and resistance to control. And the answer to those attacks is that community can protect you from this in a way the status quo cannot. And will not. A protest is many things, but one of them is an expression of the values a community wants to live by instead of the status quo.

I was talking on that AWP panel about how in my experience, new writing students will write what they think a story is, but in a way that is really a performance of a relationship to the status quo. And how my job as their teacher is to encourage them to write closer to the stories they want to tell. Students will leave out everyone’s ethnicity, for example, including their own, and act as if it doesn’t matter or as if it doesn’t exist. This is an impulse I understand because I engaged in it when I was 18. I was trying to avoid writing close to my identity, but also, avoiding being close to anyone’s specific identity, fearing it was too complicated, and by that I meant, alienating. I wrote stories then like many of my students do, where no one had an ethnicity that was described, they were just names, people who were under-described as a way to avoid conflict. I’ve talked about this before but perhaps not in this context.

I was participating in my own erasure. And it wasn’t as easy, isn’t as easy, as simply deciding to stop. I had to engage in processes that allowed me to have empathy for myself and others such that I could write about them and myself. It’s an imperfect process, a human process. You have to take risks and make mistakes, and to fix those mistakes because it matters. You take responsibility for your truths and how you present them.

It is very difficult to get people to let go of a behavior they believe protects them. In my 2018 essay collection, How To Write An Autobiographical Novel, seven of the essays there were essays I’d kept in my files, working on them or not, sometimes just holding onto them because of something like this impulse. “Girl” is an essay I kept back for 20 years, writing the first drafts in 1994. Now it is an essay I hear about from readers all the time.

Writing a story in a way that belongs to you can feel like deciding to risk a great deal. And that is because it should. You are placing a bet on your own ideas. A risk like someone who, in the Fool card, is about to go off a cliff. He is about to take that mythic leap of faith, something every essay asks for. But in your case, the Fool here is someone who has taken their felt sense of the world and seen it through intuition and imagination, until it seems like something that combines the branch held in the dove’s feet and the rose held in the Fool’s hand—that would be the Ace of Pentacles. Which in this reading suggests there is a place for this Fool to land.

I have the life and career I have now because I fought that impulse to erase myself and instead tried to understand myself and the world through my own subjectivity. The alternative was, is, worse. I started by asking myself how I can create the work that will mean the most to me. And I move according to my answers.

Find friends, lovers, compatriots, a cohort. Find community. Find the writing that makes you feel more human to yourself and others and try to offer that too. Good luck.

My best to you,

Alexander Chee

1. This version of the essay is not the version in the collection. That version has been revised greatly, with new reporting added in.