She Is Sitting in the Night Press Kit

For more details or to schedule an interview, contact Ashley Fortier: 438-338-4591 or publish [at] metonymypress [dot] com.

About the Author

After an accidental debut as a professional tarot reader in 2009, Oliver began doing tarot readings regularly, at bars and in parks and on balconies. At the request of a good friend, Oliver began writing about the Thea’s Tarot deck—a process that was at once prolonged and fruitful.

Oliver is, more generally, a Montreal-based, trans-identified writer, publisher, and editor. Their work has appeared in  Lambda Award–winning The Collection: Short Fiction from the Transgender Vanguard (Topside Press, 2012) and make/shift magazine, among other publications. Oliver released Gays in the Workplace in 2011 and is currently working on a book of short stories.

About the Book

A contemporary queer re-visioning of a beautiful feminist tarot deck from the 80s—documenting a conversation across generations and mediums—She Is Sitting in the Night emerges as both a tool for tarot reading and a celebration of queer and feminist cultural production, past and present.

By embracing an older deck and simultaneously developing current and re-visioned ways of interpreting its images and the cards’ meanings, She Is Sitting in the Night provides a much-needed informed, aesthetically strong, accessible queer tarot book for feminists, queers, and tarot readers new and old.

In the Press

Little Red Tarot

Autostraddle

Spiral Nature

Specs

Title: She Is Sitting in the Night: Re-visioning Thea’s Tarot
Author: Oliver Pickle
Original art: Ruth West
Trim size: 6.9’ x 8’ x 0.524′
Extent: 192 pages
Season: Spring 2015
Pub date: April 26, 2015
Price: $22.00
ISBN: 978-0-9940471-0-6
Illustrations: Reproduced images of 78-card Thea’s Tarot deck, copyright Ruth West.
Category: Adult nonfiction, How-To, Feminism, Occult, LGBTQ
Target Audience: 1) Feminist and queer communities, 2) Tarot enthusiasts

Market

Interest in tarot is evident in the alternative tarot decks and accompanying books that have emerged in recent years. What distinguishes She Is Sitting in the Night from its contemporaries, however, is both the cohesiveness of a book and deck featuring illustrations by a single artist, as well as the intergenerational conversation and archiving project at the heart of Oliver Pickle and Ruth West’s collaboration. What this project shares with its competition is the intentional rejection of normative readings of the figures and imagery on the decks they discuss.

See, for comparison: The Collective Tarot: A Magical Collaboration; The Winnipeg Tarot Co: “Fortuna & Fabulation for All” ; the forthcoming Slow Holler tarot deck project.

Critical Praise

“She Is Sitting in the Night is the tarot book I’ve always wanted to write. It’s a queer tarot guidebook and a celebration of an 80s feminist tarot deck rolled into one; a book of beautiful and radical tarot card meanings, and also an important document, a conversation across generations of feminism and LGBTQ politics.” — Beth Maiden (Little Red Tarot), Autostraddle

About the Artist

Ruth West, after graduating with a degree in art, created Thea’s Tarot in 1984 in papercut, based on Billy Potts’ A New Women’s Tarot. Since then, she has become an internationally recognized artist working with digital art. One of the first graduates with a Master’s of Fine Arts in Computer Graphics, Ruth West’s art has grown steadily along with this medium. She was the first computer artist in residence at Monet’s Garden in Giverny, France, creating an 80-piece series called the Digital Garden. Her work can be seen at ruthwest.com.