{"id":24403,"date":"2019-02-19T15:32:59","date_gmt":"2019-02-19T20:32:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/metonymypress.com\/?p=24403"},"modified":"2019-02-19T16:12:14","modified_gmt":"2019-02-19T21:12:14","slug":"theas-tarot-revival-after-all-these-years","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/metonymypress.com\/fr\/theas-tarot-revival-after-all-these-years\/","title":{"rendered":"Thea’s Tarot revival, after all these years"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

We\u2019re not very good businesspeople. It\u2019s not self-deprecation, it\u2019s just truth, and it comes up in conversations with our supporters and between ourselves, constantly. The tensions are in part natural within an industry with notoriously \u201cslim profit margins,\u201d and among people who are erstwhile anticapitalists running a business for ostensible profit. It\u2019s a real lol over here, being hassled by people we trust about how we should make money for ourselves in order to sustain ourselves and the books we\u2019re making.
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And it\u2019s getting more hilarious the more reluctantly professionalized we at Metonymy become: in the past month, we\u2019ve become eligible for federal arts funding as a \u201cliterary publisher,\u201d accepted into a membership organization that offers nation-wide distribution, and gotten celebrity recognition for a yet-to-be-public surprise. \u201cWhat?!\u201d they say, \u201cYou\u2019ve been doing this all yourselves?!\u201d But we\u2019re used to diy (or o), for reasons including the anticapitalism mentioned above, and the kind of organizing that engenders. In any case, it\u2019s not surprising that we have moments of yearning for the early days when we had ideas but no products\u2014when we were a publisher without books.
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Ruth West and Oliver Pickle<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s been 35 years since Ruth West created and released Thea\u2019s Tarot, amid a flurry of lesbian feminist tarot decks in the US in the early 1980s. Fast forward to 2014, when then-Montrealer Rima Athar discovered Thea\u2019s Tarot and loved it. She requested that I, as her friend and friendly tarot reader, write a book about it, and I did. Metonymy released She Is Sitting in the Night <\/em>in 2015, our first book, with a foreword by Rima and an interview with Ruth. We also started carrying Ruth\u2019s copies of the original printing of Thea\u2019s Tarot.
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These original decks were some of the first things we sold, and doing tarot readings was the first service we offered before we had any objects to sell. We\u2019ve carried them since that first year and I have been doing readings with that deck since Rima introduced me to it. Thea\u2019s Tarot was itself a long time in the making: \u201cThe starting point for Thea\u2019s Tarot was actually another guidebook, A New Women\u2019s Tarot<\/em>, which was a hand-stapled, self-published pamphlet put out by Billie Potts and Elf and Dragons Press in 1977. Billie Potts was really my mentor in creating this deck, and in her New Women\u2019s Tarot<\/em>, she went through each card and rebranded it with feminist matriarchal iconography. It was a very specific way of talking about these ideas of women\u2019s spiritual and historical power\u201d (Ruth, in the foreword to She Is Sitting in the Night<\/em>).<\/p>\n\n\n

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Oliver Pickle and Rima Athar<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

The similar collaboration, at once tribute and re-visioning, between Rima, Ruth, and Metonymy underpins our increasingly visible and legit publishing company. As Beth Maiden said in her generous Autostraddle review of <\/a>She Is Sitting in the Night<\/a><\/em>, \u201cRima\u2019s idea was to take a deck with a second-wave feminist\/lesbian ethos and reinterpret the cards via the language and experience of modern queer culture, creating a framework for tarot that would truly resonate with queer folks. At the same time, she wanted to celebrate and document an important work of feminist art.\u201d None of our other publications have involved this exact genre of collaboration, but these early discussions around value, language, and honouring perspectives while pushing for change have informed all the work Metonymy has done.
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Since 2015, we\u2019ve been talking about trying to print Thea\u2019s Tarot once the original decks run out. There\u2019s something captivating and timeless about the cards that keeps them in demand, and keeps people coming back to them (well that, and scarcity). As Rima wrote in the foreword to She Is Sitting in the Night<\/em>, \u201cWhat held [Thea\u2019s Tarot] together was the recurrence of certain symbols and iconography: the mountains, trees, and plants; living rooms, kittens, and bedrooms; aviator sunglasses, jewellery, and patterned clothing; the arch of an eyebrow, the sideways glances, the expressiveness in the hands and fingers and faces.\u201d This deck is super gay, and versatile, and also visually exquisite, having been papercut on large pieces of paper and then analog photographed, photocopied, and scaled down to tarot-size cards. The Little Red Tarot <\/em>product description rings true: \u201cThea\u2019s Tarot is a feminist and lesbian classic.\u201d
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With permission from Ruth West, the creator of Thea\u2019s Tarot, Metonymy recently was able to print Thea\u2019s Tarot decks for the first time since 1984. The 2018 edition is very much like the original, and comes with the same one-page instructional pamphlet. We felt like celebrating Thea\u2019s Tarot and also the time that\u2019s passed since we started that\u2019s basically made us a preschool-age publisher.
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