Creative Arcana 001. Lindsey Trout Hughes

A Tarot-led interview with writer, editor, and theatre-maker Lindsey Trout Hughes

Oct 31, 2023

Below is the first instalment of Creative Arcana, a regular series on The Shuffle. Creative Arcana segments will feature interviews with writers, artists, and makers about their creative lives, projects, and processes. The line of questioning will be informed by a series of tarot card pulls. Want to submit yourself, or a creative you know, to be featured in an upcoming Creative Arcana segment? Please fill out this form.

Lindsey Trout Hughes is a writer, editor, and theater maker. A former columnist for Catapult Magazine, her essays have also appeared in The Rumpus, Bright Wall/Dark Room, The Audacity, and elsewhere. She is Head of Programming at the London Writers' Salon and Assistant Books Editor at Barrelhouse. Lindsey writes weekly essays about creativity and wonder at Fox in the Dark. She lives in New York City.

Lindsey Trout Hughes’s essays are some of the most delicious and nourishing elements of my reading diet. Her Substack, Fox in the Dark, is a window into wonder that never fails to remind me of what kind of writer I want to be, and just how lucky I am to know someone who looks at the world the way she does.

We met for the first time three years ago through the London Writers’ Salon, during deep pandemic winter. It was already dark out for me in Brighton, mid-morning for Lindsey in New York. We were there to chat about what querying literary agents in the creative non-fiction space might look like for me. 1

I knew I’d found a friend in Lindsey when she shared a story about how, when faced with choosing the agent she would eventually sign with, she pulled tarot cards to help her explore the decision.

We had more than tarot in common: there were midwestern histories, creative roots in the theatre, and a shared interest, I think, in translating what we love about the dynamic, living, breathing immediacy of staged drama into intimate life writing that toes a line between grounded realism and the elevation of a dream.

That 2020 conversation bloomed into an ongoing mutual appreciation of each others’ work, and I’ve been so very lucky to have regular support from Lindsey through LWS’s Gold Writers program. She was the first person to subscribe to The Shuffle, and the first to respond when I put out an unusual call to my writing community: Would you let me interview you using tarot cards?

Featuring Lindsey as the first interview subject for the Creative Arcana segment feels fated to me, like a natural continuation of a conversation we started three years ago. It was a joy and a privilege to shuffle my deck with Lindsey in mind, and to let the cards guide me to ask her some big questions about the nature of her creative process. The greatest pleasure of all was reading her responses, where I not only saw many facets of my own creative experience reflected, but found new ways to intercede with my practice and process.

I hope you find that, too.

The Cards: The Lovers, Page of Wands, Judgement, The Chariot, the Ace of Swords

The Lovers. This is a card about the choices we commit to; the passions we choose. What does creative commitment look and feel like for you?

I grew up Catholic. I've been thinking about how I was taught to petition the saints. What I find most beautiful about this practice is that these requests aren't meant to be transactional. If I'm thinking of Saint Philomena with her arrows and crown of roses and asking for her intercession, what I'm also doing is asking for an ongoing relationship, something to be tended, a space where there is the possibility for love.

Now, I think of art similarly, as a relationship where I hope an exchange occurs. When I begin a new practice or project, there are questions I try to stay in touch with: What is possible here? What am I asking? What am I afraid to ask? How will I let this transform me?

I think of Mary Oliver and her wish to spend all her life a bride married to amazement, a bridegroom taking the world into her arms. The promise becomes about attention, sensitivity, listening, and work—like love. The promise becomes about remaining open to the possibility (the hope!) that the making of something will change me.

The Page of Wands. This card is all about attentive curiosity. How do you prioritise curiosity in your creative life?

A few times a year, I like to list my obsessions. I've made this a seasonal practice: winter, spring, summer, fall. It's an ongoing record of what I'm thinking about, what questions I'm circling, what ideas I'm drawn to. I've done this for a few years, and it's been interesting to see patterns emerge—new ideas moving in, questions falling away and then returning, particular images and subjects that just won't quit.

Saturday mornings are my sacred space for this sort of exploration on a more regular basis. When my children wake up, I make hot chocolate and set out breakfast and art supplies. After a few hours, the table is covered in paper and scissors and pencils and paint and eggs and jelly and sausage, and we each share what we've made and what we've been thinking about. (It's Saturday morning now, and I'm sitting at the table with my five-year-old daughter as I think about these questions. Just now, she's drawn a heart and filled it with other drawings: her friends, Bonnie, CC, and Sarah, the ocean, the moon, a candle, a bird, a leaf, me.)

Judgement. This is a card about resurrection, bringing up the bodies and reanimating what we've buried. Can you talk about how that theme intersects with your work - either the subjects you write about, or the art of memoir more broadly?

My background is in the theater, and I think a lot about what we call "stage pictures," visual images that hold a story, arrangements of people and objects that we cast meaning upon. 2 In my memoir and essay work, this most often comes up as internal images that act as touchstones for reasons I sometimes understand but often don't, things that come up for me again and again.

When I was little, there were a pair of oak and orange trees that grew into each other in my aunt's yard. I think about those tangled trees all the time.

An alternate vision for the Judgment card, featuring the an angle emerging from the boughs of an oak tree — *Judgement, from Tillie Walden’s Cosmic Slumber Tarot*

Just yesterday, I noticed that I've been covering the corkboard above my desk with images of solar eclipses without realizing it. For whatever reason, these images have a hold on me. They have work to do on me or in me or through me.

For me, this is a helpful way to approach essays and memoir—taking images and exploring them, working with them, deepening my relationship with them.

The Chariot. The Chariot can often be a card about balance (see the Sphinxes), or about a hunger for new adventures. Where are you creating balance right now, and where are you seeking out creative adventures?

The memoir I'm writing is taking me on the ride of my life. I've now been working on it in a serious way for five years. It has taken time, and I'm a different person now than when I began writing the book. Right now, I'm letting myself become obsessed again, letting myself fall in love again, trying to learn how to balance intuition and resolve.

My hope is to find a strong drive in my creative life again. I'm just coming out of a season that was very much about ease. I've been sketching and painting. I began a nature journaling practice. I needed that time to soften around the book, to give myself permission to meet this book anew, to take it apart, to invite new possibilities about what it wanted to be. Now that new visions for the book are solidifying, I'm ready to find some serious intention heat around the manuscript again.

Ace of Swords. A card for new beginnings. Can you share the opening lines of anything new you happen to be working on?

The book I'm revising is a memoir about motherhood, madness, art-making, and my time spent playing Ophelia. Here is the beginning:

I read a story once about an actor playing Hamlet—how, in rehearsal, he looked up from his script to see his recently dead father standing just off-stage in the shadows. I've heard many versions of this story, centuries of men being startled by their own lives while pretending to be someone else. In a 2012 interview, Daniel Day-Lewis said, "To some extent I probably saw my father's ghost every night. Because of course, if you're working in a play like Hamlet you explore everything through your own experience." The Hamlets, sad princes, are haunted by their fathers. What apparitions come for their lovers, the Ophelias?
I could tell it like this: I am in doublet and hose, Elizabethan ruff around my neck, contemplating a skull. The only soliloquy I have is a litany—grocery lists and baby names and possible ways to save my life. And there is Ophelia behind me as the ghost, dressed in armor in fair and warlike form, clown white covering her face, red hair hanging down, demanding remembrance. But the face of the ghost is mine, and the red hair, too.
Or I could offer an image of the pair of us—Ophelia and I together—mud-covered with swelling bellies, digging graves, making room for new bodies in the earth, a gathering storm approaching like the hand of God. But that is not how this begins.
It begins like this: The lights dim, and the curtain rises on a night scene. But I am not in my marriage bed. I am not at home with my child. I am not where I am supposed to be.

In this painting by Arthur Hughes, a teenage girl - Ophelia - gather flowers and herbs. Daisies are pinned into her long red hair. — *Ophelia (“And He Will Not Come Back Again”) by Arthur Hughes, 1865, via the Toledo Museum of Art.*

Many thanks to Lindsey Trout Hughes for trusting me and the tarot with her stories.

If you enjoyed this interview, do yourself the pleasure of subscribing to Lindsey’s Substack, Fox in the Dark for regular essays about creativity and wonder. This November, Lindsey is launching a monthly series that features insights from her favorite artists about their creative rituals and practices - I know I’ll be reading along, and I recommend you do, too.

Subscribe to Fox in the Dark

You can also follow Lindsey on Instagram here.

Join the conversation in the comments:

What did this interview bring up for you? I’d love to know:

What are your own answers to the card-prompted questions I asked Lindsey?
What images have a hold on you? How are they working on, and through, you in your creative practice?
Do you have a sacred time for creative exploration, like Lindsey’s Saturday mornings?
Anything else you’d like to share