Tarot Talk

Join us for a day of tarot exploration featuring established and up-and-coming deck designers from around the Pacific Northwest. Whether you’re hoping to increase your tarot knowledge, curious about how these popular decks came to be, or you’re thinking about creating a tarot deck of your own and want to learn about the process, Tarot Talk promises to provide a wealth of information.

The day will begin with a meet & greet for participants and designers, followed by a moderated panel discussion and Q&A. Our panelists will talk about their design choices, the philosophies that informed them, and the technical process of crafting, producing, and publishing an indie deck. Bring your questions! For those who don't live in the Portland area, you can join the livestream of the panel disucssion remotely!

After a break, the afternoon will continue with your choice of a workshop on an aspect of tarot study or design (descriptions below), led by our tarot creators. The day’s events will conclude with a reading swap, facilitated by the designers.

Space is limited! Get your tickets here. 

Featured tarot artists include:

Claire Burgess (the in-progress Fifth Spirit Tarot)

Wren McMurdo (Dark Days Tarot)

Lettie Jane Rennekamp (Many Queens Tarot)

Coleman Stevenson (Dark Exact Tarot series, Vitriolic Tarot, Personal Oracle, Fairytale Oracle series) 

Greg Traw (the in-progress Dracxiodos Tarot)

Workshops:

Option 1: Tarot Figure Drawing (w/ Wren McMurdo and Lettie Jane Rennekamp)

If you are working on illustrating a tarot deck or exploring your artistic practice, this is the workshop for you. We will be working through different drawing exercises to depict the figure in the tarot. Are you trying to show someone seated, walking, gesturing wildly? Wren and Lettie Jane are here to help. This workshop will be broken into two sections, with participants drawing the first from photographs and then from the human figure.

Wren honed her figure drawing skills in fashion design school. Using style poses as guides, she’ll teach you to breakdown the human body into a drawing formula that, with practice, can be adjusted to suit your visual preferences. Lettie Jane loves figure drawing, and will show you how to catch shape, movement and feeling. Materials are included.

Option 2: Writing for the Tarot (w/ Claire Burgess & Coleman Stevenson)

This workshop will examine different ways of writing about the tarot, from using cards as creative prompts to crafting useful card explanations for your deck’s “little white book.” We’ll practice getting to know the cards on a deeper level through creative embodiment and discuss how to distill card interpretations down to key words while still making descriptions fresh and relevant to contemporary readers.

Option 3: Tarot Correspondence & Symbolic Interpretation (w/ Greg Traw)

Greg Traw is a local artist, writer, musician and creator of the Dracxiodos Tarot. Greg’s expertise in Tarot draws from many different lineages and traditions, but at the core he knows it’s the user’s intuition creating the mysteries with the cards. In his workshop, you’ll learn the basics of Tarot correspondence and how correspondence is the structural skeleton for meaning. You’ll also learn about the artistic dialogue that’s evolved since the Tarot’s storied beginnings; most importantly, how you can incorporate correspondence into your own practice. 

About the Artists:

Claire Burgess (they/them) is a queer and non-binary tarot reader, deck creator, writer, and witch. Claire is the creator of Fifth Spirit Tarot, a trauma-informed tarot deck for queers, outsiders, survivors, and everyone else. They’re the host of The Word Witch podcast, which addresses tarot, astrology, and magic from an inclusive perspective, and they teach tarot classes at Portland Community College. Claire is also a fiction writer, with short stories appearing in publications such as Joyland, Third Coast, Hunger Mountain, New Stories from the Midwest, and elsewhere. Born and raised in Birmingham, Alabama, Claire now lives in Portland with their spouse and lots of houseplants. You can find them at thewordwitchtarot.com, fifthspirittarot.com, and @the.word.witch on Instagram.

Wren McMurdo (she/her or they/them) lives in Seattle, Washington, with her wife, Schquay Brignac, and parakeets RuPaul and Julia Roberts. She currently works as a Creative Content Specialist at Herbivore Botanicals while maintaining her side hustle as a slinger of Tarot cards. Learn more at https://www.darkdaystarot.com.

Lettie Jane Rennekamp is an artist working in Portland, Oregon by way of Kentucky. She’s an Illustrator, mama, weirdo, coffee drunk, drawer, talker, astrology nerd, believer in energy and work and love. Find out more at lettiejane.com and @themanyqueenstarot

Coleman Stevenson (Dark Exact Tarot series, Vitriolic Tarot, Personal Oracle, Fairytale Oracle series) Coleman Stevenson is the author of Breakfast, The Accidental Rarefication of Pattern #5609, and The Dark Exact Tarot Guide. Her writing has appeared in a variety of publications such as Paper Darts, Seattle Review, Mid-American Review, tarot.com, and the anthology Motionless from the Iron Bridge. In addition to her work as a designer of tarot and oracle decks, her fine art work, exhibited in galleries around the Pacific Northwest, focuses on the intersections between image and text. She has been a guest curator for various gallery spaces in the Portland, Oregon, area, and has taught poetry, design theory, and cultural studies at a number of different institutions there, currently for the Literary Arts Delve series, which includes seminars at the Portland Art Museum. Learn more about Coleman at colemanstevenson.com and @darkexact on IG.

Greg Traw was born in Seoul, Korea and grew up in Casper, Wyoming.  Even though he's always been a creative person, he has been many different incarnations in this lifetime alone: filmmaker, professional poker player and dealer, waiter, musician, oil field worker, paperboy, screenwriter, medical guinea pig, journalist, photographer, bud trimmer, roofer and art teacher.  He currently lives in Portland, Oregon. http://nohheechul.com/

Get your tickets here!