Deck: The New Orleans Voodoo Tarot by Louis Martinié and Sallie Ann Glassman

I don’t ever use this powerful deck lightly and/or for these creative inspiration readings, but New Orleans has been coming up lately in various ways. Part of me would love to live in New Orleans—it’s a fascinating city that combines the natural magic of the swampy South with the haunting allure of history. Since we are entering into October, a similarly atmospheric month, I felt compelled to draw upon this deck’s wisdom for this month’s reading.

(I had a feeling that the reading would contain a strong fire element before I pulled the cards, and it seems my intuition was correct.)

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Courtesy of my recent move, I have gotten to experience the magic (the good and the bad) of living in a college town. I won’t regale you with my tales of both wonder and disenchantment; instead, read on to discover which literary magical academy you’ll be lucky enough to attend!

(And, during the course of my research, I have now discovered 101 books about magical academies I am dying to read!)

Disclaimer: These are mock horoscopes and are meant for entertainment purposes only, and are not specifically representative of any particular person or people.

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Deck: The Golden Tarot by Kat Black

Here in the Northern hemisphere, I’m still waiting for autumn to arrive, but we still have blazing hot summer temperatures, sadly. Perhaps I was channeling my yearnings for cool dark evenings into this reading (If I did believe in a hell, I would imagine it as a frostbitten, icy place rather than a fiery inferno.) Has autumn began its seasonal change where you are? Either way, I hope you find this reading inspirational for your own writerly “walks on the dark (cool) side”!

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Vampira: The Original Scream Queen

By Kelly Florence & Meg Hafdahl

“Bring on the empty hearses that I may people them with my enemies.

Isn’t that, after all, why people commit autobiography? To aggrandize themselves and to destroy their enemies? 

In any case, of course, the enemy shall be felled quite accidentally as the flailing sword of truth decapitates them. Now, all nonsense aside, you know I have no enemies. Only discarded lovers, and they have their memories.”

-Maila Nurmi

Ever since Kelly was little, her grandparents told her about the legendary Vampira, (pronounced Vamp-eera in the Finnish dialect). She was a Finnish American who had made it onto Broadway, into Hollywood, and had her own hosting gig introducing horror movies on a television station in Los Angeles. Her pet tarantula on the late-night gig was named Rollo and Kelly’s grandparents named their cat the same. While there are numerous stories and rumors surrounding Vampira and her life, we appreciated reading two biographies about her. Her name was Maila Nurmi, and she was a queen.

Growing up as the daughter of Finnish immigrants, Maila understood the importance of work ethic, public speaking, and passion. Her father, a journalist and devout religious man, raised his children to appreciate their legacy and encouraged them to work for the things they cared about. Moving around the country with her family, Maila spent time in Duluth, Minnesota (where Meg spent her junior high and high school years and where Kelly currently lives) as well as many cities across the country. While she didn’t pursue a career her father may have been proud of, she had the drive and tenacity to become a legend, albeit one most aren’t aware of.

We encourage you to read Glamour Ghoul: The Passions and Pain of the Real Vampira, Maila Nurmi (2021) by Sandra Niemi (Maila’s niece!) and Vampira: Dark Goddess of Horror (2014) by W. Scott Poole. Here are our top takeaways about this fascinating woman.

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Kickstarter: My Experience and Thoughts on a Failed Campaign

By: Keith Anthony Baird

Everyone starts off as a crowdfunding virgin. I had a vision for it, high hopes in fact, but also a very pragmatic approach (for me, that’s come with age).

I didn’t think for one minute it was going to shake the world but I did believe it had a chance of success. Boy, was I wrong!  To go into all the specifics in this short article would be difficult, so I’m going to narrow it down to a certain set of fundamentals I believe were at the heart of its failure.

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I Contain Multitudes

By Rivka Crowbourne

There’s an old(ish) saying: “Everyone makes fun of the Catholics until they need an exorcism.” The complex and mysterious ritualism of the Catholic Church has always fascinated horror writers, regardless of their personal convictions: the Irish Protestant Bram Stoker (Dracula) fell back on Latin orthodoxy to inter the undead, and the non-denominational demi-Buddhist James Wan (The Conjuring) idealized a Roman Catholic couple to expel the unclean. What is it about the Church that seems to keep her cheek by jowl with the various things that go bump?

As a horror-writing cradle Catholic, I’ve always insisted that one of the great scary story benefits, along with catharsis, is inoculation: a mind that’s been exposed to evil in trace amounts, thus building up a certain tolerance, is arguably better equipped to withstand a real-life encounter. I’ve also always feared that the depicting of evil, though inevitable and necessary, is a somber undertaking for the storyteller. Evil is, by its very nature, tempting; you can’t portray it in any meaningful way without becoming a vessel for its allure. Catholics are notorious for not knowing their Bibles, but I often reflect on Jesus’ remark: “Woe to those by whom temptations come! It were better for them to be cast into the sea with a millstone hung about their neck” (Luke 17:1-2).

To a nonbeliever, the point may seem moot, but consider: even if the serpent on the knowledge tree is a metaphor, there’s still a reptile coiled around your brainstem. H.P. Lovecraft was an atheist, but he clearly managed to net a few of the massive shadows gliding through the icy murk of our collective unconscious, or his work wouldn’t resonate with such wide, still-spreading ripples. And, like his good friend Robert E. Howard (suicide by gunshot), he neither lived nor died in happiness. Their fate is not, of course, unavoidable—but it’s a stern admonition to those who strike matches in the basement of the intellect. We all know Nietzsche’s maxim about the hazards of the gaze; an exorcist or vampire-hunter might well add that when you enter the Abyss, the Abyss enters also into you.

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To Punch Me Is to Know Me

By Howard Blaise

How do you portray conflict in a horror story? Perhaps more than any other genre, horror fiction tends to offer antagonists (vampires, werewolves, zombies, &c.) that turn us into them. At what point does this strange ambivalence swing from the risk of being transformed to the desire of being transformed? Let’s put ourselves in the shoes of a horror protagonist.

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How to Take Your Love of Horror to The Next Level 

By Kelly Florence and Meg Hafdahl 

As we’re celebrating the re-vamp of our podcast and YouTube show Horror Rewind, we thought we’d talk about turning horror into more than just a pastime. 

Sure, when we were reading Stephen King books and watching slasher flicks on summer breaks, we had a vague idea that a few, special people got to live and breathe horror as a career. Meg even used to pretend to be interviewed with a fake microphone in her mirror as the “next Stephen King” in grade school. 

But then that stupid thing called reality came settling in, you know, rent, gas, diapers, the popcorn and movie ticket fund. Horror was our hobby, and for you, maybe that’s all it needs to be. Meg’s husband is content painting and playing Warhammer for fun, and Kelly’s husband is an avid golfer who doesn’t have ambitions to go pro. Though, if you’re like us, and have an inkling of interest in making horror more than a pastime, let us give you a few tips from our years in the gory trenches. 

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