My new book, Reflections of the Major Arcana: The Tarot We Meet in Real Life, is what happens when you pull a card and write about Tarot every day. It drops on September 3, 2026—eBook and paperback on Amazon. Finally. Finally.
I’ve read Tarot for decades for friends, flirted with going pro (and didn’t like it,) and relied on my cards as an extra source of intuitive information before investigating or doing energy work in homes troubled by ghosts.
During the lockdown years, I recorded Tarot videos under my alter ego, a European sock puppet named Madame Apollonia “Polly” Maria Cotton, and created a YouTube channel purely out of boredom and a wish to entertain friends. I had no idea Madame Polly would effortlessly convey all the things this introvert finds so hard to express!
On YouTube, you can’t pause to think; the camera keeps recording. So when Polly tuned into a spread, she had to do so while narrating. It is not my style, and definitely not Madame Polly’s, to rattle off a key-word list of what a card “means.” But where I struggle to translate what I am seeing and feeling intuitively into spoken word, Polly has no such issues and wove entire stories around the cards, and let the cards talk to each other, and did not hold back her opinion of the spreads.
The cards were tools for Madame Polly, and from her supremely confident perspective they should have been damn grateful that she was using them out of all her other options. What a surprise to me—I had always approached the cards with reverence and the fervent hope that I would not fail to understand them or a reading.
Through Polly, I began to experience and understand Tarot in an entirely new way, and I learned more in her YouTube era of less than twenty-four months than I had during all the years prior.
YouTube became more technically difficult and time-consuming, so I moved Polly to her own Facebook page and began writing the readings daily—it was simpler. I also found it easier, then, to step Polly into the background and come forward myself as the reader she had helped create.
I wrote daily energy forecasts until my page got pirated, and Facebook offered no help. That’s when I started this website, to blog my weekly Tarot readings and write about other things like spirituality and ghosts, and at the same time I was already working on Reflections of the Major Arcana and had been for a year.
My goal for Reflections of the Major Arcana was to apply what Polly had taught me: to flesh out the cards and present them as experiences and people rather than bullet-points of qualities and correspondences. I never dreamed it would take more than twenty months of writing, rewriting, nine-and-a-half full edits, and learning digital publishing to produce this 487-page book on the Major Arcana.
That’s a lot of material, but you should see the pile of stuff I cut. I’m still smarting a little over removing the bit about the Mary Celeste, references to helpful pamphlets you find at the doctor’s office, and a long digression about kids and skates, among other things. Many of the threads Madame Polly wove when she inserted herself into the manuscript were loose and trailing; other insights she delivered with a sharp glance and they landed perfectly.
This is not an academic book by a Tarot scholar, but a book by a Tarot enthusiast who reads intuitively and is heartily convinced—more than ever—that Tarot is a companion that always strives for its user’s success. Even the scary cards are trying to pull us forward.
If you like Tarot and have found it hard to learn, or have struggled with the Major Arcana, I hope you’ll take a look at the book I wrote for the sole purpose of helping you meet it as the friend it is.
If you prefer eBooks, you can pre-order the Kindle edition right here: Reflections of the Major Arcana: The Tarot We Meet in Real Life, on sale for launch week! For those who love the feel of a physical book, the paperback version will also be available on sale starting launch day, September 3rd.