How the stars and planets might guide your work
Q&A with astrology writer Jeanna Kadlec
Jeanna Kadlec is an astrology writer and memoirist who helps fellow writers apply astrology to their practice. Whether you’re intimately connected to your sun, moon, and rising signs, or you aren’t sure what any of that means, chances are, as a writer you’ve given serious consideration to your work habits, how you access creativity, and the many ways in which your environment impacts your writing. Jeanna uses astrology as a tool to look at those things from a more personalized angle. Which—as someone who is constantly retooling their work perspective and habits (also, as a Virgo!)—I find fascinating.
So I’m thrilled to introduce you all to Jeanna, who offers unique and empowering insight on how we might break away from 9 to 5 expectations and pay a little more attention to our natural cycles of production and creativity. Jeanna offers this perspective, along with honest reflection on her own writing process as she works towards the publication of her book this year, in her newsletter, Astrology for Writers.
Writers, meet Jeanna!
“We buy books and take classes and hire coaches and read articles to try to hack our way into being a morning person, into writing every day, into finishing a draft in a certain amount of time, even if that’s absolutely antithetical to the way our own body, energy, and temperament are wired. A model of labor built on exploitative factory work is not conducive to writing and art.”
— Jeanna Kadlec
Britany: Your newsletter brings together astrology and writing. When did that overlap first become apparent to you?
Jeanna: Gradually, organically. I’ve been writing since I was a kid and was an English PhD dropout who wound up doing the day job thing while quietly writing my own memoir and freelancing on the side. During that time, my interest in astrology evolved. I was getting asked by my editors at digital publications to write horoscopes and the like. This was back in 2017, 2018. I was only self-taught, and was keen to have some kind of professionalization in the field, so I started getting mentored one-on-one with a seasoned astrologer here in New York.
One of the first parts of astrology I started seriously working with was the timing of events — what’s technically called “electional astrology.” Figuring out the best times to get a job interview, go on a first date, that kind of thing. Given that I was freelancing at the time, it became pretty apparent to me pretty quickly that I could use that technique for things like pitching editors, sending newsletters, social media posts, and the like.
As time went on, I wasn’t particularly interested in writing bylined content that was solely astrology (more on that later), but I also knew so many other writers and literary folks in my community who were interested in it and curious about how I used it in my own practice. And so Astrology for Writers, the newsletter, was born, in January 2019.
What impact has your interest in astrology had on your own career as a writer?
I live in New York, and I’ve worked in marketing for years. A few years ago, a lot of astrology app companies were looking for content people, and they tended to get folks who were either astrologers or who were career marketers who knew absolutely nothing about the esoteric. I was both — a marketer who had worked in tech, who was also a professional astrologer and who could consequently write snappy, Instagrammable but also accurate horoscopes and marketing content. For a while there, I was one of the only people occupying the middle of a very weird Venn Diagram in the NYC tech startup scene. My last few day jobs were for astrology apps. If you have some of the most popular apps on your phone, chances are I wrote a significant portion of them once upon a time. (Not the mean one, though. My work is affirmative!)
In terms of my bylined writing career, it’s still hard to tell. I do the newsletter because I personally find astrology to be a supportive mindfulness practice for me as a creative person. Then there are the obvious divinatory aspects of electional astrology, which folks can take or leave but which I of course have found to be helpful in my own life. (For example, when it came to going out on submission for my memoir in 2020, I told my agent I wanted to avoid the Mars Retrograde at the end of the year at all costs — and we did, and we went to auction.)
But something I definitely have worried about from time to time is being taken seriously in the literary community, by virtue of my pretty frank openness about my astrological practice and also about spirituality, more generally. It’s still a pretty agnostic, God is dead, poststructuralist world over there. (And then I think, what is “serious”? Why am I worried about how other people perceive my own choices that don’t affect them? You know how it goes.)
What's one common challenge you see writers facing, and how might astrology help with that?
The emphasis on regular production as it fits within a 9-5 work day has been so detrimental to so many people’s creative processes. We buy books and take classes and hire coaches and read articles to try to hack our way into being a morning person, into writing every day, into finishing a draft in a certain amount of time, even if that’s absolutely antithetical to the way our own body, energy, and temperament are wired. A model of labor built on exploitative factory work is not conducive to writing and art.
Part of what drove me to develop my course, Astrology for Writers: How to Make Your Writing Work for You, was that I consistently saw my clients feel extraordinary relief when we examined the part of their birth chart that had to do with their writing routine itself — when we looked at how they could actually, reasonably structure their days. We used astrology as a tool to deconstruct and challenge the capitalist lessons pressing down on them in order to prioritize their own wellness, to embrace, quite honestly, what they already knew about the time of day they best functioned, the kind of creative spurts they were most inclined towards. Why certain habits just never worked for them. What other things they could give themselves permission to try instead. It has been absolutely revolutionary.
“You don’t have to be “into” astrology to sit back and just observe the natural cycles of the earth and how they invite us to align more with ourselves and a gentler, more spacious way of living.”
It seems to me that no matter what you do or do not believe, astrology is a fascinating framework to consider in your writing practice. For those who are skeptical of astrology, how might they still find value in exploring how it relates to their work?
A common denominator among my students and also my writing community, more generally, is that struggle with whether we are writing enough. This capitalist-colonialist society’s emphasis on constant productivity is truly killing us, not to mention our connection to our creativity. So much lip service is paid to the idea of rest, but not nearly enough time is spent doing it, honoring it, or owning that sometimes, we are just not in an “output” state.
Simply acknowledging the lunar cycle itself is some potent medicine for that. The moon waxes and wanes. It grows from a new to full moon every two weeks — and then spends the next two weeks diminishing, receding, letting go. This cycle of waxing and waning is baked into nature itself. It’s all around us, if we only pause to notice.
You don’t have to be “into” astrology to sit back and just observe the natural cycles of the earth and how they invite us to align more with ourselves and a gentler, more spacious way of living. Look up at the moon! Say hello. Take a beat with her, and with yourself.
What type of work do you do outside of your newsletter? And what does your writing routine look like?
I love this question, because I don’t know anyone who makes a living solely from their newsletter. However, right now, I do write full-time. I quit my full-time job last year to finish my book. And listen: I never thought I’d be that person who quit a job with good benefits to focus on the wildly uncertain industries that are publishing and media, but here we are.
I think my business background is where I got the confidence to quit and go full-time on my own in the first place — when I left the workforce, I was a Director of Content. I’ve also owned a retail business before, where I was in charge of all the financials and where I fucked a lot of things up and learned a lot of shit about, say, taxes the hard way. So at this point, I feel pretty well equipped to do what it takes to be out on my own. I’m the person a lot of my writer (and astrologer) friends come to for business advice.
When I’m in a writing phase, I write every morning — I’m the kind of person who responds to routine. But lately, that hasn’t been the case, since I’m still on the mend from being hospitalized for several weeks due to a medical emergency. So right now, I’m taking the creative energy where I can get it. I’m reading a lot. I’m retooling a class I taught last year on book proposals. I’m listening to a lot of roots and folk music. I’m rewatching True Blood. It’s all grist for the mill.
Eventually, I’d like to go back to my academic roots and teach full-time. But I’m enjoying the season I’m in right now.
Tell us about your book!
Heretic is a memoir-in-essays that chronicles my journey out of the evangelical church, out of my early marriage to a pastor’s son, and towards queerness and a more joyful, holistic way of being in relationship with community, with spirit, and with myself. It’s very much a hybrid narrative that weaves my personal story with cultural criticism and pop culture, talking about how evangelical fascism has infected American politics and society in ways that aren’t always visible and that are increasingly dangerous to us all.
I started writing it six years ago, and it has changed shape and form so many times since then. This book has really raised me as a writer, and I’m so excited for it to finally be coming out this October. (It’s available for pre-order on Barnes & Noble, IndieBound, & Amazon.)
So with the search for community playing an important role in Heretic, can you tell us if and how you've been able to find community in writing?
Absolutely. For me, Connecting with a creative community has always coincided with drastic increases in production and also “level ups” in my own relationship to my writing.
I found my first serious writing community in my late teens and early 20s with fanfiction — the other writers in my particular “ship” were so incredibly supportive, and that was the first time I was writing out in public, not for a grade, where complete strangers with no emotional investment in me were reading my work and liking it. A group of us did a writing retreat together, were just in constant communication in a way that was so supportive and so vital for my growth at the time.
My next big surge in creative output was in my late 20s, after having moved to New York. I want to be incredibly clear that you in no way need to move to New York to “be” a writer. (I sure as hell didn’t move here for a creative dream; I moved here with an ex.) But once I was here, I started to get serious about my writing again. I started taking adult creative writing classes and getting more active on literary Twitter. I slid into a lot of other writers’ DMs, asking if they wanted to get coffee or drinks — just trying to find friends in the city, honestly. I took the relationships offline and into the real world. And that resulted in a lot of relationships, but especially in a writing group that’s been going for four years that’s been so important for my development.
The community with other writers has been so important; I think the craft can feel very isolating, and it’s very easy to get in your head. It’s so helpful to know that you're not alone, that other people have the same doubts and fears. Also, having professional peers, like I do now, means that there’s so much more assistance and helpful advice and ability to connect. Having a group of people you come up with, as it were, makes an enormous difference.
What are you looking forward to in the lunar calendar right now and what should writers know about how it might impact their writing?
I’m looking forward to the New Moon in Scorpio, that’s also an eclipse, on October 25th this year, because that’s when my book comes out!
In terms of writing impact, eclipse seasons — which last for a few weeks — are known for their intensity, for stripping away the unnecessary, for bringing in new changes in a sudden rush. They aren’t something to be scared of, but they’re definitely a time to break out the journal and reassess your creative practices, or maybe take yourself on a creative date if you’re in need of some rejuvenation.
One piece of advice for fellow memoirists who hope to write a book one day?
Finishing that draft is a lot easier when you aren’t worried about what the people in your life will think. Remember, they don’t get to see this draft. They don’t get to see the next one, either. (I would actually strongly, strongly encourage folks to not talk about or show early drafts to people you’re writing about.)
Keep other people’s opinions out of your head and off of the page for as long as possible. Get the story on the page. Worrying about the rest runs the risk of freezing the story up before it’s even gotten somewhere.
What are you most proud of in your writing career so far?
First, obviously, Heretic — I’m not sure that the pride has settled in yet, because I’m still in final edits, but I’m very much excited for the publication journey this year and the celebration.
Second, all of the students I’ve been able to work with — from the astrology and writing courses, both. I feel very lucky that people have trusted me with some of their rockiest, harshest, and most self-limiting beliefs, that they’ve let me in as they try to transform their own relationship with their creativity. Helping folks become more confident in their writing and also more gentle with themselves, in a world that would prefer we were all cogs in a machine, is pretty sweet.
That’s all for today, friends. Thanks for being here, and a big thank you to Jeanna for sharing with us today.
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Stay inspired,
Britany