Good morning. Good Afternoon. Good Night.
If you’re new here, my newsletters are collages—composites of concepts and commentary, divination and divulges. They are rarely singular topics, but they usually carry a theme and are always a channeling.
This letter is a story circle, a processing, a forecast of what’s to come.
Table of Offerings
I Will Finally Tell You About My Trip to France
A Word From Our Sponsors *ha*
Your Purpose is NOT a Mystery ~ Teaser
What’s Next ~ Big Project with a Little Rant ~ Vampires, Pixies, and Planets, Oh my!
France, Finally
The whole place is shadowed—
as if my mind is trying to protect these memories through distance and subterfuge from outside eyes, from myself.
I have wanted to tell you about my summer travels for six months. I’ve failed each time.
Are the memories lying on the bottom of a bath of milk? Look at me from the surface; it’s as if nothing is there. I never left.
This summer, I spent six weeks in France, partially for a writing residency and partially for my sanity.
I’ve tried subversive “hermit crab” essays pretending to be quirky travel blogs. I’ve tried poetry. The drafts have been trauma-centered. The drafts have been joy-centered. They all remain crumbled in the proverbial trash.
I have my hypotheses for why it’s been so difficult:
I don’t feel like I deserved this taste of freedom from my domestic responsibilities.
I feel ashamed because I was able to go only because of money from my ex.
I am afraid people will think my writing sounds too critical and ungrateful if I go a sharp route or too joyful, indulgent, and obtuse about others’ suffering and lack if I parade my pleasures.
I experienced things on this trip that I will never be able to capture with words.
There are things I can’t be honest about here.
If I allow myself to think about my life there, I will see contrasts to my life in the States, which are too stark to bear and too irresponsible to act on. That dissonance could eat me from the inside out.
And now you, too, know the opacity I wade through.
And now, I will try to tell you about my summer travels in a series of nonlinear vignettes.
But first, a word from our sponsors!
Hi, yes, it’s still me lol
Here’s a juicy hunk of offerings for you before we get to the creative meats!
🌹 Editing Service ~ Applications, Grants, Fiction & Nonfiction
I’ve been a writer for twelve years, an editor for twelve years, and a working artist for nine years. It also doesn’t hurt that I’m a Virgo.
I’ve worked on dozens of applications, grants, and workshops. I pay heightened attention to detail. I want to bring out the core of who you are and translate it into how you want your audience to receive it. I excel in the conceptual and the tangible.
How to book me?
Pay the $20 Deposit via Venmo: mmayi or cashapp: $themagickartist (please use emojis in Venmo)
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For my subscribers, your down payment is $20, which is less than if you were to find me in the wild.
This item is the down payment for my editing service. This is not the final fee.
The down payment is nonrefundable, but if you let me know that you cannot make it at least 24 hours before your consultation session, it will go toward booking a new session.
I am very grateful for this kind review from Kenzi Crash!
“I have never been great at writing grants, and last year, Malachi helped me in a major way by reading over an application and giving me some really insightful feedback. They not only helped with my wording but asked really smart questions, causing me to dig deeper and rewrite some of my answers. Their thoughtfulness and attention to detail really helped my application questions become more thorough. On top of that, their positive affirmation of the places where my application was already strong was super encouraging. With their help and revisions, I got through to the second round, and now I feel a lot more confident moving forward with other applications. Their perspective is that of an artist, and it also somehow feels like you are talking with someone who reviews grants. Honestly, it was the most helpful feedback I’ve ever had.”
🌹 Book a Personal Tarot Reading!
Sliding scale for both free and paid subscribers, BUT:
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All Subscribers get a sliding scale of $40-140 for the readings, which is less than if you found me in the wild and booked via my website.
Fill out a Calendly to book the session.
Pay the $20 Deposit via Venmo: mmayi or cashapp: $themagickartist (please use emojis in Venmo)
$20 is the down payment for my editing service. This is not the final fee. The down payment is nonrefundable, but if you let me know 24 hours before your consultation session that you cannot make it, it will go toward booking a new session.
Here’s a lovely review from Temi about the reading I did for them:
(Temi is also an incredible writer, designer, and artist! Buy their zine Glorious Blasphemy!)
“Malachi’s tarot reading was welcoming, nurturing, and exactly what I needed to hear! They provided a calming and easeful space to deliver my messages. The reading affirmed me and helped me feel more intricately connected with my path. It even provided me with direct affirmations from my spirit guides and ancestors, which was so endlessly helpful!! I would highly recommend Malachi’s readings!”
Here’s another review from Jonathan Eden!
“I was recently blessed with the opportunity to have a tarot reading done by Malachi! The reading was transformative and deeply resonant, and affirmed a returning to myself and a healing that I hadn’t expected but was so grateful to receive. It was lovely to work with someone who shared a sense of simultaneous and nonlinear time, and I came out of the experience with an easefulness and peace that grounded me in both the present and the future.”
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🌹 New Airbrush on Website!
I finally added new custom clothing pieces to my website!
Feel free to email me if you need a piece but need to negotiate. I want them to find a good home; just remember they are also original works of art.
Don’t you wanna wear a one-of-a-kind piece like this cutie???
The back of the shirt is two construction workers in a homoerotic tease rendered in lavender. The one teasing has angel wings, and the one being teased has devil horns and a tail. The front says, “Boys make good pets.”
Why France? Why Now?
When I asked my tools what I should focus on for my January newsletter, they gave me this card:
All I could say was, “OH,” with a laugh. Not many cards in my Enochian deck have such straightforward phrases. Most are just the names of the ether it represents, but this one said, “Girl*, it’s time.”
*girl used at once infinitely expansively and as a surgical knife. You know what that wounds/sounds like.
I will likely scatter these memories as a mini-series throughout several letters. They’re just emerging from me so slowly. But the beings that guide me suggest that it’s time.
So let it be time.
Here is the first of many. I’m not sure if they’ll all be as *flowery* as this, but my memories of my sweet friend Djo deserve the playful decadence.
A French Vignette #7: The Spirit and the Mangrove
I met a boy who is also an alien, also a sage, but he is a walking spirit and I am a walking mangrove.
There were no words in any of our languages that could quite say, “Hello we have met before we are meeting we will meet” and so we stuffed our mouths with plantains and laughed without malice at our cast-off girlhoods.
It’s not a boast to say I knew I was the ant to your peony. I know what a silent child looks like—one who chooses silence as peace and was subjected to silence as training. In essence, with others, you’re quiet. With me, you talked and talked. It didn’t take long for my presence, my mandibles, to gnaw along the seam of your blossom until you erupted with secret thoughts, hot takes, formative experiences, and that laugh!
We radiated with each other. We out-shined the sun. We sweat out the male gaze and its confusion. All we did was walk through Marseille in early August’s tantrums and triumphs of heat. You wore a wide-brim hat to shield your sweet, dark skin. I let my yellow skin crisp with pleasant sun damage. Neither of us wavered. Both of us hydrated, singing praises for free public water with wet lips. We thanked shade when we could, took the bus once, and never cursed the sun, never made so fast, so deep a friend.
You followed me into the tide pools, where I showed you the only form of stillness my cyclone brain lets me hold–earning the trust of marine animals. You told me those who walk with you like me, and I told you mine like you right back as the translucent stripes obscured the bodies of shrimp crawling on me to eat my anchored toes. Their claws tickled as they pulled dead skin, my offering, my gratitude, to the ocean. Algae-eating fish flecked with neon blue returned to skipping around the rocks beside my knees. The crabs joined their dance at my thighs. You would not stop exclaiming for each revealed beast. Your spirits flitted around me with every gasp because you had never shared a heart with a mangrove forest before.
It wouldn’t be ✨The Magick Artist✨if I didn’t pull a card for my people!
I asked my Enochian Tarot Card deck
How can we cultivate order in the midst of being flooded by chaos?
ASP The Reincarnating Ego (Ah-seh-peh)
This card has been appearing frequently in my readings. I sense a theme. It’s also quite relevant to the next section…
The defining phrases of this card are cause, purpose, meaning, a causal or creative force.
Today, I’m being shown this card less for its role as Incarnating Ego and more for its conceptual message.
I hesitate to dive into this interpretation because this is the message I’ve been crafting for my February letter—a letter I started in November. This means the message for navigating chaos has been consistent: You must focus on YOUR purpose.
I’m sorry this message has become a little bit of a “coming soon to a theater near you,” but I am writing a whole thing about how finding your purpose does not have to be a mystery. I did a purpose tarot reading back in October after an extremely low point, and when I say my life has been completely different since then…mercy.
But enough about that. That comes later.
Next letter, we will dive deep into contemplating purpose.
What Else Is Next?
1. I’m about to have my first big kid journalism publication *sob*
My article about sexual liberation and Hot Bits Film Festival will be published in In These Times magazine! I thought it would be a web article, but they approved my article for print AND hired me to do the illustration for my own article!
That should hit the shelves in February, and I will let you know when they do!
2. Big Project! Little Rant!
(Spoilers for Castlevania and Castlevania Nocturne ahead)
Friends, it’s official. I’m working on two novels at once. More accurately, I’m working on a novel and trilogy simultaneously. More, more accurately, I’m working on a novel, a trilogy, and a TTRPG setting that might be its own book one day (Astral Adventures in the Pixie Verse).
Mother Kow’s trilogy is still happening, still gestating. I’ve come to accept that I don’t have the focus for one project. I can’t buckle down like everyone says to do. I’m poly in all things! I’m scared to attempt a writing challenge like whatever the hell that November novel writing challenge is because I will surely fail. Maybe if I balance three distinct worlds, my mind will finally be stimulated enough to create consistently. MAYBE. Maybe…
Anyway, the novel I’m returning to is:
The Garden of Angels
On 1/23/25, I restarted my project, currently called “Garden of Angels.” In essence, this story is an allegory about the metaphysical journey of the soul through a young character, so a reader of YA, even middle grade, could read and draw something from it.
While this is a speculative fiction work, a fantasy story, it’s a book that represents the nature of reality in and outside human experience, which I have observed and studied since 2018. As I’ve said, I am no longer a person of faith. I experience tangibility and observe a potent pattern that affirms my limited understanding of concepts like Collective Consciousness and the Creation of Reality. I am not special in understanding this. I’m just committed to exploring it.
My Realm of Beings, who guides me, urges me to return to this story through recent divination sessions I’ve done for insight into what SHORT STORIES I should work on. They responded, “What if you worked on this novel instead?” I found this response very frustrating and ignored their recommendation to return to the Garden of Angels for weeks.
This story came to me as a sliver in 2017 while listening to the song “Lily Pond” by Vashti Bunyan. I could see this young being, a chimeric child, jumping along the lily pads, and they would not leave my mind. I still called myself a Christian at this time and didn’t make anything of the story beyond these playful images in my head. By 2020, I was apprenticing with my energy work teacher, Gretta, and transformed enough to know better than to bind myself to Christian limitations. This Lily Pond child returned to me as the protagonist. I was too fiery about this concept without enough substance to make it stand, so when Nick of Levine Querido approached me, and I pitched this story to him, and he accepted it, I could not deliver a solid sample chapter. I was too green. I wasn’t ready. I’ve worked hard not to let this fumbled golden publication opportunity feel like a failure, but it has haunted me. I choose to believe in the divine timing of things. I am feeling more ready now. In the past five years, I have focused on my writing craft, and I am both more humble and more confident.
In April 2024, I met Erica at my Stove Works residency. Erica is a white, ciswoman multimedia artist—not someone I would think of first as a collaborator. When I saw her graphite drawings, I was struck with familiarity. She was drawing nearly exactly what I was picturing for Garden of Angels, but in a technique I could not quite embody in my physical style. I mentioned Garden of Angels as a passing connection and said nothing more, but I haven’t stopped thinking about Erica’s artwork since then. On 1/22/25, with some encouragement from my Sapphomanteion divination tool, I sent Erica a long voice message asking her to collaborate with me. She said yes, and since then, we have sent a few voice messages back and forth confirming we are on the same page with the concept and our pace of production. The ball is in my court, and I must start to write before she can put pencil to paper.
It’s important to me that this book is mainly visual, if not wholly a graphic novel. When I write, I write for the screen. I write to be watched. My resources limit me to the technology of being read. I patiently prepare myself for animation opportunities. I should have visuals with my writing. I’ve criticized myself for this conclusion, and I do need to be a stronger writer to help others see my fantastical worlds, but I am a visual artist, too. My art is not a crutch. Ignoring that side of my craft to “prove myself as a writer” does not serve me. Our medium will be graphite. She will give me feedback on the writing, and I will also contribute some illustrations, though I do not know their purpose or form yet.
I am forgoing anything from the first version of the writing and starting my channeling process fresh. While I can still feel the beats of the first version pulsing in my head, I want to give a chance for a new message to come through, one not beholden to whoever I was and all of their insecurities back in 2020. I may find that what I pull leads directly back to those beats and characters; if so, I will welcome their return.
Gushing over Castlevania and spoilers starts here.
The day after Erica said yes, I watched Castlevania Nocturne Season 2. Specifically, the episodes where Annette, a Haitian sorceress blessed with earth-shapeshifting powers from the ironworker Ogun, goes into the spirit realm. I was weeping and thrashing excitedly because I had never seen the Orisha mythos handled so beautifully, so potently. Further than that, the story implied a concept that I see as fundamental to my understanding of the “afterlife.” The idea is that what you believe shapes your afterlife and what you experience. Like many West African traditions, the Yoruba tradition sees the afterlife as an open, malleable space where all ancestors exist and continue to live. There is little judgment, nothing reminiscent of heaven or hell. The story’s plot requires Annette to find Sekhmet, an Egyptian goddess of war and healing. The Egyptian mythos have a firm judgment system for the soul, and we see the anguish of the damned souls. Sekhmet is weeping because she is no longer deemed worthy to enter heaven because of what humanoids on Earth are doing with two-thirds of her soul to cause chaos. These two afterlives exist side by side; both gods are gods of war, but their domains are vastly different. Both afterlives are equally real and valid but shaped by belief.
With that same logic, the Abbot’s (a white antagonistic character) slaughtered monks likely went to heaven where a pale Jesus with blue eyes was waiting to embrace them. That’s also why Hell is real in Castlevania and all of its chaotic desires. It’s not because Christianity is THE religion, but because the story takes place in Europe, specifically France, where a lot of people give these ideas of heaven and hell all of their fear and focus. But much like I write about in my short story, “Hell is for Lovers,” Hell is malleable to those who fear it as their punishment. Not all demons from Hell crave the same thing; some want to sing opera and liberate their kin like Edouard.
Even the antagonist of Castlevania (not Nocturne), Dracula, is depicted in Hell simply embracing his wife, his whole world. He’s not being tortured there. Hell is just a place. Hell only has power if you believe in it, and the show represents that well with Orlox. Orlox is a gay, Indigenous Aztec vampire who can become a coatl dragon. When tempted to use the book of Hell, he casts it into the fire, not even considering the demon’s temptations that come with its power. The demon can do nothing but watch and probably feel disappointed. Orlox knows Hell exists but chooses not to give his energy to it.
I DIGRESS!
(No more spoilers)
I am excited to write a story for all ages that encapsulates the concepts of a malleable afterlife. I write this story for young Malachi, who once gave all of their energy to the polarities of Heaven and Hell. If I died young, believing in them with the fervor that I did, my consciousness might have very well ended up in Hell because that’s what I was told people like me, with my gay thoughts, belonged. From what I understand now, I would not have stayed there forever. I used to pray for God to send me to Hell to save an “innocent soul” that was not baptized because at least I would know my suffering was for someone else, just like Christ. It breaks my heart to think of myself as a young child, wholeheartedly imagining burning in hellfire.
Young Malachi, the journey of our soul is up to us. It is infinite and always changing. I know very little and only represent fractals of truths from veiled human teachings, channelings, observations, and interpretations. One thing I do know with certainty is that nothing is bound to exist as the same thing for all eternity. Existence is change.
Let’s begin again.
May your inner child be released from every fear that seized their growth and freedom.
Welcome back! I loved Castlevania and the sequel, Nocturne. The second Annette showed up, I knew she had never done anything wrong ever in her life 😂 I also loved the concept of specific beliefs and systems applying to specific groups of people BECAUSE they believe in them. It’s a concept I support and it’s why I believe that even if a non-Black person has all the tools, ingredients, and instructions, our closed practices will never work for them.
This was beautiful, so excited to have found my way to your writing 💖