Rachel Pollack, R.I.P. (1945-2023)

Rachel Pollack (1945-2023) passed away on April 7. Rachel was one of my Clarion West instructors back in 1996. Appropriately enough, she taught the final week of the workshop, capping off an already intense summer with her own special brand of esoteric initiation. I immediately embraced Rachel's metaphysical approach to teaching fiction writing. Her unique ideas were both liberating and inspiring. I found her emphasis on employing Hermeticism as a tool to unlock one's creativity to be a great relief after having endured so many university writing workshops that emphasized a practical and quotidian approach over an oneiric and intuitive one. She went well out of her way to encourage me in my writing and even devoted a considerable amount of time and effort offering me much needed advice regarding a novel-in-progress I was working on in the late 1990s. Needless to say, this was valuable time she could have been devoting to her own writing career. In an elliptical and roundabout manner, she unwittingly gave me the idea for what would eventually become my first novel, UNTIL THE LAST DOG DIES.

Rachel won prestigious awards for her transcendental, magic realist novels. She received the World Fantasy Award for her 1996 novel, GODMOTHER NIGHT, and the Arthur C. Clarke Award for her 1988 novel, UNQUENCHABLE FIRE. I consider Rachel's finest book to be her criminally overlooked 1998 short story collection, BURNING SKY. In fact, when teaching Creative Writing classes at CSU Long Beach, I often use her 1982 short story, "Angel Baby," to demonstrate how to utilize first person point of view to best effect.

Rachel's groundbreaking 1993-95 run on the Vertigo comic book, DOOM PATROL (in which she introduced the first trans superhero), was recently republished by DC Comics in a massive omnibus edition. I recommend this book highly. Rachel discusses her transgressive tenure on DOOM PATROL in Alex Dueben's 5-23-22 COMICS JOURNAL interview, "'ONE OF THE THINGS THEY DEFINITELY ARE IS QUEER': AN INTERVIEW WITH RACHEL POLLACK."

Besides being an award-winning fiction writer, Rachel was also a world-renowned expert on the Tarot. Her 1998 book, SEVENTY-EIGHT DEGREES OF WISDOM (an in-depth analysis of the major and minor arcana), is considered to be a classic in the field. On May 1 of this year, her 2002 Tarot book, A WALK THROUGH THE FOREST OF SOULS, was released by Weiser Books in an extensively revised and updated edition. You can buy A WALK THROUGH THE FOREST OF SOULS right HERE.

“For forty years, Rachel Pollack has been one of the finest writers and thinkers about Tarot, and A Walk through the Forest of Souls feels like a distillation of everything she has been trying to get us to see. A must for people who want the Tarot in their lives or just for people like me who want it in our stories.”

--Neil Gaiman 

 

Here's an excerpt from Christopher Priest's 4-17-23 GUARDIAN obit:

All her fiction has a sensitivity to the images and mythology of the tarot, subtly imbued with insistent awareness of the state of transgenderism. Pollack’s work as a teacher and interpreter of the history and symbolism of the tarot became a consuming passion. She wrote the texts that accompanied several individual tarot decks, including her own, called the Shining Tribe Tarot, as well as that of the German surrealist artist Hermann Haindl and another deck based on the work of Salvador Dalí.

She said that she always looked at the tarot more as a spiritual guide, a kind of wise friend that helps discover who we are, than as a device for fortune-telling. For her, “divination” provided a means of having a two-way conversation with the divine.

For 30 years she and the tarot writer Mary Greer taught seminars at the Omega Institute for Holistic Studies, in upstate New York, and from 2002 Pollack taught an MFA course in creative writing at Goddard, a liberal arts college with campuses in Vermont and Washington.

Pollack was born in Brooklyn, New York, into a family of Orthodox Jews. She grew up with the awkward sense of being an outsider experienced by many young people who are attracted to the arts or literature. In her case the mystery of gender was an extra factor of her young life. To her it was literally unspeakable, cutting her off even more from her family.

Pollack was once asked if she had ever been a “nice Jewish boy”. She said: “I’ve always been Jewish, even when I thought I wasn’t, and I’m pretty sure I’ve never been a boy, even when I thought I was. As for nice, I’ve always tried to be, but I’ve also always tried to be tough.”

She attended New York University, graduating with a degree in English, and earned her master’s in English from Claremont Graduate University in California. She said that 1971 was her annus mirabilis. This was the year when a work colleague introduced her to the tarot. Until then she had heard of it only from TS Eliot’s poem The Waste Land. Exploring the images and symbols of the tarot led her to a further interest in the Kabbalah, the esoteric discipline of Jewish mysticism. In the same year she sold her first short story, Pandora’s Bust.

To read Priest's entire obit, click HERE.