Engaging Literature & Magic with Cameron Steele of Interruptions
An Autobiographical Conversation from Investigative Journalist to Professor to Astrologer & Tarot Reader
Cameron Steele is a lot of things — Writer, Astrologer, Tarot Reader. She has a background in investigative crime reporting and a Phd in Literature, with concentrations in Creative Nonfiction and Women’s and Gender Studies.
I first met her in Austin Coppock’s Astrology course and then fell in love with her writing through her Substack, Interruptions, where she explores topics like motherhood & illness in ways that are universally compelling.
We discuss some of that in the following interview. And a lot more. If you’re already a fan of Cameron’s work, this is an opportunity to dig a little deeper.
If not, lucky for you — you get to experience her brilliance for the first time.
CV Henriette: This is a tough interview. Mostly because the whole time I was writing questions I kept thinking about how you interviewed me and your interview questions were so good — because I’m a competitive person. Writing that line flashed me back to our podcast interview and you said something like you spent a lot of time “trying to be the prettiest and the smartest person.” Has your relationship to competition changed since you’ve gotten sick?
Cameron Steele: I wanted to be the best little sick person there ever was. I wanted to be one of those beauties who goes through chemo and loses their hair but manages to look like an angel nonetheless. I wanted to be a ghost, goddess, the winged messenger of death dressed up with a nice wig. I wanted to be the PTA mom and the mystic, the cancer girl who walked three miles in the woods every day, identifying boundary oaks and herons, the baby bald eagle born into the branches of an elm above Lickinghole Basin.
I wanted cancer to mean something.
I wanted to take drugs and have a pass for taking them, after years of being (mostly) sober. I wanted to have good sex even though my breasts were amputated. I wanted my colleagues in academia and in astrology to sit up a little straighter, to lean in when I talked. The body is the first text, I kept telling everyone, quoting a former mentor of mine, Stacey Waite. Malefics are sometimes actual harbingers of death. Venus, too. Jupiter expands the reach of cancer cells in the body. Stop ignoring Pluto, stop calling Pluto transformational while leaving out the hellfire, that kind of thing.
I wanted all of these things because, mostly, I was in a competition to stay alive. Some of these weird and normative and superlative daily ambitions were a distraction from really living, though. Walking in the woods on the days that I could be out of bed was great — was useful. Forcing myself to be present for my then-two-year-old when he was struggling with the fear that gets bricked into a household by virtue of maybe-terminal illness was also one of the best things I did. But to revive the age-old struggle to fulfill normative beauty standards? No. A total wash. Set me back.
When I was in in-patient rehab in Tennessee, twelve years ago now, the director of the eating disorder center pulled me aside after a meeting with my treatment team. I was 23, 24 years old at the time. I was smarting during the treatment meeting because another woman had joined the ward who was very obviously prettier than I was, very obviously sicker. The director was a little horrified that I was so concerned about my falling status as the pretty, sick, smart girl. “Your competitive urge will either drive you to do great things, Cameron,” she told me. “Or it will destroy you.”
I think about that a lot. I think about how the director looked like Dolly Parton a lot. My dreams get weird, trying to parse out Mars on my ascendant, on Antares. Obsession, paranoia, ambition, I have to reign them in, learn how to harness them. Can I harness them? Paranoia knows some things well, but others poorly, as queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick wrote in her last book before dying of breast cancer herself. Touching Feeling. Or maybe it was published posthumously?
Anyway, in Greek myth, the destructive and the creative urge come from the same place. David Naimon talks about this with the poet Jorie Graham, I think. Apollo’s lyre, the first musical instrument, the creative wellspring, arrives in human hands first through the killing of the turtle. Death, life, art, all palimpsests, competitive for which reading gets to surface first, and last, over and over again.
CVh: I wasn’t trying to pose a question back there. I was trying to construct an introduction about all the things I know about you, so that we can establish that before continuing to the rest of the interview — which is pretty simple, but great writers make brilliance out of the simplest questions and, besides, we covered so much in our podcast interview. Do you agree with that sentiment? What do you think makes a great interview?
CS: I mean I love a good Virgo genius, a Gemini genius, the Mercury-ruled artists and scholars who rock my fucking world through distillation, through complexity chopped up, sped up, simplified down.
Think Michael Haneke in Happy End or Caché, though Amour and The Piano Teacher operate by virtue of that kind of brilliance too. Think Larry McMurtry in Lonesome Dove or Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen. Or, oh my god, Agnès Varda and her 12th-House Gemini Sun conjunct the North Node, what’s that thing I’ve seen said about her? How she “saw the extraordinary in the ordinary?”
Maggie Nelson does this too, crystallizes tension, death, illness, motherhood, and fucking — all the chaos of the body–right on down into art. I look at her chart a lot and sweat. The midheaven Saturn in Gemini, the Virgo ascendant opposite her Sun-Mercury-Venus conjunction in the 7th. She has this competitive drive to know the other, and Saturn constantly squashes the search on the sentence level; no one shifts from clause to clause like Nelson does. It’s too bad she lets her cushy academic job interfere with later work. The Argonauts is divine. Bluets wounds. I love these so much.
More astrologers need to be reading and experiencing art and philosophy and brilliance outside the bounds of planets, divination, and technicality. Technical detail is important, but it won’t change a life unless there’s a wider net, a larger reach. That Virgo-Pisces hand off, you know?
I mean how many times have you had your chart read or sat in conversation with another astrologer and they don’t know how to talk about Jupiter in Sagittarius other than to say things like big, optimistic, dignified, growth? Does that really do anything? I don’t think so. Language requires more language, which requires living in and amongst art, living in and amongst art and the world.
Art doesn’t imitate life, it anticipates it, says Jeannette Winterson. Astrology, too, you know? When it’s doing its best.
A great interview is one where the line between interviewer and interviewee becomes incomprehensibly blurred. Do you listen to David Naimon on Between the Covers? He’s a great model for this. Listen to him interview Johanna Hedva about fiction, astrology, and how to know when you’re going to die. Hedva is one of the best practicing astrologers out there, but they’re an artist first. They don’t fuck around with this weird sincerity-and-devotion-can-be-sellable matrix that most of the rest of us do. Start with the Naimon-Hedva interview. Then read Sick Woman Theory. Then, Hedva’s Minerva the Miscarriage of the Brain.
It’s hard to get a chart reading with Hedva. I played the saddest little sick girl in all the land to get one with them. I maxed out a credit card; they read my chart. It was life-changing. Like, why don’t you use whips? They asked me, like a whip as a prop to get me up out of bed and creating something in the world. Interviewing people, reminding myself that I have a lot of skills. The investigative-reporter-to-university-professor-to-tarot-reader-who-also-knows-the-stars path doesn’t have to be a sad story, even though it involves a lot of pain, you know?
This bitch isn’t going to die yet, but she’s going to wish she was dead, Hedva said about me. It made me laugh. It was a gift. To just say it like that? To know that I could see the same thing in my own birth chart? It was a good lesson; I keep it close to me when I read for my own clients now.
CVh: Back to the introduction. You have a young son who you love very much. I don’t know your husband's name, but I know he is tall and almost died from the actual plague, having been bitten by a tick that bit a prairie dog, during a camping trip. And that you have two Frenchies, one of which is named Sappho and is a blind prophet, due to a rare pigment eating disease that took her eyes. The stranger part is that this disease was thought only to be found in huskies — and that your dog is the exception. Have you ever thought about why?
CS: My son is Theo, “gift from god,” but the thing about gifts from the gods is we don’t really know how to handle them. We have to earn them, to pay back the debt of the gift over and over again throughout our lifetimes. My husband is Kiernan, a sculptor and a middle school teacher. One dog is Fitz, the other Sappho, why did she get sick with something she wasn’t supposed to get sick with?
Hmm, I war with Susan Sontag, you know? Capricorn mommy, Virgo moon — I get Sontag; I really do. Illness As Metaphor is all about trying to do away with the essentializing, woman-hating idea that we make ourselves sick by virtue of not being good enough or evolved enough. You can’t fucking die from cancer just because you suppressed your anger your whole life, Sontag says. Sometimes I really, really believe this. Other times, I don’t know, man. Sontag refused to face the fact of her own looming death. She was so sick; she literally refused to believe she could die. She kept having shit cut out of her, poison poured through her port lines. That refusal to face your own mortality — honestly, I do think it does something to you. To the people you love.
Everything living gets oozy with something bad.
Sappho’s illness saved my life at the time. I was headed back down eating-disorder lane, waltzing around in addiction alley. I didn’t believe in anything except my own right to fuck things up if I wanted to. Then this dog that I loved more than I loved myself lost her eyes. My husband got the bubonic plague. The great American Leo eclipse was happening. They were both Leos. I am an Aquarius Moon. It was time to learn how to be a caretaker; it was time to grow up.
CVh: You have a Phd, and you’re the first person since your grandfather to earn the title ‘doctor’— and that tickles you, even though you have reservations about people calling you ‘professor.’ Why is that? Will you be annoyed if I call you doctor? (The part of me that always feels dumb in school loves that you worked so hard for that.)
CS: I mean, I think it’s just this automatic desire to reject expertise as what will save our souls, much less the world. I had to go get the PhD, I take care of myself through learning, through end games, through credentials. My Saturn-ruled Sun and Moon, they rule me. But I also wanted to fuck with legacies of patriarchy, misogyny, and wealth in my family of origin. Becoming the next “Dr. Steele” as a crazy woman, deeply in debt, with no real job prospects once the cancer diagnosis came down the line, was one way to do that. I want to play around with and to undermine my own desire to be taken so seriously, too, though. Which is why I don’t really do the whole “doctor” or “professor” honorific.
Although the urge to really attach myself to that kind of legibility–legitimacy is there, especially when I start to get annoyed at how often I see my clients getting fleeced by asshole astrologers posing as divine vessels. It floors me how often clients come to me after having shelled out so much money just for some person in their mid-20s to not do any work or prep and spew some bullshit at them about when they’ll find their one true love or whatever. Or just using the meme-psychology language of the internet to talk vaguely at them about such-and-such placement. That’s when I want to whip out the PhD certificate and be like: I have studied reading various texts, various languages, for years. I’m not going to lie to you. I’m not going to sugarcoat it. I’m not going to pretend to know something I don’t.
CVh: I know that you worked as a journalist in the Deep South for a few years before pursuing a Phd, and that, at some point, you lived on the East Coast, but here it starts to get fuzzy. Did you get your Undergraduate degree on the East Coast? Where? Was there some culture shock between locations?
CS: I went to W&L University in Lexington, Virginia for undergrad. I was born in Virginia and lived there until I graduated college at 22. Then spent almost four years as a reporter in Alabama and North Carolina. Then months in a psych ward, in rehab. Then South Dakota, to live with my parents, to try to repair a relationship that couldn’t ultimately be repaired, because I was the only one who really desired that our family move away from its history of manipulation and abuse. Then to the University of Nebraska, where I got my master’s in Poetry and PhD in Creative Nonfiction, with a specialization in Women’s and Gender Studies. I taught at UNL for eight years, too.
This is the first semester I’m not teaching college students — I’m focusing instead on writing my book proposal and seeing tarot and astrology clients. It’s also the first time I’ve lived in Virginia since leaving college. We moved here last summer just as I got the news my cancer had returned; my husband got a new job at a middle school in Charlottesville — we needed that slight increase in income, the access to better health insurance it afforded. And to be near my mother-in-law, who is really instrumental in helping take care of my son.
There really wasn’t much culture shock when I moved to the midwest; I was in this raw, internal space where I had to find out who I was apart from the institutions of illness, addiction, family. I thought academia and the big horizons would save me from those things for a little while. (When the writer Louise Erdrich moved away from her childhood home in the midwest, she called her homesickness “horizon sickness,” I love that). When I was in Nebraska, I missed the claustrophobia of trees and rock. Now that I’m back in Virginia, I miss the headiness of so much sky, the way you could cut your teeth on Jupiter as atmosphere, air, sunset and rise.
I’ve always been looking for redemption, and so one of the gratifying things about becoming disillusioned with my work in the academy was the realization that redemption is kind of a dumb thing to look for. Better to keep your eyes open for, I don’t know, the moment when you can first identify an herb without having to consult a book or the internet. Violets, plantain, and yellow dock fill the pastures around the house we just moved to in the Blue Ridge.
Better to keep your eyes open for the moment that god enters — like when you find a tarot deck smooshed in against your tomes of feminist theory. When did I buy the deck; what did it mean? Nothing except for a new way to reorient myself to living, to help others to do the same.
CVh: What else? I know you moved into a house filled with lead, and that your astrology chart is heavy with the weight of Saturn, and that a lot has changed in your life over the past few years, fueling the urgency to write a book. Care to expand on that? What else?
CS: Yeah, I mean, when you get a diagnosis that gives your life a visible leash, it becomes pretty clear pretty quickly what is missing, what will need to be satisfied before death. What will hurt that can’t be done with the time you have left. Or I, me, my. This is how I felt.
I’ve always loved writing. I’ve always been a writer. I’ve published widely but never took the time to put it all together, under a single cover, under a public concept, under a book proposal. So, I’m doing that these days. The hard part is trying to toe the line between what I love — which is experimentation at the sentence level, which is an engagement with spirit at the content level — and what will sell. I don’t need to be famous. But I do want a good press. I’m bad at marketing, which is so cliché, but anytime I try to teach myself how to actually make money, how to network, how to sell my story, I get sweaty, I break out, I have to cower in bed for days.
But then there’s Saturn, there’s death, there’s turning toward what feels reprehensible in order to achieve something more enduring. Can I do it? I don’t know.
CVh: How do we bring this into the present moment? What is it that you do these days?
CS: I take care of my kid. I write my newsletter. I work on my book proposal. I see my astrology and tarot clients. I have a tarot apprentice who is an herbalist in her own right; she’s teaching me how to be present with the land, how to be in a body, how to work with the scars of breast amputation, bowel surgery, c-section, a replaced right elbow and titanium-reinforced wrist. I read fantasy novels on the couch beside my husband at night. We drink a lot of tea — blue vervain, violet, plantain, there’s an elderberry tree we’re tending to, alongside the overgrown vegetable garden, the detritus of a life that is saddled with a lot of stuff but not much energy to care for all of it.
I try to stay off my phone except when I need to be with my friends I’ve made online, or at NORWAC, or in the book club I led for my illness and literary communities on Discord for a while. I’m in year three of Austin Coppock’s school for astrological magic. But I mostly attend those classes by myself, when they are recorded after the live session. I don’t know; I love testing the outer limits of my knowledge of magic, astrology, divination. But I don’t love the ethos of anxious striving that circulates within me when I’m present in large groups online, sometimes.
I get shots in my belly every month to keep me in early menopause. I wait for my hair to grow back. I cry a lot over what a gift it is to be able to walk alongside my clients in their own struggles with disability, pain, parenthood, the shambles of what was supposed to be a career. Art. It’s beautiful how we can be together in all of this, how we can experiment with what hurts as a pressure point for release. What a fucking gift the chart is. The cards.
CVh: I’m going to assume the above answer includes your Substack, Interruptions — am I writing that out correctly? What’s behind the name? What’s the story behind the project?
CS: I wanted to write about interruption as an ethical stance, as a moral imperative, as a political ethos in a post-modern world where information is everywhere and screens are god, and we’re drowning in circuits of free-flowing monetization, of nothing desire.
I had just finished reading all of Roy Scranton’s work — Learning to Die in the Anthropocene, We’re Doomed, Now What? and Total Mobilization. He writes of interruption, via the theorist Peter Soterdijk, as “the practice of creating new flows while guarding against old ones,” which is my own paraphrase. I liked this idea of interruption as necessary, as something that goes beyond gadfly annoyance, as something that can help us to re-inhabit our own lives.
I liked thinking of illness as interruption. Of motherhood as interruption. Of love as interruption. My dissertation for the PhD was a collection of essays called No Easy Way Out: A Memoir of Interruption. The book alternates between longform criticism and flash essays based on tarot cards. It won runner-up for the Texas Tech University Press first book prize. But then I got sick with cancer; I couldn’t pursue publishing a book-length project while preparing for and undergoing multiple surgeries, hormone therapy, chemotherapy, momming, losing my academic job. So I started my newsletter, and many of the essays from that first book evolved into the first posts of the newsletter. Now I publish free creative or critical essays on Wednesdays and tarot and astrology offerings for paid subscribers two Sundays a month.
CVh: You said somewhere — I believe it was during our IG Live — that you knew you wanted to be a writer since you were four. (If I’m remembering that incorrectly, please correct me.) Why do you think that was? Do you think it had anything to do with control?
CS: Maybe it ended up being an act of control, but the writing thing — it was just something that was mine. It didn’t originate from a teacher or from my parents or from anywhere, except maybe from god or whatever. I was identifiably good at writing even before I was in elementary school. It was a talent I have never been apart from. That was the blessing; but then I had to figure out how to build out the discipline, responsibility, and care to turn the writing into a craft, into something that would stay. I didn’t want it to be taken from me because I wasn’t treating it with respect, but that has almost happened many times over in my past. When you’re a sanguine depressive, alcohol is so alluring, thinness, too. I write to stay away from that shit, I write so I won’t lose the writing, the clear boon of my life.
CVh: What I was trying to get close to in the previous question was your Evangelical Christian upbringing. It seems that writing could be a way to control a narrative — and thus protect oneself in a household where a set of stories are being pushed on one, whether that’s happening consciously or unconsciously ... .Does that resonate?
CS: Hmm, it’s a good question, but that’s never what I was doing with writing. I used bulimia and drugs to try to control my reality. Writing was special. Writing was art, was play, was experimentation, was chaos. Writing was my way to, through, and for god. Writing was how I learned how to be a good mom. Writing was how I taught myself to be the partner I wanted to be to Kiernan. Writing was the way I learned to explode reality without killing myself or hurting other people (eventually, lol).
I wrote about my Evangelical Christian upbringing in an essay last year for Barrelhouse literary mag. But I wasn’t writing to control the narrative so much as test out language’s capacity for telling the truth about my visitations from spirits when I was a little girl, and about how the institutions of church and family fucked me over and took god away for a good long while. But the writing in that essay isn’t about control or coherence, at all, so much as a certain slant of light, the way material reality warps under the dust motes that turn into gold during the midheaven hours of an eight-year-old’s afternoon boredom.
The writing, really, is ecstatic. Sexual, eyes-closed-but-wide-open kind of thing. Very Venus on Fomalhaut in the Fourth House!
CVh: Do you think your upbringing had something to do with your reluctance to bring Astrology — or anything that felt intellectually flimsy — into your life? How did you reconcile these parts?
CS: I don’t try to reconcile them much anymore. I think there’s a certain kind of wisdom in being able to roll your eyes at yourself as you tell someone you practice astrology. We don’t talk enough about how criticism and irony are as much a part of a devotional practice as embrace and sincerity are. Like, wholeness is a theory, not a reality.
When we bow before the way, the fragments of self rub up against each other wrong — all the time, causing friction, getting pussy — we get access to a whole new level of lived experience.
How do I be both the Cameron who blushes and cringes over her belief in the apparent motions of the planets and the Cameron who understands that all meaning-making languages require the jump from observation to articulation? How do I encourage my clients to embody dynamic tension within themselves, too?
Divination really sings, if we let it, while trying to answer these questions, without worrying too much about answers, while staying with the madness of the process.
CVh: You talk about how tarot helped you up from a rock bottom place, that it allowed you to see yourself differently. What was the vision before? And the one the tarot revealed?
CS: Before the tarot, I saw a dumb bitch who knew better than to stake her identity to illness and addiction, but did it anyway. After the tarot, I saw a dumb bitch who knew better than to stake her identity to illness and addiction, but who struggles to actually do better. And she kind of delights me even when she fails to extract herself from what she knows she should not be doing.
I think, in non-dumb-bitch language, this might be called “grace.” The tarot gave me grace.
CVh: I still panic when I pull the Tower and the Three of Swords, even though I know better. Did your daily draws ever scare you? Do they still?
CS: Yes, my daily draws scare me, and I dislike tarot readers and divinatory philosophies that say we shouldn’t be scared. Fear is useful. Fear is actionable. The Eight of Wands will never not be associated with cancer growing in the body. It makes sense for my chart–that decan contains my Mars, it rises just before my ascendant. The Empress reversed always clues me in to the ways in which I’m failing my kid in a given moment, or the ways in which society fails mothers, parents, caretakers.
CVh: How has your relationship to tarot evolved?
CS: I’ve stopped listening to the instagram accounts that say every card is good and no card is bad. That’s bullshit.
CVh: Where does tarot end and Astrology begin? The strength and weaknesses of each? How do you incorporate both into your practice?
CA: I could write a book on this. Instead, I’ll just direct your readers to some essays that I’ve written on these topics. Here’s my tarot apprentice manifesto. Here’s my essay on using tarot cards against and beyond capitalism. Here’s my essay on how tarot changed my life. Here’s my essay on illness, astrology, tarot, and gender.
CVh: Somewhere in your Substack writings, you state that you’ve always had premonitions, psychic abilities. Did you always accept them? What advice would you give your younger self around cultivating these skills?
CS: To accept the beautiful ones, the ecstatic visions, the shit that feels good as every bit as real as what doesn’t. That it’s ok to trust and believe in benevolence; that there are greater forces out there than bad fathers and timid moms. To write down your dreams, every day, even when they are just impressions of negative space. Nothing will improve your creative practice or mental health more.
CVh: And finally — what’s exciting you most right now?
CS: My one-on-one mentorship sessions with my tarot apprentice and a few other clients who I’m meeting with every week to help completely restructure their lives. If someone had done this for me back when I was a reporter, or when I was in grad school, or when I was postpartum, or when I got diagnosed, I would have managed to thrive alongside, within, and through the impossibilities of life.
CVh: How can people connect with you? How do you prefer to connect with people?
CS: To book a session with me, visit my calendly schedule or email me at cameronscottsteele@gmail.com. To read my newsletter, subscribe at steelecs.substack.com. Or you can follow me, and find links to all of these and more at my instagram account @inter_ruptions. I try to go to NORWAC every year, and enjoy meeting fellow tarot readers and astrologers there, too.
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