An Interview with Andi Talarico
by Lisa Marie Basile
This interview is part of our new Creator Series, a series of q&as that are designed to help you get to know people who are writing, making, and doing beautiful things.
Andi Talarico (she/her) is a Brooklyn-based writer, poet, and self-proclaimed witchy poo (astrology, tarot, ritual work). She’s the co-founder of Writing The Cosmos (which I have the great fortune of running with her). As an endlessly fascinating human with a great deal of knowledge about all things literary, magical, and mystical, I wanted to chat with her about her creative inspirations and her upcoming workshop Luna Le Vag, a holistic spa in Brooklyn, NY.
In this interview, we discuss her workshop, influencers, inspiration, and how her culture shapes her work.
Lisa Marie: Tell us a bit about your recent creative project, the Full Moon Ritual workshop you’re holding in Brooklyn this month.
The idea for this workshop came from my frequenting of this lovely Brooklyn business called Luna Le Vag, a holistic spa in Brooklyn that’s run by two inspiring young women, Jordan and Naomi. Their spa does a lot of work with natural care (and pampering!) for the vagina (hence their name) but there’s more to it than that - I could tell that they cared about community-building, networking with other businesses run by women and people of color, and I started to think about a way that I could possibly contribute. I noticed that Luna Le Vag was already offering classes in workshops in areas of interest to me: healing arts, reiki, energy readings, intentional cannabis use, and more.
Because my hobbies revolve around things like the study of astrology, tarot, and ritual, I thought it could be useful - and hopefully fun! - to offer a workshop based around the Full Moon and ways to harness its energy for use in reflection, self-care, and intentionality. All of these practices are beneficial, but I find it especially important to have conversations around and engage with these rituals as part of building community. The more we practice intentionality, the more we participate in our lives fully and authentically. The idea for the workshop is twofold:
First, we’ll be performing ritual as a group, which is its own healing and community-building modality, but Second, I’ll be sharing ways in which all of these practices can be personalized to benefit each person, so they can take these skills and apply them authentically in their own lives, whether alone or with others.
All of this is done in tandem with the good people of Luna Le Vag who will be there to participate, contribute, host, and share their beautiful space with us, as well as their food and refreshments, as this workshop will run all evening, in order to give us time to relax into things in a more organic way. To sum that all up, I’m running a Full Moon Ritual workshop on Thursday, August 11th, from 5-9pm, at Lune Le Vag at 1096 Broadway in Brooklyn. Attendees are encouraged to bring their own tarot deck but we will have extras on hand. No prior knowledge of tarot, astrology, or spirituality is needed to participate.
Lisa Marie Basile: Who are some of your creative favorites? Who lights you up?
Oh wow, what an enormous (and great) question! As it relates to my ritual-craft, I find a lot of inspiration in the words and writing of people like Patti Smith, Maggie Nelson, Anne Carson, Sappho, Jeanette Winterson, Kim Addonizio, Diane di Prima, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Toni Morrison, Isabelle Allende - people who suffuse their work with a type of magic and openness, who use language as a way to get to truths both known and not. The reading of tarot is a narrative structure; the joy of Astrology comes from mining its depths for meaning; a guided meditation is a way to marry language and imagination. At the bedrock of all of these things is language, incantation, possibility — my love of writing directly feeds my study of the esoteric and magical, and vice versa.
“The reading of tarot is a narrative structure; the joy of Astrology comes from mining its depths for meaning; a guided meditation is a way to marry language and imagination. At the bedrock of all of these things is language, incantation, possibility — my love of writing directly feeds my study of the esoteric and magical, and vice versa.”
Lisa Marie Basile: I’d love to hear about your writing process, struggles, or any rituals you turn to when creating. How are things going?
It definitely depends. There are days when all I need is to take my laptop to a coffeehouse and immerse myself in the din of the city to feel inspired. Other days, it’s much more introverted: I need every single detail of my home to be in order before I’m able to sit down, light some incense, turn on some beautiful, wordless music, make myself the perfect cup of coffee, and then sidle up to the page. Some days I need to write by hand.
Other days I feel the need to type. I try to listen to my needs and balance them with what I’m trying to get done. I do think I write more now, in these past few years, than I used to, likely because I started practicing better life habits more intentionally and tracking them.
It also became easier when I (mostly) shut off the constant inner critic and understood that Prolific usually beats the hell out of Perfection. If I don’t consider every word precious, I can let them all spill out onto the page and then parse them later. You can’t edit from nothing, but you can always edit from an imperfect something.
Lisa Marie Basile: Tell us a bit about how culture, identity, place, or belief inspires or influences your work?
I believe my heritage deeply informs my work - and by work, I mean writing as well as magic-making as well as the way in which I move through the world. While I’m proudly of mixed ethnicity and heritage, I was raised Catholic with a strong emphasis on our Italian-American side of the family, and though I’ve loooong been lapsed in the practice of the Catholic religion, I do still carry an abiding love for ritual, ambience, the mysteries of the spirit, even prayer as it corresponds to incantation. And incense. That one definitely stuck, haha. There’s a certain type of bloody passion that exists at the heart of Catholicism that still speaks to me and through me.
Though my craft has many influences and forms, the majority of the rituals that I practice come from the folk magic traditions of southern Italy. I’ve always felt more attached to the folk magic that took places in kitchens and gardens and bedrooms than the high magic traditions, especially those which exist within a hierarchy. And frankly, if I wanted some man wearing fancy robes to tell me how to live my life, I would have just stayed in the church. I respect the freedom, feminism, and resourcefulness of folk traditions and that love informs much of how I live and work.
Lisa Marie Basile: Who are some contemporary creators, writers, or peers that you look up to on the regular?
I think we’re in a really interesting time in history as far as witchcraft and ritual are concerned and I find a lot of inspiration from the people sort of heading up that public discourse. The work of Pamela Grossman comes to mind, as does Mary-Grace Fahrun, the astrological writings of Chani Nicholas and Gala Mukomolova. I deeply appreciate the life work and educational offerings from Marybeth Bonfiglio at Radici Siciliani, Herban Cura, and Mallorie Vaudoise.
Andi Talarico (Cancer sun/Pisces moon/Sagittarius rising, she/her) is a Brooklyn-based writer, poet, and general witchy poo (astrology, tarot, ritual work.) She’s taught and coached poetry/performance in classrooms as a rostered artist, as well as tarot and astrology workshops through WORD Bookstore and more. In 2003, Paperkite Press published her chapbook, Spinning with the Tornado, and Swandive Publishing included her in the 2014 anthology, Everyday Escape Poems. She also penned a literary arts column for Electric City magazine, and curated the NYC-branch of the international reading series, At the Inkwell, from 2016-2019. Her work has appeared in The Poetry Project, Luna Luna Magazine, Brokelyn, Yes, Poetry, amongst others.
Lisa Marie Basile is the founding editor of Luna Luna Magazine. She’s also the author of a few books of poetry and nonfiction, including Light Magic for Dark Times, The Magical Writing Grimoire, Nympholepsy, Andalucia, and more. She’s a health journalist and chronic illness advocate by day. By night, she’s working on an autofictional novella for Clash Books.
Her work has been nominated for several Pushcart Prizes and has appeared in Best Small Fictions, Best American Poetry, and Best American Experimental Writing. Her work can be found in The New York Times, Atlas Review, Spork, Entropy, Narratively, and more. She has an MFA from The New School.