Selah Ann Saterstrom

Writer and diviner Selah Saterstrom on taking turns to light our passageway through disaster – The Creative Independent Writer and diviner Selah Saterstrom discusses academia, the importance of communal storytelling, and investing in your mental health to support radical creative risks

Still thinking about the piece I read this morning by @selahannsaterstrom.bsky.social at @thecreativeindependent.com:

"We carry the archive in our blood."

thecreativeindependent.com/people/write...

The response to Kirk’s death has neatly folded into the broader fascist purge of journalist, educators and artists.

For the record.

My posts were not even about Kirk directly, but about America's apathy towards political violence, and the coddling of white male shooters and hate peddlers.

I was fired because I mentioned race: white men and violence-- that was my "gross misconduct."

A U.S. Citizen Detained by ICE for Three Days Tells His Story A conversation with George Retes, an Army veteran swept up in a California raid

Here’s a story that’s becoming all too common: federal immigration agents using racial and ethnic profiling as a rationale for stopping, questioning and detaining U.S. citizens who they suspect are undocumented.

One day after the Supreme Court lifted the ban on racial profiling, federal agents swarmed a car in Van Nuys.

Four masked agents with guns drawn yanked people out, slammed them to the ground, and pointed a weapon at a pregnant woman.

There is no justification for this. None.

A professor who was actually canceled - fired - and crickets from the hysterical “anti-cancel culture” crowd.

"We should not have to live in a country where the Government can seize anyone who looks Latino, speaks Spanish, and appears to work a low wage job. Rather than stand idly by while our constitutional freedoms are lost, I dissent." —Justice Sonia Sotomayor

L’Heure entre chien et loup—“the hour between the dog and the wolf” is an old French expression for twilight, the threshold when you can no longer tell the known from the unknown

A short read about my attempts to get into the ditches of a honky-tonk angel’s voice & the way grief deranges everything

What is the price of suppressing the part of you that recognizes suffering?

Living in proximity to this doesn't require active participation. It requires citizens to fold horror into the background of everyday life.

[ read more 🔗 fourqueensdivination.substack.com/p/a-mega-pri...

Opinion | Something Extraordinary Is Happening All Over the World

An absolutely monumental piece from @polgreen.bsky.social this morning. Appreciate the research, array of sources, and nuanced thinking on the complicated issue of migration.
Gift link: www.nytimes.com/2025/01/31/o...

It doesn't matter if they are ever coming for you.

It was always ever already too much that they were coming for anyone.

New Piece / 3 min read: A divinatory take on prisons.

What is the price of suppressing the part of you that recognizes suffering?

What happens when the part of you that might have opposed, becomes enclosed, too?

LINK: fourqueensdivination.substack.com/p/a-mega-pri...

"The U.S. Department of Defense will no longer provide satellite weather data, leaving hurricane forecasters without crucial information about storms as peak hurricane season looms in the Atlantic."

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s dissent hits the target. She is reminding us of the stakes in this case. And she is spot on.
www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24p...

Horrifying. We are here.

About 3 dozen LAPD officers in full riot gear, standing around looking confused, bored, aimless. A waste of taxpayer money, a threatening show of force without morality or purpose. Behind them, the north wall of the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, covered with Barbara Kruger's "Untitled (Questions)" mural: against a field of stark red, white letters that read, in part, WHO IS BEYOND THE LAW? WHO IS BOUGHT AND SOLD? WHO DOES THE TIME? WHO SALUTES LONGEST? WHO DIES FIRST? WHO LAUGHS LAST

Pulitzer prize for this Jay L. Clenendin image of LAPD stormtroopers in front of Barbara Kruger's "Untitled (Questions)"

This man 👇

BREAKING: Federal agents in plain clothes and unmarked cars tried to snatch 1st graders from LA elementary schools—told staff they had “parental consent.”

They lied. When pressed, they HID THEIR IDS. DHS admits they sent them. This wasn’t a welfare check. It was a test run for a police state.

Curious about institutional protocol when a telekinetic outcast is tasked with the thankless job of delivering the Graduate Committee’s Assessment Report? 😂 Read more!

New Substack / 2 min read

🔗 fourqueensdivination.substack.com/p/carrie-the...

I have new micro-essay on Divinatory Poetics ✨

🔗 fourqueensdivination.substack.com/p/divinatory...

🦢 🦢 🦢

Another stunning sculpted gown by the #FrockingFabulous #RobertoCapucci. "Work for me is everything. Work and beauty. I've always fed on beauty.", said Capucci. #fashionhistory via Odescalchi Castle.

I have a new piece in which I bring my influences to that beloved janky sanctuary of my adolescence, the Natchez, Mississippi Mall, in order to understand casual shopping & the ways trade friction unsettles the fantasy of seamless consumption.

🔗 fourqueensdivination.substack.com/p/me-tammy-w...

No African may strike for any reason whatsoever. All Africans over the age of 16 must produce a passbook on demand by a policeman. No white man may teach an African servant to read. No African may buy land or own property anywhere in the Republic. Under no circumstances may an employer pay Africans the same rates as white persons even if they do the same work and work the same hours.

Poster by the Anti-Apartheid Movement: 'Anyone disobeying these laws will be imprisoned, fined, and/or whipped'. Britain, 1971.
Ref E.538-2021, V & A Museum.

For more information—— 🖤https://www.fourqueens.org/academy

Images from the archives: Divinatory Poetic classroom installation details. An hour before my seminars, I prepared the lecture space. (University of Denver; Graduate Workshop in Fiction, 2016)

25 years teaching in writing program & if ever there were a class I’ve been preping for, it’s this one, y’all—Tarot in the Academy

What does it mean to honor the body as archive & citation? To teach as a divinatory act? To protect divination’s integrity in institutions that doubt its legitimacy?

NEA GRANT TERMINATION TRACKER

Gutted, gutting -- 💔
In solidarity with a lot of breaking hearts right now.

NEA grant termination tracker

docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

Divinatory Poetics—Statements & Arrangements On writing, divining, and the art of subversive flower arranging

Hi Friends 🌻

I have a new Substack & I’ve posted a piece on Divinatory Poetics & the Japanese art of flower arranging. I’ve been a lay-student of ikebana (mostly in the Sōgetsu School) for 20+ yrs.

Divination. Writing. Flowers—you know: the enduring obsessions.

I hope you'll read ❤️

@maddow.msnbc.com Thank you for covering this!

And the jobs of the future somehow bear a striking resemblance to the jobs of the past.

They want our children and grandchildren on assembly lines, in mines, and in the fields. Generation after generation. This is the plan to create a world in which we are all piece-workers in service to oligarchs.