Jill Dawson is an award-winning British novelist. Author of twelve novels and editor of six anthologies of poetry and stories, her latest novel, Pixie, tells the story of Pamela Colman Smith, illustrator of the Rider Waite Smith Tarot deck. Jill is a Fellow of The Royal Society of Literature and certified Jungian Tarot reader and has read Tarot for herself and other writers for forty years.
Read more of Jill’s work at jilldawson.co.uk
09/09/2026, 20:01 - Finbarre:
Welcome to Tarot DMs with Finbarre.
I have the pleasure of speaking to the poet and novelist Jill Dawson, and this feels like a particularly appropriate one.
She’s a tarot reader, and her latest novel, Pixie, brings Pamela Colman Smith, the artist behind the original Rider-Waite-Smith tarot, vividly into view.
So tonight we’re going to do something Pamela probably would have appreciated.
We’re going to shuffle the cards, see what turns up, let them decide where the conversation goes.
09/09/2026, 20:02 - Jill Dawson:
Hi there. Thank you for having me. Really looking forward to this.
09/09/2026, 20:03 - Finbarre:
Because it turns out you can never have quite enough tarot cards.
Tonight we’re going to be using a brand new deck.
This is my giant Rider-Waite-Smith tarot.
These things are huge. Each one could just be a framed picture.
But I think my postman, and also my Vinted account, are getting rather tired of the number of decks I’ve been buying recently.
I have so many.
How about yourself, Jill?
What got you into tarot?
And currently, what is your favourite deck yet?
09/09/2026, 20:05 - Jill Dawson:
So I remember exactly the very first tarot reading I ever had. And it was something that I wrote in my diary: 19th of September, 1986. So a very long time ago.
And she did indeed use Pamela’s deck, as I think of it now, the Rider-Waite deck, as it used to be called.
And so I didn’t think much of that tarot reading and wanted to learn myself, which I began doing.
And when I got into learning, I was using a real 80s deck. I think it was 1986 it was created, the Motherpeace Round Tarot, by Vicki Noble and Karen Vogel.
And I still use that one every day to just turn a card over and read for myself.
I haven’t got that many compared to a lot of people I know.
I’ve got an abstract one by Ithell Colquhoun. I never really know if I’m saying her name correctly. The surrealist artist.
And Niki de Saint Phalle, another artist.
I love the kind of, I suppose, the creative ones and the ones that take tarot in strange directions.
09/09/2026, 20:09 - Finbarre:
I know the one you mean. I’ve never managed to get my hands on that particular deck.
But interestingly, another writer, Amy S. Kaufman, on Tarot DMs chat number 11, which was back in November 2025, was using the Motherpeace Tarot.
That was the first time that I had seen it. And since then, I’ve looked it up.
And of course, it’s worth a fair bit of money. So not that you’re dashing out to sell it on eBay, but it’s definitely worth hanging on to.
But of course, like me, I have my first ever tarot deck, and there is no way, come hell nor high water, I would give it away.
And it’ll probably be passed down as some kind of cursed heirloom to my kids.
Right. We have, speaking of curses, the first card. And this is the anchor card for this month.
We’re starting with a bang. We’re going in hard, and we’re starting with the Tower.
This is the card that everyone this month will be receiving.
I’m going to ask you a question about this difficult card. Are you ready?
09/09/2026, 20:10 - Finbarre:
09/09/2026, 20:10 - Jill Dawson: Yes!
09/09/2026, 20:12 - Finbarre:
There are a few cards that come with their own sound effects, but this one comes with a reverberation you can almost feel.
Right, your question from the tower would be about witch accusations and murder trials and disappearances and scandal that appear in your books.
I’m thinking of these moments that are apparently stable and then the character’s world can collapse.
So as a storyteller, are you more interested in catastrophe or what the catastrophe reveals?
09/09/2026, 20:15 - Jill Dawson:
I knew it was going to be the Tower before you even spoke, which often happens to me with the tarot. I kind of know which card I’m going to pick. I imagine lots of people have that experience.
And I lived in a tower block in Hackney for a time. And in my second novel, that features a great deal, the tower block, the sense of living in one.
So to answer your question, I think I’m very much interested in people, psychology, the unconscious, the forces that work on us.
So the answer would definitely be, it’s what people do with the catastrophes and things that happen in their lives. How, when the rug is pulled from under you and your world crumbles, how you can land like a cat and dust yourself off and carry on, or you can also crumble.
And I guess I’ve written about witchcraft, obviously, in The Bewitching. I’ve written about domestic violence in several of my novels. I have written about things which we can’t recover from, you know, that are just catastrophic, such as the murder in The Language of Birds of the young Mandy River.
And I think it’s like a sort of story, story swipe, is how I think of it, at the Lord Lucan case. It’s not exactly the same, but it’s sort of touching upon those facts.
And in that case, it’s her friend who has to survive the catastrophic Tower moment of Mandy’s death.
So I guess I’m very much interested in that, in what people do and how they carry on.
09/09/2026, 20:18 - Finbarre: On witchcraft, do you have a familiar yourself?
09/09/2026, 20:19 - Finbarre: I ask, as my three cats are waiting as I type just outside my door with “Feed us Human!” eyes
09/09/2026, 20:20 - Jill Dawson: There is a grey cat with pale green eyes who thinks he is mine but belongs to my neighbour…
09/09/2026, 20:21 - Finbarre: I’m sure ALL cats think you’re theirs! At least every feline I have met so far has that air of aloofness. Aw, give it a scritch from me next time it saunters in!
09/09/2026, 20:22 - Jill Dawson: Indeed…
09/09/2026, 20:24 - Jill Dawson: I have animals which feature prominently in all of my novels: birds, bats, bees, seahorses, hares, snails…
09/09/2026, 20:25 - Finbarre:
One of my children is going through an almighty snail phase.
All of the snails have names.
They will happily just let the snail go slimy, slimy, up the hand over the fingers,
and will regularly hold snail funerals for the ones that pass away.
Thinking about calamity outside of the abstract and into the real world,
how does the energy of the destruction of the tower, whether it be misfortune, bad luck, catastrophe, how does that affect your creative process?
Does it power it?
I’d love to know.
09/09/2026, 20:29 - Jill Dawson:
Oh, that’s a lovely snail story. My novel, The Crime Writer, about Patricia Highsmith, tells of how she kept snails as pets. And while I was working on it, my daughter also did for a bit of research so that I could observe what it was like to try and keep snails. So that’s very funny.
To your question, calamity and how it powers things. I actually got the Tower in that very first reading that I had back in the day when I was young, 1986. And I didn’t like it, but it was accurate. Something was very much coming to an end in my life. It was a very, very big change.
And interestingly, I rarely get that card. I’ve had quite a stable situation for about 25 years without, I’m glad to say, being rocked too much.
Now, the writers I work with, I teach creative writing, of course, use all of the difficult things and the trauma and the darkness in their writing, as do I. But one of the things I advise is that it’s good to do it from a place of stability, so that you feel quite safe with where you’re going in the material.
So, interestingly, I, you know, I’m puzzled by why that card doesn’t come up a lot for me. But equally, that feels correct with the situation I’m in, which is a lot more harmonious. And I feel as if I got a lot of my more difficult experiences out of the way in my 20s and 30s.
I started to publish my first novel around 34. And from that period onwards, was able to go into some quite extreme places because I myself felt rather safe.
Yeah, that’s all I can say there. So, it’s a card that when it comes up, if I’m reading for others, can be alarming, can’t it? People greet that with alarm.
But my training in tarot reading is Jungian. So there is a sort of slight difference there. You’re working with the querent in a kind of co-creation.
So you’re not the boss of them, if you like, you’re allowing the querent to say what they’re seeing. And it feels to me that it’s a little bit more empowering, and takes away what’s most frightening about the Tower, which is the feeling of being out of control, you know, of not being able to control our lives, our situations, a fantasy we probably hold very dear.
09/09/2026, 20:35 - Finbarre:
Jill, I find it incredible that back in 1986, your tarot journey started here. And I can just picture the scene of Madonna’s True Blue playing in the background, possibly Freddie Mercury or Run-DMC and Aerosmith’s Walk This Way.
I would like you, if you’ve got your Rider-Waite-Smith cards, to draw the wild card for me.
Now, normally I would pick out a card, I would ask you to say stop or to find a moment where the right card is being shuffled.
But you’ve got the cards there. I’m sure Pixie wouldn’t mind us bending the rules a little.
So obviously you can’t have the Tower again.
Give the cards a shuffle and take a picture of what is revealed.
09/09/2026, 20:36 - Jill Dawson: Full deck or just Major ?
09/09/2026, 20:36 - Finbarre: Full deck please, we’ll count reversed cards too
09/09/2026, 20:37 - Jill Dawson:
09/09/2026, 20:38 - Finbarre: What a dashing young chap!
09/09/2026, 20:38 - Jill Dawson: Yes! And was upright!
09/09/2026, 20:41 - Finbarre: *Jungian feels like such an odd thing to say out loud
The horse must be very grateful for that.
But this being a card of momentum and acting fast and hot-headedness and sometimes heat without staying power.
I’m curious about the Jungian approach to this card, because that’s not an area that I’m familiar with.
What Jungian vibes would you get?
09/09/2026, 20:44 - Jill Dawson:
Well, interestingly, in the Motherpeace deck, which accords very much with my sort of Jungian training. Yes, Jungian is such a funny word, isn’t it? Carl Jung. I never, again, I’m sure I’m pronouncing it correctly.
But the Motherpeace deck, it’s the son of wands rather than the knight of wands. And it’s quite a playful figure. As you say, charging forward, when I see that, I know myself to be an impulsive person. So I respond to that card quite well.
I would say that one of the things the Jungian training emphasizes is intuition over overthinking. We are encouraged to build a relationship with our cards, our own deck.
And so if they mean a particular thing to us, so for example, the two knights cards, well, as again, I call them sons because S-O-N-S, that’s what they’re called in Motherpeace.
There’s a son of discs and a son of swords, and I think of each of them as my two sons. And that’s a particular way I read them, sort of making a very personal relationship with the cards.
The Jungian course I did was a couple of years, and it was with clinicians, including a wonderful guy in his 70s who was really an old hippie who loved the tarot for a very long time, but was now a very senior Jungian academic, incredibly knowledgeable.
And I always felt he brought a great deal more to every reading through attentiveness to even the tiniest, you know, there is a little snail, isn’t there, on one of the cards? Is it the nine of diamonds? Off the top of my head, I can’t remember.
But those tiny details that we were looking for, I began responding to.
What else? I mean, there’s the sort of idea of everything having a shadow, of the collective unconscious, so that the cards and the tarot knowledge is part of all of our collective unconscious and knowledge of sort of archetypes.
There are many, many ways in which the... it’s a very interesting way to look at tarot.
And because I’d been doing it for a long time, at that point, 30-odd years, I suppose I wanted to deepen my practice, not by learning more, you know, lists and interpretations. I was a bit tired of those, but learning different ways to respond to the cards.
And just to say quickly, I did also have a reading with the designer of the Motherpeace deck, Vicki Noble, along with her collaborator, Karen Vogel, who did the illustrations.
Vicki is incredibly knowledgeable, also in her 70s, and living in California. And that was just truly wonderful.
09/09/2026, 20:46 - Jill Dawson: 9 of Pentacles!
09/09/2026, 20:46 - Finbarre:
If I lean over to my Knight of Wands card here, make sure he has the visor lifted above his gorgeous auburn locks there, and ask him what question I should pose to you.
It would be, what is your relationship between travel and storytelling?
09/09/2026, 20:49 - Jill Dawson:
What a brilliant question. Travel.
I lived in the States. I’ve taught in the States. I lived in a log cabin in Washington for a time. And for me, writing comes out of place very often.
Also, it comes out of physical sort of... how do I express this? It comes out of movement, not just sitting at my desk.
So, for example, walking, swimming, going places is how I do my research.
I don’t think that just sitting at my desk thinking is the best way to get the best novel out of me.
And for the new novel that I’m writing, I’ve travelled to the Hebrides. In the past, for my novel on the poet Rupert Brooke, I went to Tahiti.
I think travel is absolutely crucial to me as an enlivening, enriching experience. Of course, it is for everyone. But something about travelling alone with the agenda of looking for something that you need without really knowing what it is.
I’ve got a wonderful anecdote of going to Fort Worth, where Patricia Highsmith was from, going into a bookshop, asking, did they have a book by her? And the bookseller sort of looked very strange and disappeared.
And then he returned wheeling in a wheelchair a very old chap who turned out to be his father, who’d known Patricia Highsmith when she was a girl. So this man had known her when she was six years old.
And you can only get that if you go somewhere. And no amount of books would have brought that moment to me. No amount of dusty archives.
So I have a lot of synchronicities, which is another Jungian concept. But, you know, rather magical, strange things that happen the moment I begin working on something creatively.
And that’s just one example. I have tons and tons of them. I love seeing how they gather around me once I begin a book.
09/09/2026, 20:53 - Finbarre:
Jill the hour has absolutely flown by leaving us now with the third card which is the Gift card and this was conjured up from a conversation that I had with the peripatetic prince of punk himself, Frank Turner. In that conversation the Seven of Wands made an appearance yeah it’s another wands card and this one is yours.
I’ll just show you the picture.
09/09/2026, 20:53 - Finbarre:
09/09/2026, 20:54 - Finbarre:
With your pen held like a quarterstaff, can you tell me if you’ve ever defended a character that you’ve written about against history?
09/09/2026, 20:56 - Jill Dawson:
I feel I’ve defended characters many times, and it’s a strong impulse of mine.
So thank you for that card.
For example, the nanny that I mentioned in The Language of Birds, the young woman who’s murdered. That’s very much an impassioned plea for us to remember the victims of crimes and not romanticize murderers, as Lord Lucan was in his time.
And the victim he left behind was very much forgotten.
So there’s that one.
There’s my novel, The Bewitching, where I’m very much defending the woman charged with witchcraft. It’s a true story of Alice Samuel.
Yes, it’s a strong impulse of mine.
And what a lovely card to receive.
And just to quickly say, I’m starting an online course tomorrow called Seven Secrets Every Writer Should Know.
Actually, not tomorrow. Next week, I meant to say, next Tuesday.
But the sevens in that image, I think that’s very helpful to me and is a number I really resonate with.
09/09/2026, 21:00 - Finbarre:
Something tells me from the impish giggling I can picture on the edge of my hearing that this question would need an entire week’s worth of conversation.
Of course, I need to ask you about Pixie.
And how do you think, going back to defending characters, as a significant figure of history, how do you think she’s been misunderstood?
09/09/2026, 21:03 - Jill Dawson:
I think it’s safe to say that Pamela Colman Smith was very much written out of tarot’s story for a long time.
And in favour of, you know, people understanding Arthur Edward Waite, his contribution. He described her as a draftswoman and someone he might have to spoon-feed. And I think for a long time, that’s how she was seen.
Now, I really, really hope in my novel, Pixie, I give a very, very different version of that.
And I would say I’m doing an event, for example, at the UK Tarot Conference where she’s being honoured and people are very much more aware of her. The event is on October 9th and 10th, at Copthorne Tara Hotel, London.
But one thing I want to say, that in my talks I’m giving about the novel, people often say, “Oh, Pamela died in penury in Cornwall,” and has, you know, how sad that is.
And she did have a lot of significant money struggles. But it’s worth saying she didn’t die in penury. She died owing a lot to the Inland Revenue, which is quite a different thing.
It suggests she made a lot of money or made money and didn’t pay her tax, one or the other.
It’s still very sad. It’s part of a, you know, a sad end for her that she wanted to leave the money to her life partner, Nora Lake, and wasn’t able to.
And that her most famous quote is, “I just done a very big job for a very little cash, 80 cards. Some people may like them.”
And as we know, all these years later, hundreds of millions of people have liked them.
So yes, that is sad.
But I guess with Pixie, with my novel, I really, really want to celebrate her and celebrate creativity and that impulse to draw, design, make things exist, create things, which is very strong and persists, even when, you know, money isn’t forthcoming, fame isn’t certain.
And in many cases, not just hers, but artists are overlooked in their lifetime.
So I love that I’m bringing, I’m part of bringing her name back into people’s consciousness.
I’m hearing that a lot on the talks I give about my novel and that pleases me immensely.
And I feel it would very much please her.
09/09/2026, 21:08 - Finbarre:
One last thing before we put the cards away.
Jill, could you pass on the gift of Pixie?
Draw a card, whichever you like.
And that will be handed to the next person on Tarot DMs.
It could be a good, bad, unusual, mysterious one.
09/09/2026, 21:09 - Jill Dawson:
09/09/2026, 21:10 - Jill Dawson: Haha! I genuinely picked this
09/09/2026, 21:11 - Finbarre:
I do love the teeny-weeny fish and that nonchalant air of nonsense the card has.
It’s a very lovely one to leave things on.
Jill, thank you so much for spending an hour with Tarot DMs and for bringing Pixie into the conversation.
Pixie‘s out now and gives Pamela Colman Smith something she was denied far too often in her own lifetime: centre stage.
Thank you, Jill!
09/09/2026, 21:12 - Jill Dawson: Daughter of Cups in Motherpeace. Radiating joy to others!
09/09/2026, 21:12 - Jill Dawson:
Thank you, Finbarre. And I’m glad I left you with that fish in a cup as a gift from Pixie, which I did genuinely pick. Thanks for interviewing me. It has been fabulous.