Madame Clairevoyant's Guide to the Stars: An Interview with Claire Comstock-Gay
Talking to the Claire about Minneapolis, astrology, and building true communities
I became friendly with Claire Comstock-Gay (or Madame Clairevoyant) over Twitter a few years ago, but we really became friends during the pandemic. She’s smart, intelligent, empathetic — and her book was one that I bought immediately when it came out exactly a year ago today. I read it aloud to my friends in their backyard during a socially distanced hangout. Like Claire’s friendship, it was one of the bright spots of the pandemic for me.
As we naturally began talking more in the past few weeks — partly to discuss working together in various ways as well as the situation in Minneapolis, I realized I wanted to share what she was saying with everyone I knew. Here’s a GChat interview we did on Sunday, which we edited together over the past few days as news came in on George Floyd’s murderer being found guilty on all counts.
Sulagna: Hey, how have you been?
Claire: Hi!! I’ve been ok! Fine personally, but things are so bad in the Twin Cities
Sulagna: Just reminds you how slow progress can be
But one thing I think about constantly is how differently people read and respond to the news
Claire: Say more!!
Sulagna: Haha, ok! I think I'm of course influenced by my Twitter feed
But one person I've followed for a very long time is Mariame Kaba, who wrote that op-ed for the NYT
And I learned a lot from her, especially over the Trump administration -- specifically about the problems inherent in incarceration and policing
Claire: She's really one of maybe a half dozen people who are ACTUALLY doing good political education work on twitter
Sulagna: Seriously
Claire: Everyone else THINKS they are lol
But she's actually doing it
Sulagna: I mean that's how we bonded, right?
Mutually side-eyeing people on Twitter
Claire: It is!!!
So many authorities
So many experts
So many geniuses
But this past year i've started feeling like, okay, we're all losing your marbles, if someone wants to be a half-baked expert on twitter it's not my business anymore!
Maturity, or depression? Hard to say
Sulagna: I mean I think I've matured at a rapid rate over the course of the past year...but I still love Twitter drama
I feel like I can just tell when someone isn't worth my time a lot quicker though
Wait you tricked me!! I am talking about myself
You are good at this!
Let's talk about you
Claire: Lol my gift, my curse!!
My Cancer side
Sulagna: Your book is a year old and you're my favorite astrologer online
I think it's because astrology can be so individualistic, an outcropping of the usual American culture antics
But you really make it feel connected to the world
So often your horoscopes for my sign are about how to react to the world and how the world will react to me
Claire: Ahhh thank you
It's what I aim for--to write in a way that’s connected to the world, while also taking our private inner lives seriously too
It's something I've been thinking about a lot lately, the way the dominant mode of astrology right now can be so intensely individualistic
But I don't think it has to be that way! It hasn't always been that way!
It's possible for astrology to be really tuned in to our collective experiences and our collective future, while also capturing the full beautiful messiness of our individual human lives
And I think astrology really is perfectly structured to deal with the push-pull of individual/shared experience
BUT that doesn't mean that's how it's always used, obviously
But it's what I try to work toward
Sulagna: I really love it
I know this is some funny therapy speak, but your writing really speaks to my inner child
Like I usually read horoscopes when I'm feeling frustrated or impatient or just in a bad mood
And I always feel like your writing soothes me
Both validates my feelings and lets them pass
Claire: Lol! This is so nice though, thank you
Back in the fall sometime, I read some random horoscope online that told me I should "think back on all the adventures I had over the past six months"
Terrible!!! What adventures!?
It's been funny to see how different horoscope writers have/haven't tried to direct their writing to address the world we're living in right now
I mean, I think lots of people have!! But it's definitely hard to address that the world is so horrible, without writing horoscopes that just feel horrible to read
Sulagna: Yeah..."relatable" "pandemic" "content" is very surreal
I think another reason yours work so well are because they're only about one's emotional world
Not about career, or romance, or anything like that
Claire: That was kind of what got me into writing horoscopes in the first place--feeling like all the horoscopes I read about jobs and dating were SO BORING
I could never relate!!
Obviously, there are plenty of astrologers whose work is way deeper than the stuff at the back of the teen magazines I was reading when I was young, but I didn't know that yet!
But now there are so so so many really smart astrologers out there, and it's so much easier to find smart astrology writing, which is a really wonderful development
Lol it's also easy to find really nutty astrology writing, but I don't think that's really a bad thing
Half the astrology memes I see make no sense at all but I love them anyway
The more different types of astrology, the better, to me
(A lot of traditional astrologers DO NOT agree with me on this though)
Sulagna: I love nutty astrology writing
I love sending them to my friends to bully them
Claire: Lol!!
I love the full-on nutty stuff that's just having fun SO much more than the nutty stuff with a traditional veneer
A lot of the accepted stereotypes about the sun signs are nutty, imo!
There's definitely no sign/placement/chart that's like...."THIS is the sign of good people only"
People reallllllly want there to be!
People really want to know which are the bad signs and which are the good ones!
Sulagna: Yeah, like with Scorpios!
Or Geminis
Claire: And Geminis!
Haha yes!
Really so much of mainstream astrology culture—and by mainstream I mean the type of astrology you’d see in a general audience magazine, or an astrology book published by a general audience publisher (like mine is!)—is about flattening and un-complicating the world
And to me this is kind of sad, because I think it contributes to a lot of people’s sense that astrology has nothing to offer to anyone who cares about the world or other people in a thoughtful or serious way
Sulagna: How did that influence how you approached the book?
Claire: I thought a lot about how to write an astrology book that’s fun and readable
but that also doesn’t ignore the fact that no matter what’s in your astrological chart
you’re living under the impossible weight of this horrible system
Some of the chapters touch on this more lightly, and some are more explicit—the Virgo chapter, for instance, is about the artist and AIDS activist David Wojnarowicz and the novelist and communist Leslie Feinberg
Sulagna: Can you say more about the signs?
I really loved how you divided up the signs and went deep into their mythology by using pop culture and history
Like how you talked about Mariah Carey (a triple Aries!), and like you said, the Virgo chapter.
Claire: I think that a lot of the time, when mainstream astrology tries to distill a sun sign to its broad essence, it ends up creating this sort of imagined everyman character—the essential Virgo, for instance, ends up being portrayed as this naive neat freak of a person—who isn’t really representative of most people at all
In this book, I wanted to open up space for how we can think about these signs when we do take into consideration the immense systems of violence that most of us are subject to, all the time
What if we saw Virgo not just to mean being a perfectionist in our atomized individual lives, but about being kind of a perfectionist about the world—refusing to accept or be chill with these systems that keeps harming your and the people you love? Etc
Sulagna: Can you say a little bit about your work experience? I really loved learning about you as a person through the book as well.
Claire: Oh, hah thanks
For a long time, my full-time job was working at a shelter for LGBT youth in New York—as a counselor and a case manager and an HIV tester
It’s something I don’t talk about a ton on the astrology side of my life, but I do think it’s shaped a lot of how I approach this work
A lot of the young people I worked with obsessed with astrology—would they see space for themselves and their lives in the ways I write about the signs? Maybe not always, but it’s something to work toward
At the very least, I want to create space in astrology to see the signs in a more expansive way, in a way that makes room not just for our “personalities” but our whole lives, feelings and actions and relationships and all.
Buy Claire’s book Madame Clairevoyant’s Guide to the Stars: Bookshop | Barnes & Noble | Indiebound | Amazon.
I also asked Claire where she suggested we donate and she said:
I think the best place is to donate anywhere listed on the Reclaim the Block's community donations page — they keep this list up to date, and it's all individuals and projects working on the ground in the community: bit.ly/fundthecommunity
I’m doing more interviews with writers and novelists and just plain interesting people these days. Reply to this email or email me at sulagnamisracontact@gmail.com if you want to talk about your newly (or oldly) published book; a book we both loved and read; or just plain fun internet stuff.