Arcana is a memoir in essays structured around the tarot’s Major Arcana, using archetype as a narrative lens to explore anxiety, faith, lineage, and the transformative work of care. Each essay pairs a card with lived experience, treating tarot not as divination but as a language for meaning-making.
Arcana exists because of four simple words: For you, from you.
They arrived unexpectedly during an automatic writing exercise in a spiritual development class, written in my grandmother’s unmistakable handwriting. At the time, I was stuck trying to figure out what kind of book I was supposed to write. Should it be spiritual? Memoir? Self-help? Something that taught a lesson or solved a problem? But those four words shifted everything. I understood them not as for you, the reader, but for me, from me. They gave me permission to stop chasing the book I thought I should write and begin writing the one I had been searching for all along.
That decision became the foundation of my MFA thesis in Creative Nonfiction and, over the years that followed, grew into Arcana. Every essay began as an honest conversation with my life through the lens of the major arcana of tarot. I explored my anxiety, my faith, my motherhood, my stories, and my growing trust that meaning isn’t something we find once and for all, but something we make over a lifetime. I hope that by sharing my own search, you’ll feel a little more permission to trust your own.
Jesse Janelle is a writer and the owner of Willowdale Bookshop, an independent bookstore in Rowley, Massachusetts. Her work explores intuition, identity, motherhood, and the stories we tell ourselves in order to make meaning of our lives.
Her debut memoir, Arcana, uses the tarot’s Major Arcana as a narrative framework to examine anxiety, faith, family, and the lifelong practice of learning to trust ourselves.
Before opening her bookstore, Jesse spent more than a decade coaching leaders, writers, and creatives through periods of personal and professional transformation. Her 2023 TEDx Talk, The Power of Self-Trust, was one of the most-watched talks of the year.
Jesse holds a BA in Psychology from Boston College and is completing her MFA in Creative Nonfiction at Bay Path University. She lives in Rowley, Massachusetts, with her husband, three children, and far too many books.
