Celebrate the Magic of Pride with Ash + Chess
RP Mystic is celebrating Pride Month with a magical Q&A with Ash + Chess, creators of Queer Tarot: An Inclusive Deck and Guidebook and My Queer Year: A Guided Journal. Read on to learn more about what Pride means to Ash + Chess, how they manifest that Pride in their tarot deck, and how Pride influenced the creation of their guided journal.
Plus: Teach kids that they can all be affectionate, beautiful, courageous, and more with the adorable board book ABC-Deconstructing Gender, featuring a bright and bold poster on the other side of the book’s jacket. Celebrate all types of families with their inclusive picture book, Just Like My Family, featuring a bonus sheet of vibrant stickers. Show off your own Pride with The Big Book of Queer Stickers, featuring over 1,000 stickers from flags to rainbows to slogans and more.
Ash + Chess, thank you so much for taking the time to chat with us during Pride Month! This is such a magical event for the LGBTQIA+ community, and everyone experiences and shares that Pride in so many different ways. What does Pride mean to you?
Pride to us is celebrating the community around you and the part you play in it. It’s about taking care of each other and fighting for equity and equality for all LGBTQIA+ people. We are starting to see so much visibility and acceptance, but with both of those comes backlash from the people who don’t want to see us thrive, and that has taken the form of policing trans bodies and bodies with uteruses, rolling back protections and rights for LGBTQIA+ people, and outward hate and bullying towards the community. While Pride has always been about celebrating how far we’ve come, the most important thing to remember is that we are STILL on that journey and we are still under attack.
How can modern mystics use Queer Tarot to manifest the values you most love about Pride?
When we were making this deck, the two biggest things we had in mind for what this deck could help cultivate in readers is a deeper understanding of your queer sense of self as well as the importance and the connection you have to your community. While solitude is good for some things, the community will always have your back.
Queer Tarot is certainly bursting with Pride – from the art to the models to the guidebook. What kinds of discoveries did you make about yourselves and the community while creating the deck?
While casting for the Queer Tarot, we saw so many submissions come in. We had to narrow down from over 500 applicants to about 100 and it was so hard. While doing this though, we discovered how cute and special and connected queer people are. People shared their stories, backgrounds, and favorite tarot cards with us. Being able to hear everyone’s bits and pieces of their lives made us realize that it really is true – community is the most important thing! We realized that by creating this deck, we were creating a way for queers to become even more connected to each other and to recognize that and cherish it.
We love the bright, bold design of My Queer Year! How has your Pride influenced the creation of this unique journal?
Like all of the projects we do, everything we make is inspired by what we would’ve liked to see on shop shelves growing up. I (Ash) was a big fan of guided journals growing up, so getting to a point in our creative careers where we could create our own version that is more focused around your queer identity is so exciting! We hope that this little journal will shine some light and help in guiding people to experiment with their identity and discover their true selves.
Explore the Ash + Chess Collection
Featured Titles
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Queer Tarot
$28.00
$36.00 CAD
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My Queer Year
$22.00
$28.00 CAD
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The Big Book of Queer Stickers
$28.00
$35.00 CAD
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ABC-Deconstructing Gender
$18.99
$23.99 CAD
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Just Like My Family
$18.99
$24.99 CAD
