Sarah Henstra's new novel explores tarot, cults and the secrets of the art world
The author of The Lost Tarot spoke with Christa Couture on The Next Chapter
Sarah Henstra's The Lost Tarot is a decade-spanning mystery exploring themes of love, power and persuasion from an English commune to the halls of the University of Toronto.
The Lost Tarot follows Toronto art historian Theresa who receives a tarot card in the mail. Depicting the work of legendary artist Lark Ringold, the card would mean a career breakthrough. The only problem is the card shouldn't exist. Ringold and all his work were lost in a fire in 1938 that also destroyed the mysterious cult known as the Shown. To prove the card is real Theresa must delve into the secrets of the Shown.
Henstra is a Toronto-based author and professor at Toronto Metropolitan University. Her novel The Red Word won the Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction in 2018.
She discussed her fascination with cults, academia and tarot with Christa Couture on The Next Chapter.
The book starts with Theresa, the art historian at the center of the story. She gets a tarot known as the Ringold Tarot in the mail. Can you tell us a little bit why this card is so important to her and the rest of the art world?
Lark Ringold is an artist from the 1930s who died in a fire in which most of his work was also lost. What's left of his work has almost taken on a kind of legendary status that's in the past tense part of the novel. In the present tense, Theresa at the University of Toronto is studying Lark Ringold's work. The body of work that was lost in this fire was a set of paintings for a deck of tarot cards and there are some accounts of what they looked like, but they don't exist. So when Theresa receives this image in the mail, she recognizes it right away as Lark's work, but it confounds her because these paintings aren't supposed to be floating around anywhere out there.
She starts to be drawn into the mystery of how can this image exist? Is there some way that these paintings made it through? Who has sent this card to her, who's encouraging her to connect the dots in this way?
What made you decide to write about a tarot card as opposed to other different visual art forms?
Well, actually the tarot cards is what sort of was the initiating spark of this story to me. I have always been interested in the tarot, not so much as a sort of fortune telling tool or an occult game like Ouija boards or something like that, but as a kind of collection of images that represent a history of mythology and archetypes that have to do with different aspects of human psychology.
From the time that I first discovered the tarot in high school, and took some books out of the library and started reading about it, there was a little bit of an aspect of "ooh, I'm going to read my friend's tarot cards, and that will make me more popular." I was always desperate for anything at all that might make me more popular, nothing really worked.
I became more and more interested in the symbolism and concentrated history that each one of these cards has from throughout the centuries.- Sarah Henstra
I became more and more interested in the symbolism and concentrated history that each one of these cards has from throughout the centuries.
And the first setting we're brought into in The Lost Tarot is the world of academia. This is one you know well as a scholar, a university professor. How much of your own experiences did you draw on when it comes to Theresa's challenges, like claiming ownership of work, facing biases in her profession?
Quite a bit, actually. I know what it's like, you know, to be sort of pinching pennies and wondering how far you're gonna have to move away from your family in order to get a full time job and at the same time, being passionately in love with a particular research subject.
I knew long before I entered grad school that if I could spend the rest of my life on a university campus, I'd be very, very happy.
In terms of the biases and some of the discouraging things that can happen, I think that's a very real aspect of every young scholar's life. In particular, the young female scholars that were more readily dismissed in terms of how serious their subjects of study were and how capable they were of commanding a lecture hall with hundreds of students.
I think a lot of those hierarchies and biases are still in place, especially for minoritized people of different groups.- Sarah Henstra
I do think things have shifted a little bit in that regard. There are many more female mentors, especially in the humanities, or maybe only in the humanities, I can't speak for STEM. But I think a lot of those hierarchies and biases are still in place, especially for minoritized people of different groups.
Without giving away too much, as the secrets of the novel reveal themselves, we learned some surprising things about both the present and the past. What makes deception so compelling to write and read?
Well there's the enjoyment, leading a reader in one direction and then forcing them to sort of stop and backtrack a little and think about what they've just read. That's really enjoyable for me as a writer as well.
People only see what they want to see.- Sarah Henstra
Deception actually emerges as a theme in the novel, there's a line that gets repeated by several of the characters at key moments, which is that people only see what they want to see.
That desire to stay in your comfort zone and have your beliefs reaffirmed leaves room for people who are out to get power over other people to manipulate that so that they can profit from it. That happens in both timelines of the novel to various degrees.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
