Michelle Tea – författare

In this enchanted sibling to the cult classic Modern Tarot, literary and tarot icon Michelle Tea returns to her magical roots, offering stories, little-known history, traditions, rituals, and spells for any modern witch seeking a deeper spiritual practice.A self-described DIY witch and professional tarot reader, literary and feminist icon Michelle Tea provides a fascinating magical history and spiritual traditions from around the world, giving us the tools, spells, and rituals to navigate our stressed-out, consumer-driven lives. Witty, down-to-earth, and wise, she bewitches us with tales of how she crafted her own magical practice and came into her own. She also shares enchanting stories from her earliest witchy days as a goth teen in Massachusetts as well as insights from her adult practice. Modern Magic is a guide to queer spirituality that gives us the tools to tap into a stronger, distinctive magic that lies within us, one that incorporates feminist, anti-racist, and intersectional values. These include:Love Magic for the 21st centuryHexes for when you really need them (and an exploration of magical ethics)Sleep Magic, from dream interpretation traditions to prophetic dreamsThoughts on why magic practice is spiritual practiceMichelle shares her truth and observations about the world around us as well as her vision for what it could be. For novice and seasoned witches alike, Modern Magic is the essential guide for defining and deepening a practice that aligns with our individual political and spiritual values.

In Spencer’s fantasies, the breezy, queer streets of Provincetown are utopia, a place where he can be free. And when a violent attack in his suburban Arizona schoolyard sends him to the hospital, he decides queer utopia can’t wait. One night, with the help of his best friend, the teenage witch Joy, he hitches a ride to find it. What follows is a cross-country road odyssey throughout the USA, taking Spencer from new moon rituals in Arizona canyons to Texas bus stations, from the luxe drag stages of Houston’s Montrose district to the jazz-soaked streets of New Orleans and beyond. This new novel from Michelle Tea tells the story, by turns raw, romantic, and sweet, of a sheltered boy taking his first leap into queer life, among all the complicated queers who live it.

'A wonderfully disgusting book ... invigorating' DAZED Best Books for Pride MonthThe 25th anniversary edition of Michelle Tea's classic coming-of-age story, now with a foreword by Maggie Nelson, award-winning author of The Argonauts'One of the few truly life changing books I've encountered' Torrey Peters, bestselling author of Detransition, BabyFleeing Tucson and her troublesome on-and-off ex-girlfriend, Michelle lands in queer San Francisco's riotous underbelly, stumbling through her early twenties in a haze of nightlife, drug adventures, scams and a string of hookups, break-ups and make-ups. As butches and dykes spin in and out of her orbit, she considers the force and casual cruelty of their desires and her own. Heady, beer-sticky and brimming with life, Valencia is a sharply observed and piercingly funny chronicle of a year lived close to the bone. 'If you want to know how dangerous and great and awful it is to be a girl, you'll scarf Valencia right up' Eileen Myles, author of Chelsea Girls'Michelle Tea is an intoxicating writer, delivering sentences that land with the snap and force of a punch' Guardian

The beloved literary iconoclast delivers a fresh twenty-first century primer on tarot that can be used with any deck. While tarot has gone mainstream with a diverse range of tarot decks widely available, there has been no equally mainstream guide to the tarot-one that can be applied to any deck-until now. Infused with beloved iconoclastic author Michelle Tea's unique insight, inviting pop sensibility, and wicked humor, Modern Tarot is a fascinating journey through the cards that teaches how to use this tradition to connect with our higher selves. Whether you're a committed seeker or a digital-age skeptic-or perhaps a little of both-Tea's essential guide opens the power of tarot to you. Modern Tarot doesn't require you to believe in the supernatural or narrowly focus on the tarot as a divination tool. Tea instead provides incisive descriptions of each of the 78 cards in the tarot system-each illustrated in the charmingly offbeat style of cartoonist Amanda Verwey-and introduces specially designed card-based rituals that can be used with any deck to guide you on a path toward radical growth and self-improvement.Tea reveals how tarot offers moments of deep, transformative connection-an affirming, spiritual experience that is gentle, individual, and aspirational. Grounded in Tea's twenty-five years of tarot wisdom and her abiding love of the cards, and featuring 78 black and white illustrations throughout, Modern Tarot is the ultimate introduction to the tradition of the tarot for millennial readers.

From PEN/America Award winner, 2021 Guggenheim fellow, and beloved literary and tarot icon Michelle Tea, the hilarious, powerfully written, taboo-breaking story of her journey to pregnancy and motherhood as a 40 year-old, queer, uninsured womanWritten in intimate, gleefully TMI prose, Knocking Myself Up is the irreverent account of Tea’s route to parenthood—with a group of ride-or-die friends, a generous drag queen, and a whole lot of can-do pluck. Along the way she falls in love with a wholesome genderqueer a decade her junior, attempts biohacking herself a baby with black market fertility meds (and magicking herself an offspring with witch-enchanted honey), learns her eggs are busted, and enters the Fertility Industrial Complex in order to carry her younger lover’s baby.With the signature sharp wit and wild heart that have made her a favorite to so many readers, Tea guides us through the maze of medical procedures, frustrations and astonishments on the path to getting pregnant, wryly critiquing some of the systems that facilitate that choice (“a great, punk, daredevil thing to do”). In Knocking Myself Up, Tea has crafted a deeply entertaining and profound memoir, a testament to the power of love and family-making, however complex our lives may be, to transform and enrich us.Part punk rock quest, part love story, this unforgettable memoir explores one woman's refusal to take no for an answer.Single Mother by Choice: Tea's initial plan to go it alone, complete with witch-enchanted honey, black market fertility meds, and a whole lot of can-do pluck.An Unconventional Love Story: Just as she decides to get pregnant, she falls for Orson, a wholesome genderqueer a decade her junior, turning her solo mission into an unexpected partnership.The Power of Chosen Family: From a ride-or-die group of friends to Quentin, the generous drag queen sperm donor, this is a story built on fierce queer community.Navigating the Fertility Industrial Complex: A raw, hilarious, and critical look at the maze of medical procedures, baffling costs, and emotional highs and lows of trying to conceive when you're uninsured and queer.

From PEN/America Award winner, 2021 Guggenheim fellow, and beloved literary and tarot icon Michelle Tea, the hilarious, powerfully written, taboo-breaking story of her journey to pregnancy and motherhood as a 40 year-old, queer, uninsured womanWritten in intimate, gleefully TMI prose, Knocking Myself Up is the irreverent account of Teas route to parenthoodwith a group of ride-or-die friends, a generous drag queen, and a whole lot of can-do pluck. Along the way she falls in love with a wholesome genderqueer a decade her junior, attempts biohacking herself a baby with black market fertility meds (and magicking herself an offspring with witch-enchanted honey), learns her eggs are busted, and enters the Fertility Industrial Complex in order to carry her younger lovers baby.With the signature sharp wit and wild heart that have made her a favorite to so many readers, Tea guides us through the maze of medical procedures, frustrations and astonishments on the path to getting pregnant, wryly critiquing some of the systems that facilitate that choice (a great, punk, daredevil thing to do). In Knocking Myself Up, Tea has crafted a deeply entertaining and profound memoir, a testament to the power of love and family-making, however complex our lives may be, to transform and enrich us.

A raw and surprisingly beautiful coming-of-age memoir, Coal to Diamonds tells the story of Mary Beth Ditto, a girl from rural Arkansas who found her voice.   Born and raised in Judsonia, Arkansas—a place where indoor plumbing was a luxury, squirrel was a meal, and sex ed was taught during senior year in high school (long after many girls had gotten pregnant and dropped out) Beth Ditto stood out. Beth was a fat, pro-choice, sexually confused choir nerd with a great voice, an eighties perm, and a Kool Aid dye job. Her single mother worked overtime, which meant Beth and her five siblings were often left to fend for themselves. Beth spent much of her childhood as a transient, shuttling between relatives, caring for a sickly, volatile aunt she nonetheless loved, looking after sisters, brothers, and cousins, and trying to steer clear of her mother’s bad boyfriends.   Her punk education began in high school under the tutelage of a group of teens—her second family—who embraced their outsider status and introduced her to safety-pinned clothing, mail-order tapes, queer and fat-positive zines, and any shred of counterculture they could smuggle into Arkansas. With their help, Beth survived high school, a tragic family scandal, and a mental breakdown, and then she got the hell out of Judsonia. She decamped to Olympia, Washington, a late-1990s paradise for Riot Grrrls and punks, and began to cultivate her glamorous, queer, fat, femme image. On a whim—with longtime friends Nathan, a guitarist and musical savant in a polyester suit, and Kathy, a quiet intellectual turned drummer—she formed the band Gossip. She gave up trying to remake her singing voice into the ethereal wisp she thought it should be and instead embraced its full, soulful potential. Gossip gave her that chance, and the raw power of her voice won her and Gossip the attention they deserved.   Marked with the frankness, humor, and defiance that have made her an international icon, Beth Ditto’s unapologetic, startlingly direct, and poetic memoir is a hypnotic and inspiring account of a woman coming into her own.From the Hardcover edition.

“A gutsy, wise memoir-in-essays from a writer praised as ‘impossible to put down’”—PeopleFrom the author of the acclaimed genre-bending Black Wave comes this moving personal essay collection about the trials and triumphs of shedding your vices in order to find yourself. As an aspiring young writer in San Francisco, Michelle Tea lived in a scuzzy communal house: she drank; she smoked; she snorted anything she got her hands on; she toiled for the minimum wage; she dated men and women, and sometimes both at once. But between hangovers and dead-end jobs, she scrawled in notebooks and organized dive bar poetry readings, working to make her literary dreams a reality.   In How to Grow Up, Tea shares her awkward stumble towards the life of a Bona Fide Grown-Up: healthy, responsible, self-aware, and stable. She writes about passion, about her fraught relationship with money, about adoring Barney’s while shopping at thrift stores, about breakups and the fertile ground between relationships, about roommates and rent, and about being superstitious (“why not, it imbues this harsh world of ours with a bit of magic”).  At once heartwarming and darkly comic, How to Grow Up proves that the road less traveled may be a difficult one, but if you embrace life’s uncertainty and dust yourself off after every screw up, slowly but surely, you just might make it to adulthood.   “Wild, wickedly funny, and refreshingly relevant.” —Elle  “This compulsively readable collection is so damn good, you’ll tear through the whole thing (and possibly take notes along the way).” —BustleFrom the Trade Paperback edition.

"Heartbreakingly beautiful writing; sometimes funny, sometimes shattering—always revolutionary. Truly amazing collection!"--Margaret Cho"Sister Spit is like the underground railroad for burgeoning queer writers. Not only in the van, but in the audiences trapped in the hinterlands of America and looking to escape. Sister Spit saves lives."--Justin Vivian Bond, author of TANGO: My Childhood, Backwards and in High HeelsA collection of writing and artwork from the irreverent, flagrantly queer, hilariously feminist, tough-talking, genre-busting ruffians who have toured with the legendary Sister Spit. Co-founded in 1997 by award-winning writer Michelle Tea, Sister Spit is an underground cultural institution, a gender-bending writers'' cabaret that brings a changing roster of both emerging writers and some of the most important queer and counterculture artists of the day to universities, art galleries, community spaces, and other venues across the country and worldwide.Sister Spit: Writing, Rants and Reminiscence from the Road captures the provocative, politicized, and risk-taking elements that characterize the Sister Spit aesthetic, stamping the raw energy and signature style of the live show onto the page. Bratty poets and failed priestesses, punk angst and tough love, too much to drink and tattooed timelines—this anthology captures it all in a collection of poetry, personal narrative, fiction, and artwork. Featuring a who''s who of queer and queer-centric writers and artists, the collection functions as a travelog, a historical document, and a yearbook from irreverent graduates of the school of hard knocks.Eileen Myles * Beth Lisick * Michelle Tea * MariNaomi * Cristy Road * Ali Liebegott * Blake Nelson * Lenelle Moise * and Many More!

A Literary Hub Notable Small Press Book of 2025A new epic novel about a teenage queer runaway from cult classic author of Black Wave and Valencia Michelle Tea.In Spencers fantasies, the breezy, queer streets of Provincetown, MA, are utopia, a place where he can be free. Yet when a violent attack in his suburban Arizona schoolyard sends him to the hospital, he decides queer utopia cant wait. And one night, with the help of his best friend, the teenage witch Joy, he hitches a ride to find it.The cross-country road odyssey that follows brings Spencer from new moon rituals in Arizona canyons to Texas bus stations, from the luxe drag stages of Houstons Montrose district to the jazz-soaked streets of the French Quarter and beyond. This new novel from Michelle Tea tells the story, by turns raw, romantic, and sweet, of a sheltered boy taking his first leap into queer life, among all the complicated queers who live it.

In this gritty, confessional memoir, Michelle Tea takes the reader back to the city of her childhood: Chelsea, Massachusetts,a place where time and hope are spent on things not getting any worse. Tea's girlhood is shaped by the rough fabric of the neighbourhood and by its characters,the soft vulnerability of her sister Madeline and her quietly brutal Polish father the doddering, sometimes violent nuns of Our Lady of Assumption Marisol Lewis from the projects by the creek and Johnna Latrotta, the tough-as-nails Italian dance-school teacher who offered a slim chance for escape to every young Chelsea girl in tulle and tap shoes. Told in Tea's trademark loose-tongued, lyrical style, this memoir both celebrates and annihilates one girl's tightrope walk out of a working-class slum and the lessons she carries with her. With wry humour and a hard-fought wisdom, Tea limns the extravagant peril of a dramatic adolescence with the private, catastrophic secret harbored within the walls of her family's home,a secret that threatens to destroy her family forever.

An urgent proclamation of what life is like for American women without the security of a financial safety netIndie icon Michelle Tea--whose memoir The Chelsea Whistle details her own working-class roots in gritty Chelsea, Massachusetts--shares these fierce, honest, tender essays written by women who can't go home to the suburbs when ends don't meet. When jobs are scarce and the money has dwindled, these writers have nowhere to go but below the poverty line. The writers offer their different stories not for sympathy or sadness, but an unvarnished portrait of how it was, is, and will be for generations of women growing up working class in America. These wide-ranging essays cover everything from selling blood for grocery money to the culture shock of "jumping" class. Contributors include Dorothy Allison, Bee Lavender, Eileen Myles, and Daisy Hernández.

'The polyamory book I've always wanted' MIRANDA JULY'Michelle Tea is our luminary of optimistic rebellion' JEREMY ATHERTON LINLove is consuming, love is boundless. Isn't it natural for love to then spill out of the lines we draw around it? Even before polyamory burst into the mainstream with its magnetic promise of liberation, Michelle Tea has been on the forefront, searching for a love without judgment. Her husband - though firmly monogamous - understands her enough to embark on a playful and sometimes painful adventure through such a marriage.With years of experience on the queer scene, Michelle Tea uncovers the risks and rewards of non-monogamy, the honesty it requires, the guilt it elicits. Emphatic and refreshing, Free Love is an unforgettable lark through poly parties, STI clinics, tarot readings and good old-fashioned sluttery.

Desperate to quell her addiction to drugs, disastrous romance, and nineties San Francisco, Michelle heads south for LA. But soon it's officially announced that the world will end in one year, and life in the sprawling metropolis becomes increasingly weird.While living in an abandoned bookstore, dating Matt Dillon, and keeping an eye on the encroaching apocalypse, Michelle begins a new novel, a sprawling and meta-textual exploration to complement her promises of maturity and responsibility. But as she struggles to make queer love and art without succumbing to self-destructive vice, the boundaries between storytelling and everyday living begin to blur, and Michelle wonders how much she'll have to compromise her artistic process if she's going to properly ride out doomsday.

Winner of the 2019 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay‘I must find my own complicated junkie to have violent sex with. In 1994, nothing seemed like a better idea, save being able to write about it later.’Michelle Tea is our exuberant, witty guide to the hard times and wild creativity of queer life in America. Along the way she reclaims SCUM Manifesto author Valerie Solanas as an absurdist, remembers the lives and deaths of the lesbian motorbike gang HAGS, and listens to activists at a trans protest camp. This kaleidoscope of love and adventure also makes room for a defence of pigeons and a tale of teenage goths hustling for tips at an ice creamery in a ‘grimy, busted city called Chelsea’. Unsparing but unwaveringly kind, Michelle Tea reveals herself and others in unexpected and heartbreaking ways.Against Memoir is the winner of the 2019 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. Best known as writer of fiction and memoir, this is the first time Tea’s journalism has been collected. Delivered with her signature candour and dark humour, Against Memoir solidifies her place as one of the leading queer writers of our time.

Boyfriends masquerade as straight bros to have fun on an early internet porn site. Sex on Viagra; sex on acid. A lesbian bar sells out, turning barflies into doms for hire. In Spain, an exchange student lets two young men flip a coin to see who will have her. A stranger on a train. A collegiate lesbian ‘it’ couple. A trans woman bashes back. Post-apocalyptic punk crushes. Slut eras. An American intellectual in Austria fucks and talks attachment styles with a Viennese queer. A jaded Black queen ponders race, apps and what the sex we have says about us. Taking us from the awkwardness of middle school to the transcendence of a sex club, SLUTS: Anthology presents an inspiringly diverse collection of writing – fiction and non-fiction, pro and con, philosophical and compulsive – exploring the eternally controversial word. Whether an insult or badge of honor, an identity or a state of mind, SLUTS engages some of the hottest minds of the moment to riff on the subject, exploring the nature of desire and its cultural consequences, creating a collection bound to become a classic of sex writing. Featuring work by: DL Alvarez * Jeremy Atherton Lin * Vera Blossom * Chloe Caldwell * Cristy Road Carrera * Sam Cohen * Tom Cole * Lydia Conklin * jimmy cooper * Lyn Corelle * Jenny Fran Davis * Cyrus Dunham * Hedi El Kholti * Robert Gluck * Miguel Gutierrez * Gary Indiana * Taleen Kali * Cheryl Klein * Gabrielle Korn * Nate Lippens * Meredith Maran * Carta Monir * Amanda Montell * Carely Moore * Bradford Nordeen * Baruch Porras-Hernandez * Kamala Puligandla * Brontez Purnell * Liara Roux * Andrea Sands * Daviel Shy * Jen Silverman * Anna Joy Springer * Laurie Stone * McKenzie Wark & Zoe Whittal

An adult woman haunted by her childhood muses on the foster system, institutions, and the medieval tale of a girl given to a witch. A genderqueer Brooklynite learns of their past life as a murdered sorceress. An uptight participant at a Northern California witch camp finds community in the kitchen. A professor uses magic to help students under attack by right-wing politicians.In this collection of manifesto, poetry, playscripts, and prose, the archetype of the Witch is honoured and unpacked, poked and prodded, owned and othered. From work centred in antiquity to writing that illustrates how primordial occult energies continue to enliven our world today, WITCH lays bare a wilderness of myth, magic, trickery, and power swarming beneath the surface of contemporary life. With work from CAConrad, Frankie Miren, Sarah Shin, Edgar Fabian Frias, Amanda Yates Garcia, Ashley Ray, Brooke Palmieri, Yumi Sakugawa, Kai Cheng Thom, Ariel Gore, Myriam Gurba, Fariha Roisin, and many others.