Memento Mori
A Generative Creative Writing Class with Selah Saterstrom
Join live on Zoom or enjoy asynchronously
Sunday, October 5, 2025
10 - 11:30 am PT
11 - 12:30 pm MT
12 - 1:30 pm CT
1 - 2:30 pm ET
Sliding scale: $15 – $65
On the payment check-out page, please enter the amount you’re able to afford. Contributing even a little extra allows us to offer discounted rates to those in our community who really need it. Thank you for all your generosity!
In this 90-minute generative writing class, we will take up memento mori as both method and subject. Through creative-oracular strategies that open new ways of thinking and framing, we will work toward two new pieces of writing.
What both writing and divination have taught me is that memento mori—“remember that you must die”—is a dirge and a creative, hermeneutic discipline that steadies the gaze until the present trembles with specificity.
As a method and subject, it sharpens the field of vision and attends to the nuanced details: the turn of a hand, the slant of light, the breath between words. It understands the lyric’s potential for composition (buckle your seatbelts, living and dying is not for the faint of heart!).
Memento mori a call to the seer’s table where CD Wright one said (in response to a question about how she just kept writing better and better books..like how did she do that?...), it isn’t about composing (writing) better, but about seeing better. Seer better.
Memento mori is also a call to one another’s table: to see our own fleshy limits reflected in the mortality of others and to answer that seeing with care and awe. For example. . .
Memento mori is the urgency to live justly and love fiercely, knowing the body is temporary but the imprint of our acts may outlast us.
Memento mori is the deep bow before life, even in the presence of horror. Memento mori is a margin filled with ash, and in the ash, a seed.
Memento mori is to let death gloss the text of your life: absence, that absolute fucking heartbreaker, even as fecundity insists. Each moment, whether exquisite or tedious, bears the same unsparing illumination: nothing is ours to keep.
Memento mori is the edge where one vanishes into the very thing one has been trying to name!!! Goddamn it. But also: it is the threshold where absence and presence overlap and make perfume combinations.
It is a door held open between the living and the dead, where language is both a threshold art and an offering.
It is the song you hum in the direction of the empty plate you set each night at the table.
Memento mori is the patience or willingness or heart to witness the unmaking of things, decreation, and the courage to keep making anyway.
About Selah
Selah Saterstrom is a writer and diviner who practices a Southern family-style of card reading and for nearly thirty years, she has offered divinatory guidance within her communities. She is the author of five books, including Ideal Suggestions: Essays in Divinatory Poetics, which has garnered widespread acclaim. A respected consultant and educator, she teaches, lectures, and facilitates workshops and seminars across the United States and internationally. With Kristen E. Nelson, she co-founded Four Queens Divination and co-hosts The Janky Church Podcast. At the heart of Selah’s work is the belief that divination and radical creativity are liberation practices. She lives on Vashon Island in the Pacific Northwest with her wife and daughter.
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