About The Green Sheaf

The Green Sheaf was first founded by Pamela Colman Smith in 1903, and had exactly thirteen issues before it was shuttered in 1904 for lack of financial viability. Each issue was small, with a limited print run, but by the end of its life, her personally illustrated magazine had featured a network of fifty writers hailing from the U.S., U.K., Ireland, Germany, the Netherlands, Japan, and South Africa. It also featured themes of fantasy, folklore, and mysticism, and many works by women, and was a feminist vehicle for supporting women in the arts.

Lorraine Janzen Kooistra, FRSC, of Ryerson University, Toronto, describes The Green Sheaf as such:
“In the largely male-dominated world of little magazines in fin-de-siècle Great Britain, The Green Sheaf is remarkable for its female leadership, eclectic content, and artisanal design. Its acknowledged place among other little magazines of the period is long overdue.”*

Pamela, known as Pixie to her familiars, is most famously known to us in 2023 for her work as the artist behind the famed Rider-Waite-Smith tarot deck. She was also a folklorist, performer, artist, writer, costume designer, set designer, suffragist, and publisher, also founding The Green Sheaf Press after the magazine closed its doors. Her art was shown in both New York and Europe, and she was a popular illustrator. A contemporary of famed literary figures such as Bram Stoker and W.B. Yeats, Pamela championed her fellow creatives via her salons and publishing ventures, often hand-coloring her publications with love.

Long uncredited for her major contribution to the tarot deck, her work was frequently undervalued, and she often struggled financially, especially toward the end of her life. Pamela worked as an artist until her death in 1951, however, her style had long fallen out of favor. Her estate was deep in debt, and was auctioned off in an attempt to pay creditors. With nothing left to her name, she received a pauper’s burial in an unmarked gravesite in England.

Many years have since passed, and I am utterly delighted that Pamela has experienced a modern resurgence, finally getting the attention she deserves as an artist, especially for her work on the Rider-Waite-Smith deck. Her influence on generations of seekers of divine inspiration is vast. The extent of art and writing that has been infused by Pamela’s tarot imagery is unknown. A quick internet search will tell you that Pamela Colman Smith’s influence lives on, and gloriously so.

I came to tarot first in my twenties, but had strayed away from it until my forties, when my self-exploration as a writer in search of my deepest authenticity led to the study of archetypes. As a student of the famed Jungian analyst Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés at the Institute for Archetypal and Cross-Cultural Studies, I was reintroduced to the tarot, and felt as if I’d come home. Here was a wealth of vast intuitive archetypal information encoded as art. Every encounter with Pamela’s tarot was deeply inspirational and healing. A chance reading, in which I drew a card with Pamela’s portrait on it (incorporated into the deck by the publisher as part of a centennial anniversary edition) led me to explore the artwork’s creator further. Since then, I have deeply revered the person affectionately known as Pixie as a beloved ancestor.

While The Green Sheaf’s first incarnation only lasted a year while Pamela was alive, my resurrection of The Green Sheaf is an attempt to do justice to Pamela’s legacy as a publisher and champion of other creators. It’s also an attempt to give it another chance at glory by utilizing the wonders of the internet—making publishing much more cost effective, and allowing us to reach the whole world, if we want to.

As a form of restorative justice for past female and gender fluid creators once overlooked in their lifetimes, The Green Sheaf will now only publish works by female-identifying and gender-fluid individuals. In an effort to craft a fine publication with limited resources, we will publish twice a year. One of those issues will be solely dedicated to creators of a historically marginalized background, and the other will be a contest issue, featuring prizewinners only, but open to all female-identifying and gender-fluid creators. We will pay competitive rates.

For submission guidelines, please go here.

To read a story that captures the essence of the writing I hope to acquire for The Green Sheaf, please read the phenomenal “Gather the Lightning,” by Jalyn Renae Fiske, in our first issue.

Here’s to a proper resurrection.
Welcome to the second coming of The Green Sheaf.

__________________________________

*“A Paper of Her Own”: Pamela Colman Smith’s The Green Sheaf (1903-1904), by Lorraine Janzen Kooistra, FRSC, of Ryerson University, Toronto, accessed 8.30.23