The Healing Deck - Interview Pt. 1
By Kathy Bibeau
The following interview was conducted with Monte Farber and Amy Zerner, creators of “The Healing Deck”, recently released by Chronicle Books. Monte and Amy are partners both in business and personally. They have published numerous books and metaphysical tools for those who are seeking insight into the healing arts, relationships and divination. Amy is also an accomplished artist. What follows is a chronicle of their personal experiences in the realm of metaphysics and their contribution to the healing arts.
What was your background before entering your current field of work?
AMY: I have always been an artist. I loved living in Laporte, a town of 175 people that was the county seat of Sullivan County, part of the gorgeous Endless Mountains area of Pennsylvania. It was a safe, idyllic place to grow up. I have never had a problem being alone because making art is a solitary pursuit, and I have always been an artist.
MONTE: I, on the other hand, had many different jobs. I was primarily a musician, singer, and songwriter, but I went on to work in the movie business as a location scout. I did that until our books did well enough where I could concentrate solely on my writing and our business. I came to metaphysics via my interest in the nature of personal reality and especially Amy. I like to say that when I met Amy in 1974, she was studying astrology and the tarot and I was studying Amy, so I learned astrology and the tarot. Prior to that, I thought they were just silly superstitions but I quickly learned that they were symbolic languages. They became our language of love.
Was there a particular event or experience that changed the direction of your life?
MONTE & AMY: We’d have to say that meeting each other in October of 1974 and moving in together in Amy’s home in East Hampton, the same house where we still live today, is the event and experience that changed the directions of our lives. However, the event that changed us over to becoming authors occurred in New Orleans at the 1986 American Booksellers Association convention. Here’s that story:
In 1986, our friend, Lori Solensten decided that she was going to publish my Karma Cards book and card set. Lori had gotten to know Amy in the 1970s when she was an executive for Tri-Chem, the fabric paint and crafts company for whom Amy did the doodle posters (if you have one, hold on to it—it’s worth a lot of money!).
I had given Lori one of the two complete sets of Karma Cards that I had formulated on file cards and perfected over the years. I had invented them because, after I quit drugs and the musician’s life, I had gone full force into astrology as a profession, reading charts and living and breathing it. Amy and I became the life of so many parties that when we left they would beg us to stay and say, “I wish you could come up with a way that we could have fun with astrology without you!” I decided to see if I could do it.
The Karma Cards are three stacks of twelve cards each, a deck of Planet, Sign, and House cards. When an astrologer reads your chart, they look at where the planets are in order to interpret it. I broke the meanings of the planets, signs, and houses of astrology into sentence fragments that fit together to make six sentences that would answer questions, either what the outcome of a situation would be or what should be done about it. It was one of those simple ideas that has never been done because it was almost impossible to do. There were 10,368 possible sentences that all had to make sense. I did it before I owned a computer, and I truly believe that it rewired my brain and enabled me to go on to invent our other oracles.
Every time we would consult the Karma Cards, both my set and Lori’s kept advising us, independently, that we should not be publishing Karma Cards together, but we did not tell each other, which was almost a big mistake. By the time we got to the booksellers convention in New Orleans that Lori had invited us to, we both admitted it. Lori decided that the she was too small a publisher for such a project. Her professionalism is as great as her friendship.
Amy and I went to the show the next day, undaunted by this turn of events. It is very important to believe in yourself and your work, no matter what setbacks befall you. I walked by a small booth with a copy of The Book of Runes mounted on their sign. Amy and I introduced ourselves to the two very nice and very British men, Nick Eddison and Graham Sadd, whose company, Eddison/Sadd Editions, had packaged Ralph Blums’ seminal work, The Book of Runes, which had already sold several hundred thousand copies and was the first new oracle to be published by a book publisher, Thomas Dunne, who has his own imprint with St. Martin’s Press.
I told Nick and Graham that I had an astrology card game that told the future. They immediately asked if they could play it with me. As Amy went down the aisle to see if she could find a publisher interested in doing an art book of her work, they shuffled the cards and silently asked a question. The answer they received was unquestionably and overwhelmingly positive. I asked them what their question had been. To my delight, they replied that they had asked what the outcome would be of their packaging Karma Cards for publication and we shook hands. It was as easy as that!
Whereas the music and art businesses had been buildings without doors for us to enter, the publishing industry opened like a flower. An important secret is that when things are right, you do not have to force them. If you find yourself having to force something too much, it is probably not right for you. This is as true in romantic relationships as it is in business.
At the same moment that I was striking a deal with Eddison/Sadd, Amy had walked up to Stuart Kaplan at his U.S. Games booth and shown him slides of her fabric collage tapestries. He was taken with her work and asked her to execute two tapestries of tarot cards as samples for a deck that he would publish. Two potential deals in two minutes of each other! Coincidence? I don’t think so. In astrology, the fortunate transits of Jupiter happen every twelve years. If you do the math, you realize that 1986 was twelve years after Amy and I met in 1974 and our good fortune was timed perfectly to the return of Jupiter to the position it was in at the time we first met. It was time for a new twelve-year cycle of growth and good fortune to begin.
What inspired you to create the Healing Deck in particular?
We work so hard that we spend quite of bit of time and money on preventative health measures. So, as is our want, we shared what we know in “The Healing Deck.” Healing is something that we all need to do everyday. You can’t be healthy if you are not healing yourself and healing other people.
What other projects do you have upcoming?
Amy’s “Spiritual Couture” wearable art fashion, a combination of her fabric collage tapestries sewn onto gorgeous, embellished jackets, coats and vests, is expanding greatly and she has a number of trunk shows at Bergdorf Goodman in New York City and elsewhere. Her work also sells at select Neiman Marcus stores, as well as a few very high end boutiques around the country.
We are working on another healing project with Dr. Gerald Epstein, the author of “Healing Visualizations,” and a project to teach everyone my secrets for being psychic. Both projects include beautiful series of illustrations by Amy and teach exercises and techniques that are so simple that people are not going to believe it, until they try them!
For more information on Amy Zerner and Monte Faber’s work visit their website at: www.TheEnchantedWorld.com.
