how the cards fell...

Susie Chang bought her first tarot deck out of sheer curiosity.  It was a perfectly ordinary Rider Waite Smith deck, off the shelf at a Barnes & Noble in New York in the mid-1990's.  She bought it for herself - and don't let anyone tell you you can't do that!  During her early years as a reader, she moonlighted in a café in Hell's Kitchen offering weekly readings, and occasionally joined classes led by Wald and Ruth Amberstone of the Tarot School.  She became a Certified Professional Tarot Reader in 1999 (back when the Tarot Certification Board was still certifying people), after a final exam which consisted of a nerve-wracking 45-minute phone reading for the tarot grandmaster DenElder, founder of World Tarot Day.

For many years she read mainly on a casual basis, but starting in 2015 returned seriously to the cards after discovering the thriving online tarot community.  She designed and trademarked the Arcana Case® for tarot decks. She began offering an informal six-week introductory tarot course a few times a year.  She now reads tarot weekly at the Inspirit Crystal shop in Northampton, Massachusetts.

She is the author of Tarot Correspondences: Ancient Secrets for Everyday Readers, 36 Secrets: A Decanic Journey through the Minor Arcana of the Tarot, and, along with Mel Meleen, a brilliant esotericist and friend also living in western Massachusetts, the co-author of Tarot Deciphered: Decoding Esoteric Symbolism in Modern Tarot. Mel and Susie also host the Fortune's Wheelhouse podcast. 

Her interest in tarot is wide-ranging and passionate, and has included: setting up a Dropbox database and 78 Spotify playlists for those interested in card-appropriate music, memorizing astrological correspondences for the minor arcana while swimming laps, writing tarot haiku and spells, maintaining a sprawling Card-of-the-Day-tracking database (complete with elemental, astrological, and kabbalistical frequency and percentage pie charts), trying to design fabrics based on the 17th-century textile trade in and around Marseille, where the early Marseille decks were simultaneously being fashioned using the same woodblock printing process as the textiles.  She attempts to learn Hebrew approximately once every 15 months and has been known to spontaneously arrange her pancakes into a Tree of Life formation. She lives in western New England with her husband, children, and a variable number of chickens.