Psychic Telephone · 18
Joanie
For Joanie, a mediumship sitting is like diving into a lake and collecting a bunch of objects off the bottom—symbols, impressions, communications—before swimming back to the shore to lay them all out. She goes quiet for a while, diving down inside herself, gathering it all. And then she starts running her mouth, talking through each thing, talking fast as one thing after another is coming, coming, coming. Ancestors appear behind her, future things in front of her, and typically like paternal-side stuff in one area, maternal-side stuff in another. Then she’ll dive back in, get quiet again, see what comes out, and talk through that. And all of it is just ingredients in a blender. So you can ask questions. A sitting is a conversation. She is in dialogue with the spirit world, with this continuity of intelligence. You can provoke the continuity of intelligence, get clarification. And she encourages her clients to do that.
And in particular, she has this incredibly well-developed mind’s eye. You know, there’s a movie screen inside her head. She can describe everything in exquisite detail. Because she’s been writing for more than twenty years. She’s gotten really good at showing up and then getting out of the way—entering into this same kind of meditative quasi fugue state, to let stuff start coming through. And then taking the abstract and making it concrete, through language. So it’s just a matter of, if it’s a big, tangled ball of yarn in her mouth, she’s trying to pull it out in one smooth, clear, and cohesive thread.
In some ways, this all starts with her father. She is from Kentucky originally and her father was raised in the hollers of West Virginia. So she has spent a lot of time in Appalachia—a place she feels has a certain energy. There’s a kind of natural magic to those mountains, she says, that integrates with people’s lives. Everybody moves with this kind of natural spirit in them, pulsing through their days. And her father was very much that way. His people were hillbilly people, Hungarian and Sicilian immigrants who lived by all kinds of old-timey folkways.
Her father was born with the caul—the placenta—over his face, and his mother believed this was a sign he would be intensely psychically gifted. Across cultures, it’s a sign that someone’s going to be prophetic. And her grandmother would always say, He’s going to see the future. He’s going to know the future. So he was expected from a very young age to be the village prophet or something like that. And he did have intuitive gifts. He always knew stuff, things he shouldn’t have known. He could relay things about the dead after they were gone. Or he was able to articulate things no one could have known that then turned out to be right. But he didn’t live up to his mother’s expectations, her belief that he would do great things. So it wasn’t like a Flannery O’Connor version of the child prophet where everyone lines up under the revival tent.
Instead, the way it manifested was really low-key, sort of daily stuff, never for money. An ongoing awareness. Just predictions, predictions. And when he was a young man, after his father died of black lung disease from working in the coal mines, his intuitive gift told him to get the fuck out of there. So he jumped on a freight train and made it as far as Kentucky before getting kicked off. That’s why Joanie grew up there. And in his house, it was like he was in constant communion with what she calls Spirit—the spirit world. But he never seemed to think of it as weird or special. It was just the way he was, truly his way of being in the world. So she grew up with him always predicting things. And she would be like, You’re full of shit. And then it would come true.