In college I had a subscription to the New Yorker because I’d learned in various workshops and the lit I consumed that this was where great writing could be found. I’d read the short stories that appeared in each issue, studying them and often wondering, What makes this great? Most of the stories left me strangely cold. I couldn’t connect with them and thought maybe I didn’t have enough life experience yet. Maybe I had to live in New York to understand.
But then I stumbled across Joyce Carol Oates’s “Zombie” in the magazine. Just the title alone was enough to make me read it, and I was transported by the short, clipped sentences of a serial killer who yearned for a companion and decided to make one. I could feel his pining and how desperately the narrator was misunderstood, even though he committed horrible crimes. I’ve always been attracted to the darker things in life, and this story (loosely based on serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer) made me actually feel and believe I understood such motivations. What witchery! I was in love.
Immediately, I went to the library and found the Oates section, where there were so many works, she had her own shelf. I read the inner flaps of each novel and collection of short stories, deciding what I would read first, and picked out Foxfire, a story about a girl gang. What a perfect first Oates novel for me. As an English major at the University of Iowa, most of my time was spent reading and discussing white male authors, so I was ecstatic to find a woman writer with dark, gritty work mining all that disturbing territory that I loved. And she had so many books—I would never run out, I thought.
Since that time more than thirty years ago, Joyce Carol Oates’s works have been a backbeat to my life and a huge influence on my own writing. From the horrific food porn of Wonderland to her fictionalized odyssey of Marilyn Monroe in Blonde, I’ve been reading her work, noticing themes about American life that Oates comes back to again and again. Right now, I’m preparing to reread Joyce Carol Oates’s canon, starting from her very first collection of short stories By the North Gate to her most recent novel Fox. I’ve also been looking at her astrological chart, studying it like I once did the New Yorker, trying to figure out what makes her such a talented writer and how she’s sustained such a long career. Here’s a look at her chart, and in the first part of this series, I’m going to be focusing on the first quadrant.
Her ascendant is at 28 degrees of Aquarius, which is potent; there are thirty degrees in a sign and with Oates’s near the end, she’s able to harness all the power of it and act with a sense of urgency. Aquarians view the world through a humanitarian lens and are known for being curious about the people around them and how they can become their best selves, making a better society. Often, a rising Aquarius comes off as cold, withdrawn, and emotionally distant to others; they’re the intellectuals of the zodiac and live in their heads, taking apart anything they encounter, trying to see what makes it tick. And they can be shy.
The first house of the zodiac, the ascendent, shows us how Joyce Carol Oates approaches life, and it is first as an intellectual. She stands on the sidelines, taking everything in, and she does have that Aquarian trait of shyness. She went to Syracuse University on a scholarship and was so shy she couldn’t even read her stories aloud during her writing workshop; her teacher had to read her stories to the class. Oates graduated in 1960 as valedictorian of her class and was horrified to learn that she was expected to give a speech in front of hundreds of people. The only way she might escape this was if the graduation ceremony was rained out, which had never happened before. Oates did the work and wrote a speech, revising it many times, but she kept saying over and over again, “I don’t want to give a speech. I don’t want to give a speech.” The day of the graduation was sunny as people gathered at Archibald Stadium, but soon heavy, gray rain clouds began rolling in and a steady drizzle started as the ceremony began. The drizzle turned to sheeting rain, and at first people cracked open their umbrellas on the bleachers, but eventually parents started fleeing, and the chancellor interrupted his own speech to say, “You’re all graduated.”
The first house is also associated with one’s style, and Aquarians are known for their eclectic choices. They like bright, saturated colors, different textures, and shapes, and you can see that sense of style in how Joyce Carol Oates presents herself to the world. She loves big statement necklaces and earrings, scarves, and hats–her fingers always adorned by a couple of rings.
Her first house spans three zodiacal signs–Aquarius, Pisces, and Aries–a phenomenon known as intercepted signs, which is an indicator of a person having a karmic lesson that still needs to be learned. Pisces is the intercepted sign in her first house and is known for its artistry and psychic abilities. Some say that an intercepted sign indicates the person having a difficult time expressing those qualities, but Oates has two planets in her first house, making it quite dynamic.
She has Jupiter in her intercepted sign of Pisces, where the planet is in its domicile, meaning this is one of two placements where Jupiter shines and does its job to the best of its abilities. Jupiter is a benevolent planet known for luck and expanding everything it touches, and of course, we can’t talk about Joyce Carol Oates without discussing her tremendous output. She’s even been cruelly mocked for this ability, as in James Wolcott’s infamous essay “Stop Me Before I Write Again: Six Hundred More Pages by Joyce Carol Oates,” which appeared in a 1982 issue of Harper’s magazine. But this expansive and abundant scope of how she makes sense of the world is a part of her identity–she was born to be a writer and to write a lot.
In her first house, she also has Saturn in Aries, where the planet is in its fall and struggles to function. Saturn is considered a malefic planet and is the exact opposite of Jupiter. It’s about time, structure, discipline, coldness, and contraction, but the zodiacal sign of Aries is impatient and hot, so Saturn doesn’t do well there. It’s an awkward fit, and regarding her writing, Oates can struggle to turn off the faucet. But I can also see Saturn and Jupiter combining here, with Saturn giving form and discipline to her boundless imagination. Oates identifies as a formalist where she’s most concerned with the structure of literature, the building blocks of sentences, words, and punctuation, and Saturn is all about structure.
She has Uranus in her second house, and because Oates is a rising Aquarius, that makes Uranus her chart’s ruler. Uranus is the planet of sudden surprises and innovation, and the second house is all about values and personal finances. Uranus is also associated with new technology and the internet, and Oates has quickly adopted those innovations that give form to writing. About a decade ago, she joined Twitter and has since then delivered some of the sickest burns. My recent favorite is the takedown she did on Elon Musk who bought Twitter and renamed it X:
She’s also been an early adopter of Substack, an online platform where writers can share their work through subscriptions and make money off their words. Her second house starts in Aries, all about energy and initiating things, but it ends in Taurus, which is associated with nature and agrarian culture, definitely one of Oates’s values. She likes going out daily for walks, runs, and bicycle rides in nature, and this is where she likes to work out ideas for her stories. She also grew up on a farm and acknowledges her childhood in Lockport, New York, as an integral part of her writing: “I am drawn to write about rural and small-town upstate New York in the way in which a dreamer’s recurring dreams are likely to be set in childhood places. Our oldest memories are the most deeply imprinted in our brains—the first to be absorbed into our physical being, in neurons; the last to be lost, as consciousness fades to black.”
Taurus extends into the third house of her astrological chart, which rules siblings, communications, and short trips. That makes sense to me as Oates uses nature and setting as a conduit for her stories, and the third house ends in Gemini, which rules communications and duality since it is quite literally the sign of the twins. Oates’s sister Lynn Ann was born on her eighteenth birthday, and Joyce was allowed to name the new baby, which she took very seriously. Lynn was autistic and nonverbal, and Joyce’s mother took care of her youngest child at home until Lynn was fifteen and physically attacked her mother, injuring her. They then had to institutionalize her for their own safety. Joyce and Lynn Ann shared an uncanny physical appearance and could have been twins, identical, born eighteen years apart. But where Joyce had been gifted with language, Lynn was nonverbal and existed in a physical world ruled by sensations.
