On a Wednesday afternoon in late October, a meeting room at Portland Public Library's Downtown Branch will fill with teenagers, card decks, and a question that has occupied fortune-tellers and artists for centuries: what does this card mean, and what does it mean to you? Teen Tarot 101, a free two-hour workshop running from 2:15 to 4:15 p.m. on October 21, 2026, is led by Isabella Rotman, a Maine cartoonist and illustrator who created her own tarot deck. The library describes it as an introductory workshop covering the foundational system of tarot, how to read for another person, and practice reading with friends. All levels of experience are welcome, and participants can bring their own decks or borrow one that's provided.
The person teaching it is not a hobbyist with a favorite deck and a strong opinion. Rotman is an Eisner and Ignatz Award-nominated cartoonist and illustrator who lives and draws in Maine. Her comics work includes A Quick and Easy Guide to Consent, which she wrote, and Wait, What?: A Comic Book Guide to Relationships, Bodies, and Growing Up, which she illustrated and co-wrote with Heather Corinna. Her art, as she describes it, is usually about the ocean, women, crushing loneliness, people in the woods, or sex. She is also the creator of This Might Hurt Tarot, a full 78-card deck in the Rider-Waite-Smith tradition, the visual and symbolic system that underlies most tarot decks in use in the English-speaking world today.
The story of that deck is the reason this workshop is more than a library craft hour. This Might Hurt began as a self-published project in 2019, funded through a Kickstarter campaign. Rotman printed it herself in a solid cardboard box with gold foil and a magnetic closure, accompanied by a guidebook containing an introduction, descriptions of every card, and a full-page black-and-white image of each one. The self-published edition went through six print runs, a sign of how far the deck traveled beyond its initial backers. In 2023 it was picked up by Liminal 11, and a trade edition followed from Sterling Ethos in July 2024, priced at $26.99.
What makes the deck distinctive is what Rotman kept and what she changed. She retained the time-honored symbolism and imagery of the classic Rider-Waite-Smith cards but dropped their medieval context. Clothing and scenery are modernized, diversity is embraced, and queerness is lovingly acknowledged, in the deck's own words. The result is a deck designed to be both easy to read and highly relatable, especially for readers who have never seen themselves reflected in the older decks. The court cards, and a few other select Minor Arcana cards, are portraits of real people in Rotman's life. The Liminal 11 edition added a nineteenth bonus card to the standard 22 Major and 56 Minor Arcana, a card called This Might Hurt/This Might Heal. The deck's title carries its own philosophy: sometimes essential changes or fundamental truths might hurt us at first, but once we bring them to light, all wounds will heal in time.
That approach to the cards, as a system to be learned rather than a mystery to be guarded, is what Rotman teaches in her workshops. In a description for a similar Tarot 101 session at 3S Artspace in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, she framed tarot reading as the skill of synthesizing card meanings, card positions, intuition, visual symbolism, and context. The workshop promises to delve into the systems at work in tarot, asking how suits, numerology, and archetypes come together to make a card, and whether you can read without memorizing every card (the answer, she says, is yes), and how intuition and personal experience affect a reading. No prior experience is necessary.
The Portsmouth session, held on a Friday evening in October 2026 and open to ages 13 and up, sold out, and the listing noted that Rotman was returning by popular demand for another Halloween-season workshop. That demand is part of why the Portland event stands out: it is the same curriculum, offered free, in a public library, to teenagers, with no ticket required. The Portland listing appears on Rotman's own calendar of upcoming events alongside zine fests in Watertown, Massachusetts, and Burlington, Vermont, comics festivals in Boston and Chicago, and a makers market at Thompson's Point in Portland in December. She is, in other words, a working artist who tours the region's libraries and art spaces, and the teen workshop is one stop on that circuit rather than a one-off favor.
The setting suits the subject. Portland Public Library is Maine's largest, serving the community since 1867, and it has occupied its current location since 1978, standing as a gateway to the city's arts district near the Portland Museum of Art and the Maine College of Art. A renovation by architect Scott Simons was designed, in the words of structural engineer Paul B. Becker, so that just as the trusses reach out to hold up the façade, the design reaches out to the public. The library's own program disclaimer makes the fit explicit: programs offer a variety of ideas and perspectives for learning, exploration, and conversation, and speakers share their own views, which do not necessarily reflect the library's positions. Providing access to diverse ideas, the library says, helps everyone explore, think, and learn for themselves.
For teenagers, that framing matters. Tarot has long carried a whiff of the forbidden, which is part of its appeal, but the workshop treats it as a craft with rules, history, and interpretation, the same way one might study a sonnet or a comic panel. Rotman's deck, with its modern clothes and its portraits of real people, makes the point that the cards are not ancient fixed texts but a visual language each reader learns to speak. The two hours are structured around practice: reading for another person, then reading with friends. That is the part that cannot be learned from a book, and it is the part the library is providing decks for.
The event is designed for teens ages 12 to 18, and the library asks that anyone needing an accommodation contact staff in advance. No registration fee, no ticket, no capacity gate: participants can walk in with a deck or walk in without one. The workshop runs from 2:15 to 4:15 p.m. on Wednesday, October 21, 2026, at the Downtown Branch, 5 Monument Square. For a teenager who has ever flipped a card and wondered what it meant, or for one who has never touched a deck at all, the invitation is the same, and it comes from someone who has drawn all 78 cards herself.