This issue features a microinterview with Betsy Cohen, conducted by Catherine Lacey. Betsy is a psychic medium and ordained Spiritualist minister who lives in New York City and has conducted regular church services and séances at the Spiritualist Church of New York City. She served as a social worker and counselor for nearly a decade before she began taking classes on mediumship, meditation, shamanism, and the intuitive arts—an education that set her on a very different career path. As a clairvoyant, Cohen centers her private readings on her clients’ spiritual growth and empowerment. She also hosts a live radio show for Talking Alternative and has put out a CD of her ukulele music, worked as a band’s tour manager, and miraculously secured the domain name NewYorkCityPsychic.com. This interview was conducted in the middle of a January blizzard in Brooklyn.

–Catherine Lacey

PART I

THE BELIEVER: What’s the difference between a psychic, a clairvoyant, and a medium?

BETSY COHEN: Psychic means you’re reading someone’s aura or getting information from the collective unconscious. A clairvoyant can see things. Medium means you’re speaking to a dead person, so you’re getting information filtered through a spirit who was on this Earth plane not too long ago. And they have opinions! So sometimes a mother or grandmother will come in and shake her finger and say, “You better get away from that boy,” or “Hold on to that boy,” or whatever. But that’s not necessarily what source energy would say.

BLVR: And source energy is…?

BC: Spirit, God, infinite intelligence. Whatever you want to call it. Personally, I believe that everything is made of energy and that energy has consciousness. That’s about as concrete as I can get.

BLVR: From a scientific perspective, then, I mean, this cup of coffee has energy. Plus, it has milk in it, which has its own energy. So is there consciousness in my cup of coffee?

BC: Yeah, I believe so. But so does this chair, even though it’s plastic.

BLVR: So when you say you can “see things,” do you mean that you can see what’s going on in that building over there, or that you’re having visual hallucinations?

BC: Any psychic or medium gets information symbolically through their five senses. Being clairvoyant means you see things, clairaudiant means you hear things, and so on. I have all five of the “clairs.” Generally, you excel in some over others.

PART II

THE BELIEVER: Do your abilities ever impede your life in any way?

BETSY COHEN: As I progress and work with my spirit guide, I’ve said, “OK, occasionally you can come into my daily life without...