Amy & Monte: A Legacy of Love and Creativity-Two He(art)ists Created a Beautiful Life Together

I was introduced to the work of Amy Zerner and Monte Farber around 2008 when a friend gave me a birthday gift called “The Truth Fairy: The Enchanted Pendulum & Message Board Kit” It is a divining tool to help the user connect with Spirit. I was delighted since I am of a metaphysical bent and have used it many times over the years as a guide to assist with some questions I had about ‘life, the universe and everything’. Together, Zerner and Farber are the minds, hearts and souls of their company called Enchanted World. With a vast array of products that include books on various metaphysical subjects, tarot cards, art, clothing, decorative items, to meet them is to witness two works of he(art).  They are as colorful as a pallet of rainbow hued paint, with Amy’s hair a vivid shade of purple and their clothing, bright and flowing. I had the opportunity to meet them when their film Amy & Monte: A Legacy of Love and Creativity debuted at the New Hope Film Festival in August of 2025. They discovered after the screening that it had won Audience Choice Award for Best Documentary. That can be attributed to both their story and the way it was presented by their talented producer Annmarie Sairrino. Her company called Ammo Entertainment is known for producing horror films. Monte and Amy’s story is as far from that genre as could be imagined. 

Let’s get to know them in their own words.

Monte and Amy:

Please give us a bit of the back story that led you to this moment of more than 50 years together?  How did each of you recognize that the other was ‘The One’?

We met at the filming of a porno movie in 1974. True story! Ha! Monte was in it. He was playing music in the band playing a New York City rooftop party scene. Everyone had clothes on! My friend asked if I wanted to go watch her friend Monte play music- and when I arrived, bells went off! Monte told me years later that he had a friend named Amy in public school and every time he heard her name it fel special, though they were always just friends. Hey, you never know where you’ll meet your true love.

Our advice to those who are looking for The One? Be yourself so strongly and so beautifully that you magnetize yourself the way electrical current in a wire wrapped around a metal bar magnetizes itself and attract to you the person who is attracted to the real, unadulterated, pure and glorious you.

When we met we were both subscribers to the ‘60s notion that the coolest thing one could be was to be one’s self fully. It worked for us then and it can work for you now.

Could the young people you were back then have imagined the life you are now living?

No, I don’t think we could have imagined our life together, the peace, joy, and sense of accomplishment of lives well-lived. We knew we were in love and it stopped us in our tracks because neither of us was looking for The One. We just enjoyed watching each other live, not wanting to change a thing about each other.

It’s a miracle that we found each other in this world of billions of people so we are living proof that miracles can happen! I didn’t believe in astrology then but Amy was studying astrology and tarot and I was studying Amy and respected her wisdom as much as I respected her prodigious artistic talet and so I dove in and now I’ve got several evergreen titles about astrology and tarot and her Enchanted Tarot is considered an essential deck.

It’s so cool to see how many people know their astrology charts now, encourage their psychic abilities, use the tarot, honor the cycles of the season, consult expert intuitives, have personal spiritual practices, do yoga, rituals, set their intentions, do visualizations, meditate, are into holistic healing and integrative medicine, watch for signs and interpret symbols…We have been doing all of this and writing about it since the 1970’s….we could not have dreamed how mainstream metaphysics have become…not to mention the changes in eating, organic foods available everywhere.. and to share it all on our phones! Truly a magical time we live in.

We were very idealistic in the 1970s when we met and we still are. We helped stop a war, we helped start feminism, we changed art and music and we are staying true. And the baton has been shared and passed to a wonderful generation of beautiful souls we have met who have big hearts, smarts, and the work of so many people of our generation to build upon and inspire their unique and inventive accomplishments.

Where does your inspiration come from for your vast array of creations?

Amy’s art is the heart and soul, the driver of everything we create. In a reversal of roles, she does the art first for all of our many oracle card and divination systems and I illustrate them with my words, describing what I see in her images. The word “channeled” is a bit overused today but I have always thought that her work revealed an uninterrupted connection for the the Art Spirit, the Muses, The Goddess, however you want to name the un-nameable, to visually represent the human condition surrounded, penetrated, and supported by the overwhelming energies that scientists and spiritual seekers know exist now and forever. We only see a small part of true reality and Amy’s work approaches a visual representation of the Unified Field, as Einstein called it.

Creativity requires dedication, concentration, and time. It’s imagination, visualization, and perspiration, especially if you want to bring your work to a world you believe could really benefit from knowing about it. Commercial is not a dirty word around here, we are proud that we have had commercial success in numerous artistic venues, especially publishing.

Creativity is our passion and we put all of our wisdom and guidance into each of our books and oracles. We now have over three million copies of our published works available around the world in 18 languages.

Using an oracle regularly creates a ritual space in one’s life where we can restore our connection with the quiet voice of our higher mind and benefit from its wise guidance. Creating this oasis of calm in the midst of the hectic pace of modern life helps us tune into the meaningful coincidences and inspirations that help to give our lives meaning.

I had the joy of being in the audience at the New Hope Film Festival recently when your documentary Amy & Monte: A Legacy of Love and Creativity debuted. It was a behind the scenes glimpse into your personal and professional lives. How would you describe it?

As of this writing, we just learned that the documentary about us won the New Hope Film Festival’s Audience Choice award for Best Documentary Feature so you brought us luck!

It’s an acknowledgement of the artistic vision of Annmarie Sairrino, a producer of horror movies, who has crafted as both producer and director of her first documentary, a film that in our humble opinion beautifully shares our world of love, magic, art, fun, creativity, humor, mindfulness, collaboration, support, trust, and dedication through a collection of interviews, photos, and quotes. Explored through the perspectives of family, friends (some of whom are world famous), and creator colleagues, it weaves a rich tapestry that showcases our relationship.

Annmarie is the first person we have had create something based on our work without our having creative control. We knew she was The One! And in our opinion, she aced it, threaded the needle of doing a documentary about two people whose art and creativity is inseparable from their commercial success in the worlds of art, fashion, publishing, philosophy, and even a little music, without the finished documentary resembling an infomercial in any way. This is no mean feat!

Back to Amy&Monte (we write it like that because there is no space between us!), ever since we first met, we have chosen to work together using art and words, in a lot of forms, to create The Enchanted World of Amy Zerner and Monte Farber; it’s our way of changing the world, i.e., being the change we want to see.

We agree with the Dalai Lama that the purpose of life is to be happy. Also, as Joseph Campbell said, “Follow your bliss.” For us, our bliss and our happiness has been our journey together on the path to making our life a work of art and our art a work of life.

Some couples find it challenging to be together nearly 24/7 in their work and at home. How do you maintain a sense of balance between ‘me time’ and ‘we time’? I think of the Kahlil Gibran quote, “Let there be spaces in your togetherness.”

Many have asked how we made it to 50 years together. Easy! Love each other, grow together and PUT YOUR RELATIONSHIP FIRST, ahead of friends, parents, kids, everyone and everything. We even wrote a book about our relationship secrets, The Soulmate Path (Red Wheel/Weiser).

We are constantly working on numerous creative projects, so our house sometimes seems like a factory with bedrooms. Although we have chosen to be together and work together as much as we can, which we love, we have evolved our individual schedules in shifts, like those in a firehouse: someone is always on duty.

I (Amy) get up and go to bed early, taking care of all of the things that I like to do in the mornings including making art, some cooking, exercise, and social media, while Monte stays up late writing as he cannot have distractions. We each end up with a couple of hours of alone time every day, though we are still in the same house, and that helps us keep our centers.

My artwork allows me to live every day feeling that I am in direct communication with the transcendent realms. To commune with the wisdom of the sacred realms is as essential to both of us as eating, drinking, breathing, and dreaming—if we are to function fully in the world.

Do your spiritual and secular lives blend, in part because of the work you do?

Yes, there’s no space between them, either. Wherever we go, no matter what we are talking about, the first question people ask us is “How do you two, work and live together twenty-four hours a day and still be so in love?”

That’s a good question. The answer is a lot of hard work in the form of consideration, trust, friendship, adventure, forgiveness and laughter—and creativity! Our great marriage partnership and successful business partnership is also partially a result of our practical application of the ancient mystical wisdom we have studied before and during our marriage—wisdom we make available to everyone in each of our books and tools.

By looking within using your intuitive powers, astrology, and oracular work, we can identify our special dreams, learn how to develop our personal creative power, make our base secure, and our dreams real.  This crusade is not a selfish one.  It is the only one justifiable in our time.

Creativity is spirituality.  By realizing and actualizing our creativity we become a spiritual human being, a most glorious occurrence.  A world populated by such people can only make a paradise of our planet, a dream of the ages that is not only technologically possible at this time, but is crucial to our survival as a species.

Monte, you say in the movie, “We made our lives small so we can do big things.” What does that mean to you?

That line came pouring out of me the way my best psychic information comes through and so I, too, have had to figure out what the heck it means! The most obvious choice was to not have children even though we lived with Amy’s amazing mother, the artist Jessie Spicer Zerner, who was so wonderfully smart, talented, and nurturing that everyone called her “Ma.”  One day, Jessie’s 97 year old mother said to us, “You are the kind of people who should not have children,” meaning it as a complement and confirmation of our choice.

A lesser small-making choice we have made is to not travel, but to stay home and work. I, Monte, used to work in the movie business and was away from home a lot but Amy and Jessie held down the fort. Since she passed in 1996 we have kept travel to a minimum and only for business related reasons. I guess leading a no-drama lifestyle and staying away from people that manufacture drama is yet another small-making life choice. So many people waste so much of their precious time.

We want everyone to be successful creating their own version of success. In our case, we made our lives small, not doing a lot of the things most people do, because we wanted to do big things and we’ve done them.

How do you both maintain your genuine, not putting on airs personae given the attention and praise you receive from the art world and the metaphysical world?

We like to think of ourselves as the normal paranormal couple. Amy is a beautiful and fashionable couture fashion designer with gorgeous purple hair and I am a Leo Rising who has always loved dressing creatively even before Amy started stying me but we work hard and we know what it is to work for a living, too. We think that anyone who approaches life creatively is an artist. We have also been privileged to become the close friends and sometimes co-workers of some of the most famous people of our culture, several of whom appear in our documentary. Every one of them are too busy being themselves to put on airs. When you love or at the very least are interested in everyone and their stories, it shows.

While our journey has been filled with magical success, it’s also been marked by struggles, loss, lessons, and resilience. And that makes you humble and full of gratitude. We know life, we know how beautiful it can be and we know how difficult it can be, and we want to be a part of people’s solution the way other people have been a part of our solution.

Just like your artistry, the film seems like an extension of you. What would you want this ‘baby’ to do as it has been let loose in the world?

Well, after having people tell us for decades that our work and our story has inspired them to make successful choices and changes in their lives, we are hopeful that if we can somehow get our story out there and above the noise of what passes for “news” and the celebrity obsessed cuture we live in, that we can do the same with those who watch our documentary and are maybe inspired to learn more about us and our work.

In our lives both divination and love are the simple story and have been for decades. That is why we want now more than ever to have our Enchanted World story of the truth about the enduring power of love and astrology and partnership and the enchanted tarot and mutual support and oracles and mutual respect and how art and words and working together 24/7/365 and working with wonderful people changed our lives and how our story relates to your story and how it can help you live your life.

We’re having fun being together as much as we can and we love sharing the ride, sharing our art and our discoveries in our documentary. I think that is the reason it was the Audience Choice award winner at New Hope.

If our amazingly good fortune continues, there will come a time when even more new friends will be watching this documentary and getting to know that in second half of the twentieth century and the first half of the twenty-first century lived two people who loved each other with an eternal flame so bright that it illuminated those dark and confusing times and influenced those who came after them to create their own enchanted world just like their old friends, Amy&Monte.

As I was on your website, I took the opportunity to pull a Tarot card in response to a question about ways to blend my personal, professional and activism work to be a greater force for good. Wowie, Zowie, was the answer spot on.

Here was some of it.

Anything else you want to share?

We want to use this fateful moment of joyful awareness and creativity well, too, and now thanks to your article, we are doing so!

The Enchanted World mom ‘n pop mini-conglomerate is just getting started. We are hopeful about getting the documentary out there, of course, but wait, there’s more!

We have three books coming out in 2026 with Insight Editions: Your Cosmic Blueprint teaches how to decode an astrological birth chart to unlock a greater understanding of self and others; the book’s publication is April 2026. The Enchanted Tarot (35th Anniversary Edition) releases in March 2026, and features vibrant artwork in an updated edition of our bestselling deck. And a new book-and-deck set, The Karmic Balance Tarot, publishing in September 2026, will offer lessons and revelations in dealing with challenging times.

And an enlightening conversation with filmmaker Annmarie Sairrino 

I met you as you were at The New Hope Film Festival, celebrating the debut of your newest film called Amy and Monte: A Legacy of Love and Creativity. It is quite a departure from your primary filmmaking experience. Can you share what makes that so?

Yes, it really is. Most of my background has been in narrative filmmaking and horror, which is about building fictional worlds, characters, and tension. This documentary was entirely different because it was rooted in the real lives of Amy and Monte and their extraordinary story. Instead of creating scares, I was invited into a space of love, creativity, and spirituality. It required me to slow down, listen, observe, and capture the essence of their relationship, their art, and their philosophy of life. It was a departure but also a gift because it allowed me to show another side of what storytelling can do. It was incredibly fulfilling for me. I can’t wait to do another documentary!

How did you get involved with filmmaking and why did you choose the horror genre?

I actually came into filmmaking through a nontraditional path. I did not go to film school. I started out working on Sandy Climan’s desk, and over the course of fifteen years he became both my mentor and the person who gave me a foundation in development. That experience positioned me to not only be creative but also to understand the executive and business side of the industry. I consider myself self taught, and I think having the ability to evolve and pivot is essential in this business.

When I began producing, I gravitated toward horror because I realized that working mainly with Japanese titles, it was the one genre that was always in demand. Horror can be made at lower budgets, often with higher returns, and it comes with a passionate built-in fan base. Audiences are genuinely excited whenever a new horror film comes out, and that combination of creative freedom, accessibility, and strong ROI made it a natural space for me to build in.

Was there always a fascination with Japanese culture?

Not at all. My exposure to Japanese culture actually came later in my life. It wasn’t until 2012, when I took my first trip to Japan, that I really began to understand it. Since then I have traveled there 51 times, and over those years I have become a huge fan of Japanese culture, IP, storytelling, and people. Some of my most meaningful relationships have come from my time in Japan. It is so much more than anime and manga, and I feel fortunate to have been given the access and trust that I have received.

What were the series of events that brought you together with Amy and Monte, who are a spiritual and creative power couple?

It really began with an introduction that turned into an immediate sense of connection. Jeff Pulver, a mutual friend, introduced me to them when they were doing his YouTube show Ask the Oracles. I fell in love with them immediately and, honestly, became a bit of a social media stalker. One day I asked Jeff if they had a documentary, assuming of course they did. When he told me they didn’t but mentioned to them that I had asked, their response was simply, “Why don’t you make it?”

I can’t fully explain what made me say yes, since I had never made a documentary before, but I agreed to have a Zoom call with them. That Zoom lasted three hours. From that moment it was clear this was something bigger than a project. Over time it became a relationship built on trust, love, and friendship, and that’s what gave the film its intimacy, I believe.

What was the experience like for you to produce this documentary?

It was both humbling and inspiring. To spend time with them was to be reminded of what it means to live creatively and to support each other as partners. There were moments where I felt like a student, learning from the way they approach art and life, and moments where I felt like a witness, making sure their truth could be preserved on film. The process was deeply collaborative and very different from the usual production grind. It left me with a sense of gratitude. I still can’t believe we created this. It’s mind-blowing when you think about it. But we are so happy with it.

Were there aspects of yourself that came to your awareness as you made a film about spirituality, manifestation, karma, art and relationships?

Yes, very much so. It made me reflect on my own patterns, especially around creativity and relationships. Producing this film required me to slow down, to be present, and to honor the unseen forces that shape a project. I realized that my professional life had always been about momentum and productivity, and this film asked me to approach with more balance and intention. That was transformative for me personally.

What is your vision for what this film will do for those who watch it?

My hope is that viewers will come away feeling uplifted and reminded of the power of love, tenacity, and belief in one’s path. Amy and Monte live in a way that defies convention but radiates truth. If this film can inspire even one person to pursue their art more boldly, to deepen their relationships, or to trust in the synchronicities of life, then it will have succeeded. It is a story about possibility, and I hope that resonates widely.

Is there anything else you want to share?

This film feels like a gift from Amy and Monte as much as from me. Their openness and generosity made it possible. Through them I have met some amazing people, which is a true testament to who they are and the community they surround themselves with. The process has also opened doors for me personally, giving me the chance to explore new ways of storytelling beyond what I have done before. I am excited to keep experimenting with narrative, documentary, and other forms of media to tell stories that matter. Storytelling is always evolving, and I feel grateful to be part of that evolution