Meet Tessa Love
I am very excited to present Tessa Love, a freelance writer who grew up in California and now calls Berlin home. I have found her writings on psychedelics on Medium and felt it would be really interesting to understand who she is and where she is coming from since her articles and content are so fascinating and interesting. Thank you for the opportunity Tessa.
Small bio on you and career highlights
I sometimes say that I'm a poet by nature and a journalist by training—while my initial interest in writing stemmed from a childhood habit of writing poems (which led me to study poetry in college), I eventually turned towards journalism, which is now my main medium. My work has appeared in Longreads, Outside Magazine, BBC, Gossamer, Elemental, The Outline, Racked, Slate, and more. I’ve written about the personal experience of wildfire, dark-sky preservation, why robots wear what they wear, death positivity, some things about dreams, and lots about psychedelics.
A career highlight for me so far has to be the day I spent following a conservationist out into the desert of West Texas to hunt peyote in its natural habitat. That was earlier this year when I did on-the-ground reporting for "Button Down," a story I wrote about the race to save America's peyote, which is quickly going extinct. That story appears in the current issue of Gossamer, a very cool indie print magazine that I've been lucky enough to write for a few times.
Greatest inspirations or influences?
So many! But a shortlist—and one that reflects what I've been reading the past few months—would include Marilynne Robinson, Maggie Nelson, James Baldwin, Zadie Smith, Sheila Heti, Patti Smith, Elif Batuman, Rebecca Solnit, Joan Didion, and more.
What were some challenging articles to write ( if any)
"California Burning" was a very challenging piece to write—but in a good way, in the end. It's a longform researched and personal essay about wildfire, loss, home, belonging, and more. It's by far the most personal piece of writing I've ever published and it deals with some topics that were difficult to revisit. I didn't know that going in, though, which goes to show how purgative writing can be. And while that's cathartic in the end, it isn't always pretty in the process. But beyond being an exercise in processing and making sense of a lot of personal things in my life, the essay was also a practice of creativity. When writing straight journalism, it's often hard to infuse a piece with the more dreamy aspects of my preferred or aspirational writing style. You're writing for information, not for style or beauty. "California Burning" was a hybrid of the two, which meant I had to let go of internalized formulas and instead work from a gut feeling. In this process, I confronted every writer's source of both bliss and dread: a completely blank page to be filled however I saw fit.
Tell us about your creative process
To be honest, I don't really have one. I write a lot of different things that require different processes, so I've never really developed a strict routine or ritual or method. That said, there are some practices that help me push through tough moments, and when I'm working on something, I try to make these a habit in order to avoid those tough moments. This includes sitting down to the page first thing in the morning (before I have time to even think about procrastinating); letting a piece sit for a while and returning to it with a fresh perspective; reading drafts out loud to myself, or sometimes recording myself reading and listening back; talking out ideas (or stuck points) with a friend; stepping away from a draft to write a journal entry about it; and—back in the days when this was possible—writing at a cafe. I will say that I journal almost every morning, which helps me center myself and also get all the junk out of my head that might get in the way of real work. And though this can be rough on the ego at first, I also try to give myself permission to write a really terrible first draft, which I lovingly call "the shit draft." You can always edit, but only so long as there is something on the page to edit in the first place. Silencing your inner critic is one of the hardest but also most important elements of any creative endeavor.
How has this year changed you as a person, or in your career?
Like most people in the world, I would guess, this year has left me a little dumbfounded. Journalism as a profession took a huge hit this year, with dozens of great publications folding and hundreds of staff writers losing their jobs. Many of the publications still standing have substantially cut their budgets, reoriented their focus, or otherwise delayed or canceled projects. I personally lost several assignments I was excited about, and have had the progress of other ones severely hindered. On top of that, with so many incredible writers now freelancing after the loss of their jobs, the competition is even stiffer and the pool of opportunities progressively smaller. It's not a pretty picture. But in a lot of ways, there's still not much I would rather be doing with my life.
In my own life, this year has been an experience of deconstruction. I feel like I've watched the world flip inside out, and myself along with it. Motivation has proved an ongoing challenge, writing has often felt frivolous and self-indulgent, and so much of who I thought I was has fallen away. But the act of deconstruction inherently exposes what goes unsaid or unnoticed, what's written between the lines of the self. And in that revelation, you can get closer to the core of who you are. As a person—and as a writer—there is nothing so important as knowing what occurs beneath the surface of you. For a lot of us, I think, 2020 will go down as the year we lost everything that mattered—and then discovered what really did.
What is " nobody"?
Nobody is a passion project created with my bestie and fellow freelance writer Sami Emory. Sami and I both love print indie mags as well as stories about the people, places, and things that get sidelined in the manic cycle of hook-driven news. So we wanted to slow down a bit, and create a space for other writers, photographers, and artists to do so, too. The result, of course, is Nobody, a biannual print magazine about "everyone else's stories."
Sami and I started working on this project almost two years ago. Starting a magazine is a ton of work and we were relatively clueless going into it, so it's taken us a while to really get it off the ground. We were hoping to have our first issue out right about now, but the pandemic and general insanity of 2020 has slowed us down. Now we're aiming for Spring 2021. It's in the hands of our designer now and is looking so good. We can't wait to share the final product!
What do you think about wellness as an industry?
While I've been happy to see a destigmatization of mental health and attention paid to the idea of overall wellbeing, it's unfortunate that the idea of wellness has morphed into a capitalist commodity and a means to feed the pervasive and toxic mindset of endless productivity. But Taffy Brodesser-Akner has said it all better than I ever could.
How come you know so much about "psychedelics"?
If I'm being totally honest, I've always been a fan of psychedelics and have experimented with them for years. Though they can be ridiculously fun, I always considered them more than a recreational drug. They feel more like a reset to me, a way to look deeply at myself and the universe, and feel more connected to both. Though I personally saw their effect on my own personal growth, I never thought of them as a drug that could be used that way in a clinical sense. But when the "psychedelic renaissance" began, and with it a resurgence of research into the healing potential of these drugs, it felt like a "duh" moment for me—and it felt natural to marry my long-time personal love for them to the growing media appetite for stories about the topic.
