Meet JOHN TESSITORE

We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful JOHN TESSITORE. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with JOHN below.

Hi JOHN, thank you so much for opening up with us about some important, but sometimes personal topics. One that really matters to us is overcoming Imposter Syndrome because we’ve seen how so many people are held back in life because of this and so we’d really appreciate hearing about how you overcame Imposter Syndrome.

This is a daily struggle for me. Imposture syndrome is why my creative life got off to such a late start.

I’ve been writing since I was very young. Maybe I was ten or eleven when I wrote my first story, and twelve when I wrote my first poem. So I started out knowing I had a lot to learn. (Really young kids know they don’t understand the adult world. Only teenagers think they know everything.) And I carried that insecurity with me for a very long time.

I studied. Hard. And I went to college and studied some more. And I went to graduate school and studied some more. And all of that education only convinced me that I still didn’t know enough. Which was nonsense. I’ve read and analyzed and taught a million stories and poems over the years. I know plenty. But the literary critics have a way of convincing you that you don’t know the right things, the proper things, the fashionable things.

I was in my mid-forties before I realized that no one else was in control but me. I was in charge…that in literary matters, the writer decides what’s right and proper and fashionable. And it’s the writer’s job to teach the audience how to read his or her work.

But by the time I had that realization, I was dealing with a new kind of imposter syndrome, because now I felt like I was too old to make a fresh start, and I had the wrong kind of graduate degree. Who’s this old guy? Where did he come from? Which MFA program?

I still deal with those feelings every day. I’m no longer a young man of promise. I’m a guy in his late forties who is trying to publish his work. Will the young editors read my work with an open mind? Do I know enough for them to take me seriously? Do THEY know enough to take ME seriously?

And then I remind myself. It’s my job to make them take me seriously. It’s my job to teach them that my work is worth serious consideration. I’m not an impostor. I’m a teacher. And one of the things I’m teaching is how to read my work.

Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?

I’m a writer. In one way or another, I’ve always been a writer. In previous lives I’ve been a journalist, a biographer, an academic, and for 15 years I worked on public policy issues. Today, I continue to earn a living by writing for others through my business, First Idea Communications. And I love my work. But my heart is in my poems.

I’ve written poems for a long time–in secret since I was about 12 years old–but for a variety of reasons (none good in hindsight) I waited thirty-five years to start publishing them with regularity. Since 2021, I’ve published dozens of poems in literary journals, magazines, and anthologies, and have a growing catalogue of chapbooks and collections that I have self-published and market on my website and through social media.

Since I’d been an academic for about a decade, and I miss teaching, I started a weekly podcast in 2023 called Be True. In each episode, I revisit “the writing I love and the writing I do”–usually one of my own poems, supplemented by the work of others–as the starting point of a larger discussion about life, culture, and creativity.

I also have the great privilege of serving as Co-Editor Across the Pond for The Wee Sparrow Poetry Press, a small volunteer organization that publishes poetry collections and donates all proceeds to charity.

This all happened because I faced a turning point in my life in 2021–a confluence of personal issues, compounded by the pandemic–and decided that I had to take a chance on myself at some point or risk fading away. It’s one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.

There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?

First and most important…I’m a very hard worker, a real grind. I think you need to be to make your way into the world. Especially if you’re a late bloomer like me. And especially in a world with so many people in it. You need to be able to put your head down and work. Everyone needs a little help along the way, but you need to put yourself in a position to receive help first. Because no one’s looking for. you otherwise. There are just too many people trying to do the same things. You have to work your way into position in order to be noticed.

Second, I have just enough confidence to believe I have something to offer, but not enough to believe that anyone owes me anything. I guess that’s a recipe for gratitude when a project works out. I love when someone reads something I’ve written and finds meaning in it. That’s why I’m working so hard to spread the word. I spent decades writing only for myself, and it started to feel empty. On the other hand, no one’s asking me to do this. If I manage to grab someone’s attention, I understand that they’ve given me something precious. It’s my responsibility to offer something worthwhile to honor their time.

And third, it’s been helpful to have some historical perspective on the whole enterprise, to know that my literary heroes were forced to publish their own work from time to time, and fought with editors, and resented critics, and were overlooked, and forgotten, and remembered, and forgotten again. History tells us that nothing is linear. That’s very helpful knowledge when you’re zig-zagging all day.

One of our goals is to help like-minded folks with similar goals connect and so before we go we want to ask if you are looking to partner or collab with others – and if so, what would make the ideal collaborator or partner?

I’ve had the privilege of working with a few visual artists in the last two years, which has been enormously gratifying to me. My friends Ted Randler, Bill Travis, Pete Shorney, and Pier Gustavson have allowed me to use their beautiful work for book covers and within the pages of my books as well. I’m always interested in doing more with the visual arts and I dream of musical collaborations as well. I’m easily found through my website, johntessitore.com, if anyone’s interested! Instagram is usually pretty good too, @jtessitorewriter.

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