Spotlight On Writers
Tessa Weitemeier
@TessaWeitemeier
- Where, do you hail from?
- What is the greatest thing about the place you call home?
For as long as I can remember I’ve been searching for a place that really feels like home to me and I came to the realization that home actually isn’t a place for me. I grew up in a home that wasn’t as safe for me as it should’ve been and when I lived in a children’s home for a while I was pointed at with a gun, so that wasn’t too safe either. I always struggled with the term “home”. To me, home is the feeling of inner peace. And I am not always at home. But I carry home inside me and I have the chance to come home wherever I am.
- What turns you on creatively?
Music and nature. If you send me into a forest with headphones for an hour I’ll come back with at least ten new notes in my phone. Some of them turn into sentences in a novel, others turn into poems and the rest ends up in songs I write. When I listen to music it’s like I am watching the words falling into place in a way they didn’t exist before.
I feel like many creative people need something to really turn them on but I am “on” all the time. I am always looking at things, hearing things, noticing things around me with this thought in mind that I could turn these things into something creative.
- What is your favorite word, and can you use it in a poetic sentence?
I don’t think I have an all time favourite word, I am constantly on the hunt for new words. Given the fact that English isn’t my first language there are still a lot of words for me to discover. Right now I think beacon is a cool word.
all of my hopes and dreams are weakened but there’s still a bright shining beacon
- What is your pet peeve?
People who don’t realize that making art, creating something that wasn’t there before is actual work. A novel doesn’t just magically appear and a poem doesn’t fall from the sky onto the paper in front of me or you. And it doesn’t matter if the created art is commercially or financially successful, it’s still work and it means something to the person who created it, so who are these people to question the value of it? Normally these people never made art in any form themselves and I am learning to surround myself more and more with people who understand what it means to create something. Slowly coming home to inner peace regarding this.
- What defines Tessa Weitemeier?
It’s weird to answer that myself, it would be a lot easier to ask the people around me this question. But I think both creatively and personally I am defined by having a very strong sense of what feels right and wrong to me. And I follow that sense even if some of my decisions seem very odd or simply wrong to others. So far I’ve never regretted a decision, and there have been some quite huge and life-changing ones. This doesn’t mean I never doubt my decisions, I doubt everything all the time.
My work is defined by a lot of deep emotions I guess. Having mentally visited the darkest places to exist I always try to capture the deepest human emotions in a hopefully easily accessible way. It’s the biggest compliment for me when someone sends me a message to tell me they had to put down a book I wrote because it made them cry or feel something else so intense they couldn’t continue reading. Don’t get me wrong here, I don’t want to make people cry but as a writer, it is a huge achievement to have created something that resonates so deeply with other people that it actually makes them feel something. And I think we all are in this world to simply feel.
- Need a Brother - September 3, 2024
- Trilogy On A Bench In The Rain - January 9, 2024
- Inside The Mind of a Dejected Writer - September 11, 2023
