S6E8: The Courage to Be Seen with John Tessitore

In This Episode

In this deeply reflective conversation, Norah sits down with John Tessitore — writer, editor, poet, podcaster, and advocate for the humanities — to explore the relationship between language, creativity, fear, and identity.

What begins as a discussion about writing quickly unfolds into a larger conversation about vulnerability and the courage it takes to let others truly see us. John shares how writing became the way he understands his own thoughts, why words matter in shaping public conversations, and how fear quietly influenced much of his creative life for decades.

Together, Norah and John reflect on communication across differences, the role of literature in helping people understand one another, and the ways language can either limit or liberate us. At the center of the episode is a powerful realization: sometimes the very thing we fear exposing is the thing that most deeply connects us to others.

You’ll Hear About

• Why writing became John’s way of understanding the world
• The connection between language, thought, and identity
• How fear impacts creativity and communication
• The role of literature in helping people understand one another
• Why language education is about far more than career skills
• Communication across differences and human connection
• The vulnerability that comes with poetry and creative work
• Public discourse, advocacy, and the language we choose
• The freedom that comes from no longer hiding parts of yourself
• Why “being seen” matters in both language and life

Timestamps

• 00:05 — Introducing John Tessitore
• 01:48 — Writing as a way of thinking
• 04:37 — Slowing down through words and writing
• 07:00 — Language, advocacy, and shaping conversations
• 11:29 — “We have a duty to understand each other”
• 13:04 — Inside a national humanities commission
• 18:41 — Relationship, communication, and human connection
• 21:00 — Walt Whitman and “I see you face to face”
• 23:09 — Hiding creative work for decades
• 24:24 — “It was about time”
• 29:14 — Finding freedom through creative exposure
• 34:37 — Fear, language learning, and vulnerability
• 40:15 — The story behind the Be True podcast
• 47:21 — Bringing your whole self into your work
• 50:21 — Final reflections on language and courage

Key Quotes

“I don’t know what I think until I write it.”

“We have a duty to understand each other and communicate across our differences.”

“Sometimes the strength in the writing is the totality of what you bring to it.”

“Fear is hard to get over, especially when you can’t even name it.”

“Breaking that down is the key to a lot of education.”

“The strongest part is the thing that only you’re going to do.”

Resources Mentioned

• www.nfmlta.org
• www.firstideacommunications.com
• www.johntessitore.com
• Walt Whitman and Crossing Brooklyn Ferry – https://www.poetryfoundation.org/
• Henry David Thoreau – https://www.poetryfoundation.org/search?query=Henry%20David%20Thoreau
• Bruce Springsteen — “Be True”- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rq2lsxXUVew
• John’s podcast: Be True – https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/be-true/id1692960494

About the Guest

I have been executive director of National Federation of Modern Language Teachers Associations (NFMLTA) since 2025. I am also a book editor for Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and I have a small consultancy, First Idea Communications, specializing in higher education and nonprofit communications. In past lives, I have been a journalist, a biographer, and taught history and literature at colleges around Boston. For over a decade, I managed national policy studies on education and civil justice for the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. In my spare time, I serve as Co-Editor Across the Pond for The Wee Sparrow Poetry Press and I record a weekly podcast about literary matters called Be True, which you can find anywhere. In other words, it’s complicated and I’m tired.

---

🎧 Listen to this episode wherever you get your podcasts and subscribe to It’s About Language for more conversations exploring language, culture, and our shared humanity.

---

Enjoyed This Episode?

If this conversation inspired you to rethink how you teach—or how you see language and culture—please subscribe to It’s About Language (enter your email below) to receive all of our updates.

• Follow It’s About Language on your Favorite Podcast app.

Share this episode with a colleague, student, or friend who cares about language, equity, and global citizenship

Your support helps amplify stories, resources, and voices that are changing how we think about language in the world.
Visit our “Merch” Store –>>> Shop Now!

---

Transcript

Norah Jones (00:01)
Perhaps you have heard the phrase from a poem that Alexander Pope wrote in 1711, fools rush in where angels fear to tread. I think that in this particular case, I feel a little bit like that rushing in fool. But on behalf of this wonderful conversation with my guest, the polymath and humanist John Tessitore, I gladly do so.

When we take a look at what makes humans human, and language is quintessentially the human talent, we take a look then at what education is for. The practical uses of education, the application of education immediately to a profitable job, all are very well-meaning items, but have turned

a lot of educational experience into that of a consumer nature. With the advent of artificial intelligence, the question already is rising. What then is the unique possibility of the natural intelligence of humans? And I would like to posit, as you listen to this wonderful conversation with John Tesetore, that

natural intelligence is embedded in human language, in use, in all areas of study and thought, and especially in connection with one another. I’d like to challenge us all to think about where education and where humans go in the world that is changing so quickly around us and how language and the humanities

get us to the goal we want. Enjoy this conversation with my guest, John Tesitore.

John, I’m just so excited that you’re my guest today. This is very, very cool.

John Tessitore (02:11)
No, thank you. Yeah.

I hope to be useful.

Norah Jones (02:17)
You are useful just by breathing and being here today. And I’m especially excited, John, about the very things that make you, at least in your communication before we got started, kind of like, I hope that I’m an okay guest. And the fact is I’m thrilled about your being the guest because you come with this depth, these multiplicities of experiences, actions, and skill sets that just, I just love.

even looking at your biography, which is on my website, and with the things that you’ve gotten into. So if you said, okay, I’m John, and I want to introduce myself to people and let them know what I do and why I do it, what would you say about yourself?

John Tessitore (03:01)
Yeah, you know, it’s a funny thing because the other day I had to send the bio to someone, a one-line bio. And in addition to being the executive director of NFMLTA right now, which isn’t actually the natural progression to my career, if you kind of look at the trajectory of it, I said that I was a writer, editor, and liberal arts advocate. And the reason why I said liberal arts advocate, which is a term I think I made up, if there was another one out there, I’d love to meet him or her.

But I made it up because I was trying to make some sense of this very strange career I’ve had where I always thought that I would be a sort of paid writer. That’s kind of what the training had been through college. Right out of college, was writing for newspapers and magazines, took a detour that was great and a little misadvised into graduate school. I thought I was going to be a better writer. I didn’t realize I was going to be a professor. Like it was a different career path than I assumed it would be. Yeah. Just my own ignorance. And then

for a variety of reasons, wound up in education policy outside of my own scholarship. So the trajectory is very strange, but the definition of how I see myself has always been writer first. Because all of those steps, that’s where the focus had been, my academic scholarship. When I went into policy work, I was writing commission reports for 50 person blue ribbon commissions, the sort of consensus reports of these organizations. And then I wound up here at MNFMLTA. ⁓

which is one part of what I do and the rest of what I do is the editing and the writing and the advocacy work. So the writing is the through line and everything else sort of comes out of

Norah Jones (04:33)
What is it about writing that attracted your heart and attention when you got started and where you still use it as a through line?

John Tessitore (04:41)
I started seeing myself that way in private and secretly, you know, in my teens, like, you know, 14, 13, notebooks under my bed, that kind of stuff. And I think, I think I grew up in a big family that used to sort of bury me in their stories because I was interested. So that was one thing, right? I was sort of trained as a young kid to be the recipient of the family stories. But the other thing is,

And I’ve read several people say this, and I forget who I heard the first time, but I don’t know what I think until I write it. It’s just the way I conceive of the world. I literally don’t understand anything until I work it out on a piece of paper. So I’m always writing. mean, it makes me a crazy person to watch on a 24-hour basis because there’s paper everywhere coming out of everything. Even in 2026, there’s paper and pencils and erasers. So those two things, think, together sort of built this weird person with all the paper coming out of his pockets.

Norah Jones (05:37)
Those two directions are so rich in themselves, but I think I’ll start with your second one. I don’t know what I think until I write it. What have you discovered about what you think and how has the act of writing indeed allowed you to understand that? What is it about that very act that brings about that understanding?

John Tessitore (06:00)
that

anyone’s ever asked me that. But as you’re asking me, I’m thinking about the word, not the word with capital W, but word choice, one word leading to another. That’s not the right one. That’s closer. That’s the right one. Okay, now we’ll build from there. I’m thinking about the process of how it is to think on a page. And for me, again, I’m a creature of a different century, I think. I have a thesaurus next to me. It’s the second version of this.

I tore through the first one. So I think it’s, there’s a kind of, you can hear it. speak too quickly. move too fast. I have too many, too many thoughts at once, but I think the writing slows me down enough to make some sense of You hear it right? I’m going a mile a minute, so I need something to slow me down.

Norah Jones (06:40)
Slurge.

That’s interesting. And do you do it with the pencil and paper, pen and paper, versus, typing it?

John Tessitore (06:49)
Yeah,

so it depends. I still start with literally a pencil and paper. know, I mean, there’s nobody on the planet that buys pencils, but I buy pencils. But sometimes my brain’s going too fast for the pencil and then the keyboard’s back. Ultimately, it all winds up on the keyboard, but sometimes I’ll start. Again, maybe just to slow it down, maybe just to slow this whole process down a little bit.

No, no, no, not at all. No, so I think at the end, didn’t, like I said, nobody’s ever really asked me that before, but as I’m thinking about it, the kind of jittery energy that could be a detriment is the thing I think I fight by writing.

Norah Jones (07:28)
What is the strength of jittery action in your life historically? And what is potentially the drawback that you are working with when you slow yourself down?

John Tessitore (07:38)
Well, I think I get a lot done in a day. I don’t think I slow down. You know, in a day with NFMLTA, I’m a one-man show there ⁓ in that work. ⁓ That means that I’m the social media guy, the budget guy, the writer of all the checks, the manager of all the committees, and I’ll do all of that in a couple of hours. So I have a pretty big capacity for work and pretty good work ethic.

but I can overload very quickly in the sense of like running past myself. I can get a lot done, but not with any thought sometimes. And so I do think as I’m thinking about this with you right now, which I actually appreciate quite a bit, I do think that might be why I rely so heavily on my notebooks.

Norah Jones (08:23)
Very interesting. Thanks for the reflection in front of us ⁓ and interiorly. When you work with words, you have this thesaurus that is right next to you as we talk. You have therefore a sense of the searching for the exact word in your work as a journalist, as a poet, as a person that’s been doing a variety of kind of writings and still does, including these kinds of organizational works. What is it like to be a

a man of words and language in that way in a world where potentially people are not necessarily valuing the individual word that they say or am I overstating it?

John Tessitore (09:05)
No, and I also don’t want to overstate it because that puts me in this position of having some kind of wisdom, which I do not have. But I do think that we rely on the same, I do think I notice that we rely on the same words quite often, the same phrases, and sometimes the same explanations, the same thought patterns. I do think that’s something I kind of pick up. I don’t necessarily escape it, but I do pick it up. And it’s one of the things that sort of I’m thinking about a lot right now.

⁓ in terms of the advocacy work. So I said liberal arts advocates, a term I made up. But part of what I think I’m noticing having done it for 20 years in this field in some way is that we kind of allow the conversation to define us rather than to define the conversation. Which is a weird position for people who work with words all day to allow themselves to be in. so it’s a funny question that you asked because I’ve been thinking a lot about this.

how we’re kind of on our heels at the mercy of the conversation as we find it, rather than on our toes finding the conversation for ourselves. That’s been something that I’ve been very frustrated with in this particular field of work for a long time. So maybe that’s the place where I see it most clearly.

Norah Jones (10:16)
That’s

interesting. That’s such a rich answer and I’m delighted to hear it. And one of the images I get from what you’ve just said is standing still while there’s a swirling around us or maybe sometimes a wave that wants to wash over us and wash us away almost. That may be an image that you want to repair with your skill set. The idea of how words can help you, you and all of us.

to get that conversation wrangled a little bit. Again, you repair what I’m asking you as you desire, okay?

John Tessitore (10:51)
Yeah,

no, I understand what you’re saying. I think, so, you know, maybe I’m the conversation to a topic we don’t necessarily want to go through, but in this way of thinking about the liberal arts in 2026, for example, or broad education or humanism in 2026, I find that the conversation has been, I don’t want to say co-opted, it’s been directed by people other than the people doing the work, right? So the people doing the work, the teachers of the disciplines of the liberal arts and the humanities, for example.

are not defining the conversation they’re in right now. And we have all kinds of statistics about how much trouble we’re having with this notion of a broad education and how small colleges are closing and universities are cutting programs. And we know all of those sort of practical things on the ground that happened. And we’re living in a definition of education created externally by business, by financial concerns of the university, by parents who are afraid that their students won’t have

a great first job, let alone the fifth job or the sixth job. It’s become a conversation that we’re responding to. And that’s something that to me is a language conversation in a lot of ways. It’s far as a field, as a discipline, as a culture, our inability to take the skills that we’re supposed to be teaching, right, communication skills, and failing to use them for ourselves. And so as a person who’s thinking about words all day, keep, get on LinkedIn and you see these conversations going on about what are the skills that…

employers looking for in 2026. And that’s the conversation that everybody has. have college presidents, professors have to have it, students have to Everybody has to have that conversation instead of coming the other way, which is here’s what we really do. We all know what we really do. We don’t necessarily do all of that. We do this other thing, right? Yeah. And I don’t want to, maybe too soon in this conversation to start telling us what we do. But you know what I’m trying to get at here. It’s like we’ll play that game. Who’s playing our game?

Right? Yes. So when I go back to the language, I’m always bothered that the language isn’t mine. It’s not ours. It’s somebody else’s that I have to adopt. So I think that’s the struggle I have culturally. I’m trying to clear a path through somebody else’s refuse.

Norah Jones (13:03)
That sense of being reactive. Response is one thing, reaction is another, and this reactive defensive position that often seems to take place. But no, really, we’re good for the planet somewhere. We’re good for society. So what is the stand that you stand in, John? What is our conversation? What is our word? What is our language about what it is we really do?

John Tessitore (13:32)
Yeah, so, and there’s the trouble, right? Because now I already said I have no particular wisdom, but the thing that I keep in my head and that I’ve been frustrated that we’ve been unable to say, excuse me, unable to say very clearly, again, my experience is 20 years of trying to do this work is really simple, right? It’s very simple. It gets down to like really basic things like we have a duty to understand each other and communicate across our differences, right? That’s basic.

We have a duty to understand each other, communicate across the differences. So that seems a foundation for education that’s pretty strong and that lasts a lifetime, right? It’s not so much here’s the skill that, you know, in 20 years you probably won’t need that skill and this one’s going to be AI just wiped out all the computer programmers. So that’s gone. But we’ve forgotten that sort of really basic part. You read books to understand the past or present or the future. They don’t necessarily have to be in paper. Mine usually are, but that’s because I’m a man of a different century.

But that conversation seems very quiet right now to me, that we’re basically trying to understand each other and communicate across differences. This is why the language field is so crucial ⁓ and why it’s so very difficult to replace however much we might try. So again, my whole buildup gets to a very basic kind of solution, which isn’t, but it’s a conversation that’s missing and it’s very strange that it’s missing.

I was the head staffer of a major national humanities commission, the last big humanities commission, a bipartisan request from Congress, which today would seem absurd. this was only in 2012 or 2013. It was not that long ago where we got the letters requesting this commission to think about the humanities and social sciences for the future of America.

We put together, this is when I was working at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and we put together a commission that had to be 54 people, but very prominent, lots of household names. George Lucas was an active member of the commission, and Yo-Yo Ma was in and out, and Ken Burns would do a couple of things for us, and John Lithgow was a spokesperson for us quite often. But also, scholars and university presidents and college presidents and scientists and the CEO of Boeing. And so you put all of those people together in a room, and they really did come.

They really did sit in a room. And you sort of have to give everybody a little bit of a say in the report, right? So everybody gets a piece. So they’re good for business and they’re good for these skills and soft skills, international and soft power. All of that sort of winds up in there because you have these people and everybody needs to have their voice heard. And it was very, very hard to come to like a sentence I just said, which is we just need to communicate and understand each other. Like it was very hard to get there.

because everybody had fears and concerns. Everybody had their own issues they wanted to deal with. President of an Ivy League college walked, university walked in on the first day and said, I need to tell parents who want to know when their kids are studying the humanities, what they’re getting. This is a president of an Ivy League university. So it was a very odd place. It was the people who create opinion. was all the thought makers sitting there, not understanding how to talk about the very basic thing that we all did on a daily basis.

And so ever since that experience, I’ve been trying to find the simpler version, the simpler version that didn’t require a war to explain, for example, or that didn’t require the fact that Boeing wanted to build more planes, the simpler version of the story. We forgot that part.

Norah Jones (17:11)
Yeah. Well, simplicity has such vast explosive, frankly, power. I don’t mean destructive. mean that it’s an important thing to keep in mind, but sometimes folks run away from it. But I’m going to actually go back to that amazing word that you used, duty, a duty to understand each other. I would love for you to hear more from you about the thoughts that are around that particular phrase, how that

how the language, even of that group of people that came from those different talents, they had their own kind of language, depending on their career and what brought them to that career. But how it is that we, if we have a duty to understand each other, how that unfolds in a world that we have.

John Tessitore (18:02)
I think that word, and I’ve been using that word, so it’s the right one to poke at, but I think it comes from my own experience as a teacher and a person who used to be in a classroom in a college, right? And I loved it. I didn’t leave academia for lack of passion. I think that word was how I justified standing in front of these people every day. They were young, not much younger.

much younger than I was at the time. And justifying to myself why it was important, for example, that everybody was reading, I don’t know, thorough in my class, right? There was that a hundred years, even in his lifetime, very few people read him. It’s kind of a crank. Like, what’s the point, right? And I knew sort of in my bones that there was something there to pull out, right? It was something there that we could all use. And so I think that what I…

I used to look around the classroom and think, what I’m doing here is helping them think through things for themselves. And that’s important for education, obviously. That’s what we all try to do for education. We help them think through things for themselves. But that the end goal has to be something. They think through things for themselves for what purpose, right? And I was never comfortable teaching thorough because it was good for business, right? And I was never comfortable teaching thorough because there was a specific skill.

that you were going to come out at the end of it, you were going to have this thing that I had helped you find. That wasn’t going to be, that had to be something else, right? It had to be something other than, used to call it the instrumental. Even something as basic as a skill, forget instrumental, even something. I couldn’t tell you what that was, but I could tell you that you might see things a little differently, right? You might understand something a little differently. You might understand, for example, you might see a protest on the street one day and not be disgusted because you know that civil disobedience has a purpose and what it is and why you do it.

As an example, the duty is the understanding. The duty we have to each other here in the classroom, but also when we go back in the world is to get past the fast judgment and get to the understanding. So I think that’s where it came from. think the word, when I say that, I think that word comes from my sense of what we were doing in the classroom when I was still teaching and why that was important. We have a duty to understand each other. Now, we live in an age of manipulation. That’s very clear.

And so I feel that duty even more strongly now, although I don’t know that I have the right. I don’t have the platform the way I did. I classrooms full of kids. But I still try to hold onto a little bit. I’ve seen some of the writing I do publicly and stuff. I mean, I still try to hold onto that a little bit. Not so much that I’m telling anybody what to think, but to help people think through and not be manipulated, to think through for themselves. So I know if I’ve answered that question.

Norah Jones (20:45)
yeah, absolutely, absolutely, and not to be manipulated. Okay, so here’s a little etymological moment. When we talk about relationship, that rellatio, the coming next to, coming beside, being with, in a culture where people are in a way that you described very visually just a few minutes ago, that sense of this sea around us or this volatility around us that’s very much oriented towards

the individual discovering themselves, the individual discovering, doing their skill set, the individual promoting themselves, not that we’ve not done that before, but that sense of overwhelmingly so. And when you talk about the duty we have to each other or building relationships or the ways that we communicate that bring us side by side with others, we have a language there that’s very different. And from the way you did your introduction even about the idea of we,

trying to have the conversation to be able to say this is a value and here’s why. There’s a bunch of ideas I just threw out there, John, that made me want to wrangle that together in a sense that the language that we use presupposes value of the connections. How do we make sure that our language that we use helps people to understand that without feeling bad about the kinds of things that they’re engaged in or

if maybe that emotional thing is not what I’m looking for here, understanding why it is we would stand in a slightly different place or to talk to them about value.

John Tessitore (22:21)
Yeah, it’s a danger. So that’s the danger of being a writer or a poet. The danger is that, again, the position assumes a kind of wisdom. It’s not a democratic position to stand in, right? It’s not as bad as being a comedian who stands in front of 500 people and says, listen to me and only me. But it’s not exactly a…

But you know, when I was doing my research, my research was about Walt Whitman. I talked about Thoreau, but my research was actually about Walt Whitman. And something I’m writing about, but I always write about it. So it’s just a constant in my life. His poem, Crossing Brooklyn Ferry, is probably my favorite poem. And the reason why I bring it up is because there’s several lines throughout the poem where he says it once, but there are a bunch of things he does throughout the poem. He see you face to face, right? I see you face to face. And he’s talking about.

The commute from Brooklyn to Manhattan in 1856, which was on a ferry, it was before the Brooklyn Bridge, it’s a commute that my family took every day when I was a kid. So he was imagining future commuters. Crossing Brooklyn Ferry is about imagining people who have done this in the past are gonna do it in the future. And he says, I see you face to face, he says it to the reader. I you face to face. So he’s literally like including you in this act, right?

And it’s this extraordinary gesture of sympathy, empathy, I never quite sure which one, I think this one is sympathy, but of understanding that not only are you an isolate, not only as you’re going across the East River into Manhattan from Brooklyn, but you’re not an isolated individual through time. It’s like this very strange cosmic moment. so when you ask about words and language sort of knitting together community, I went straight to that, I see you face to face.

Mostly because I write about it all the time. I quoted constantly, I’m writing about it now. But that’s the understanding. It’s not so much the seeing face, it’s the understanding. The understanding is you probably need some cash, so you have to leave home and go to New York and make some, come home. That means you probably got a house, you probably got a family, you might have some bills to pay, maybe some debts. You’re to have to do this tomorrow, which sucks, and you probably don’t want to do that. But I’m sorry you have to wake up in the morning and do it again. Like that’s enough right there for a writer to have ever accomplished, right?

to be able to see that we’re all in that part of it together. The trick is, you know, you’re always in the position of manipulating at some point, right? We’re all going to have to do a little bit of advertising and cajoling, and there’s a little bit of a slight of hand. But those kinds of gestures are where I think that’s how I see literature doing the work of community, Stuff like that. It’s those kinds of moments.

Norah Jones (25:09)
Very powerful. What about your own writing? How do you then incorporate this into what you write, including your poetry?

John Tessitore (25:17)
Yeah.

So I told you, I hid most of my writing until I was 14 or 13 or whatever. I hid it forever. I hid it until my mid forties, which is very embarrassing to admit now because I don’t know what kept me. I mean, I had been public with the creative writing and off and on in sports, but never sort of had a website and said, it’s my stuff. Everybody can find it. You know, never did that before. And it took me a minute to get my bearings as a person.

who was suddenly at this late date sort of exposed. the weird thing was, I don’t know what I was hiding. I’m gonna get to you. I’m gonna get to an answer to the question. I’m gonna get to, I don’t know what I was hiding, but I got out and it was suddenly available. And don’t you know family members found it? Like I didn’t tell them. I didn’t go around, but they found it. And I didn’t know that anybody knew I was doing such things on the side. And an older cousin said to me one day, there he is, the poet.

Norah Jones (25:54)
No, you’re on it. You’re on

John Tessitore (26:15)
Right. walked into a room and I thought, boy, here we go. This is my big fear. 47 years of fear. it comes. And he goes, it was about time. Wow. The next thing he said was it was about time. And I was just, I was dumbfounded by it. And I realized that at least in the poem world, in the poetry world, the openness was okay. It was acceptable to be sort of open and to, in fact, it was the good part. The good part was the part that people wanted to see and feel and associate with, or at least.

commisery with. Maybe it’s just misery loves company, who the hell knows. it was okay. And being that kind of a writer was okay. even if it went in a direction that I, know, I being my family, for example, even if it went in direction I’m uncomfortable with, I understand that’s the process. That’s the game you play. It’s okay. Like people understood that, which I had no way of predicting. So there’s that part.

And then that opened up the rest of what I was doing. And it’s actually when I combined the two, when I allowed my professional life and the creative life to sort of come together, which I still kept separate even after I had started, when I allowed those two things to come together, then it was really okay because now it seemed to help on both ends, right? It seemed to help that my professional associates knew that I was a creative writer and the creative people knew I wasn’t just a beatnik bum, you know? And it was okay to be those things and they actually were reinforcing.

But it was hard. so to get back to the question, I think what happened was I realized the kind of exposure was the part that was the useful part. That was the useful part. And nobody cares about my theories about life and the world or my philosophy of linguistics or whatever. They cared about the exposure, which was frightening and still is sometimes. But it seems to be stronger. It seems like a stronger foundation than if I hadn’t.

Norah Jones (27:59)
Yeah,

that’s, and you see, is that relationship and it’s interesting, it was through poetry first, yeah? Do you think that the nature of poetry is such that, as you actually mentioned it, the exposure through poetry has a different feel about it from the sound of what you just expressed.

John Tessitore (28:18)
Yeah, it did. I was writing, I was at a college, I was writing fiction. At one point I had a fiction agent in New York. The story of that manuscript, it’ll take another podcast. But that was when I was younger and I had an agent for fiction and nobody blinked. It wasn’t even, it was fiction, you know. But there’s something about the poem, this weird thing that very few people read. But our assumption is that it’s going to be personal even when it’s also fiction. There’s something about the genre that seems revealing in a way that’s different.

Even if you wrote an autobiographical novel, you write a weird poem, people go, he’s revealing something. So yeah, I think there is definitely something there that’s a different, that has to do with genre. But it may be just more the way people receive it. It doesn’t necessarily mean that the writing isn’t any different, but the perception is different.

Norah Jones (29:05)
But the way they receive it is there’s sort of a, perhaps I’m overstating it here, but a kind of an expectation that one will receive poetry in a different way from say nonfiction or even fiction or an editorial column in the paper.

John Tessitore (29:22)
Yeah. Memoir, even memoir. I have a Substack account where I write little articles on the Substack account because it reinforces the poems, which reinforce the pot. It was all, it all grew, it all ballooned. But a memoir piece on Substack doesn’t feel like anything for some reason. I can say, you know, my dad said this and my mother said this and here’s my sister’s and it doesn’t feel, but you write that same thing in a poem and people respond a little differently. And that’s a very strange feeling.

Norah Jones (29:25)
been more interesting.

John Tessitore (29:52)
The idea that it happened first, that I was more public that way first, made everything else much easier.

Norah Jones (29:57)
that sort of toughened you up there, realizing that that was a huge moment. Clearly, you can hear it in your voice that here was this opportunity, suddenly this exposure, and it turned out to be about, it’s about time.

John Tessitore (30:13)
Yeah.

And it was a big deal for me to get over a fear that I couldn’t even name for decades. But you know, the second leap, and it’s not that long. It’s it’s not that long ago. The second leap where I allowed all these things to cross, where I allowed not so much that I want my professional life to be about my poems. That’s not what I mean. But I didn’t hide it. Like when I stopped hiding it and allowed the energy of one kind of creativity to branch over into the other kind of creativity.

I noticed something happened that was different in my work and in my creative life. And that was really something.

Norah Jones (30:50)
I would like you to do two things. One is I’d like you to riff a little bit more on that sentence that you just finished up. And that was really important. That was really meaningful. And how that might be a recommendation of some kind, an insight of some kind to those that are listening. What is it that your experiences there, what you just said, can help people to understand maybe some freedom through language that they might not have yet?

John Tessitore (31:18)
I that’s right. Sorry about that. think that’s right. think, I think, I’m sorry. Let me just see if I can, you’re going to edit. So let me see if I can stop this from happening. No texts, please. This is my daughter. Okay. So I think, I think that what happened was I, think freedom is the important part of what you said. It was a freedom that I suddenly had access to that I didn’t have before. And it’s because I got found out, right? People find just, ultimately people are going to find you because it’s 2026 and

You can’t hide it forever. You can’t hide anything forever, right? And I got shunned out. And again, like my cousin, it was okay. wasn’t, do you do these things? Why would you? It wasn’t that. I was afraid of that reaction coming into my work life. And so I kept them very separate. And then it didn’t happen that way. It was more like, hey, that was pretty interesting. What do you think of this other topic, right? It started a conversation on the other end. When it started a conversation, I thought, well,

Now I’m depriving myself of this conversation that I could be having that I’m not having because I’m keeping everything so siloed. I’m not actually having these conversations because I’ve locked them down, all of them. And I can’t function that way anymore. Literally, I’m running out of road, right? In both things, in my creative life and my professional life, I’m running out of road because I’m separating them apart. So when I can bring them together, it was a freedom, but it was a confidence thing. was okay to think a little differently now, a little bit.

it was okay to use art in my professional life or bring an essay that I had written as a conference presentation into the creative world and go, hey, you guys who like books, here’s a thing that I just did to this other thing, you might like this too. Now you’re starting to become a sort of person rather than what I had been for so long, which is a kind of persona over here and a sort of persona over here. Now I’m a person in a way that I hadn’t been. that’s not, nor that’s not that long.

That’s a very recent, I’m a 51 year old man. That’s a very recent achievement where, you know, where, where I wasn’t blocking these things off. mean, here we are. You’re a language scholar. I’m running a language organization. We haven’t even talked about languages. Right. mean, that’s brand new in my life. Right.

Norah Jones (33:18)
interesting.

Yeah.

John Tessitore (33:35)
So yeah, there’s a lesson there for sure. Now, it also makes me different from other people I know. Other people have other things that make them different from other people they know. This is the thing that makes me slightly different from other people I know. There’s a poem in this journal that nobody reads and I read it on a podcast that I do that very few people listen to. So I’m available to all of this stuff. I’m available out in the public and I have a sub stack account that very few people subscribe to and they can read the essay based on the poem, based on the podcast and all of a sudden it’s not a big audience.

But it’s a full experience. And that’s new. That’s like very new. It’s embarrassing to be 51 and have been struggling for so long to find it. And now you’re almost starting at ground zero because only at 50, 51, only at 50 or 51, 49, did I even have access to that world.

Norah Jones (34:27)
But you have a freedom and a joy that is in its own way that we’re sharing here. And I know through the various productions that you provide, that is a real guidepost for people that may not yet have discovered their freedom, no matter what age they are. So that works. That works.

John Tessitore (34:51)
Yeah,

yeah. Again, you know, it wasn’t for lack of aspiration to have a more well-rounded experience, but fear is a big deal. Fear is hard to get over, especially when you can’t really even name it. And you can’t even tell it, what exactly am I afraid here? I couldn’t even tell you what that would be. It was just, there’s something unseemly about this. I don’t know what it is. I’m just going to block it off, right? And again, when my cousin walked into that room, it was a big deal because he-

This is an older cousin, a guy you look up to. And I thought, he’s going to hammer me. Oh, this is going to get nasty. And instead he goes, yeah, it’s about time. And I thought, oh, they all know. Everybody knows. On some level, everybody knows I have other stuff going on. I didn’t know that they knew that. And that was really a big deal. And I do think it’s a lesson. We’re not seeing the end of it. We’re just seeing it in the early days, really. But there is something there. I passed it on to others.

I’m telling you.

Norah Jones (35:51)
Well, I’m going to keep going back to the fact that through the types of ways that you are using language, there was a fear of exposure and then a tremendous freedom opening, again, through that sense of I was been able to express myself in various ways and that’s okay. And there’s a huge message for

people that are not necessarily interested in being poets or writers or anything else, but just there’s a lot of fear-based stuff going on in the world. And that discovery and that comfort, that freedom comfort that you’re expressing here today, that’s a huge, huge prize for any human being.

John Tessitore (36:40)
You know, you’re going to laugh because I was thinking about this before we got on. is, you do obviously a lot of language education stuff on this podcast. I was thinking about my own language education and junior high and high school French, one year of college. So I’m an odd person in this field. As you know, it’s not, it’s not where I started. And I was thinking, why am I not better at French? Why am I not better? And it’s back to fear.

And I know it. I knew it in college too. The exposure of making those sounds, right? Making those different sounds in front of those people. We’re doing way too much psychoanalysis here for me, but getting over that fear would have helped me there too, right? It would have helped me there too. didn’t. I didn’t. So now I go through phases where I’ll read a novel in French and muddle through just to maintain the muscle. I’ve done that for years. But, but, ⁓

but you probably won’t catch me speaking it very often. It’s the same kind of thing.

Norah Jones (37:35)
Human face to face thing. Yeah.

John Tessitore (37:39)
I know I’m speaking French with an Italian, with an Italian American Brooklyn Long Island accent. And I, I’m very self-conscious about that. And it’s been a fear of mine all along. So.

Norah Jones (37:50)
There’s someone out there that would have been so tickled to hear a man speaking French with a Brooklyn Italian American. ⁓

John Tessitore (37:59)
So I have this Long Island accent, but my family’s from Brooklyn and I could hear it in my French. So I was afraid, right? I’m at a university and I’m going, you don’t want to hear this. This is not going to be pretty, you But getting over that would have been useful even in that part of my life, of course. I mean, you see that all the time in classrooms. But it’s the same lesson. At the end of the day, there’s no reason. At the end of the day, there’s no reason. The people I was afraid of when they found my creative work were not surprised and weren’t really even thinking about me that way anyway.

Right. Everybody, and the same in the classroom. Nobody was going, John’s got a Brooklyn accent. Like nobody was doing that, you know. But you sort of, build this thing up about yourself, right? About, build it up. Breaking that down is really important if you can do it. Breaking that down is the key to a lot of education.

Norah Jones (38:44)
Absolutely, and I do think that part of it I’m speaking from my own personal history now as well as listening to yours is that part of it at least is that we are afraid of how little it will matter to people to find out who we are that they’ll be perfectly content and they’ve already as you say pretty much I’ve understood us because they’ve been observing us and It’s not a big deal and our sense of it’s a really big. I don’t want to admit it, but I’m thinking it’s a big deal with

No, and it’s not. they’re like, no, it’s

John Tessitore (39:18)
I’ll you another one that because we’re doing this, I must feel comfortable. I said to my mother, not that long ago, it was my mom. I said to her, I’m a little weird. Because I was writing and I was producing creative work. said, I’m a little weird. She goes, I’ve always known that. Yeah. I said, you did? She goes, yeah. She goes, I’ve worried about it too. I’m like, what? Tell me. I was the only one who didn’t know. So there’s both nobody’s thinking of you that way and also what they’re thinking, they knew anyway.

Norah Jones (39:38)
What did you-

knew

anyway.

John Tessitore (39:48)
You’re not going to be new anyway. You know, yeah. And that’s in the classroom too. In the classroom, that’s your mom, that’s you.

Norah Jones (39:55)
Yes, yes.

John Tessitore (39:57)
They’re not thinking of you that way and the way they’re thinking of you, they have been thinking for a long time anyway. You’re fine. Go ahead and do it.

Norah Jones (40:03)
Well, when you were in the collegiate teaching profession there, that exposure to understanding of literature, people are hiding behind their reactions or what they think the professor wants to know or what they think they should be knowing or saying a lot, right? You don’t necessarily see a lot of freedom in that. I was fortunate in my collegiate experience to have the kinds of interesting professors that had fascinating approaches to things such that they just

broke through all the walls that made us worry about what we were doing and who we were with each other, which was pretty cool for people that were 18, 19, 20. But that sense of exposure comes in all kinds of classes, but especially in language class, because you define yourself as you have done here, John, with my accent, where it exposes that I’m from, my sense that I can’t communicate as clearly in this other language as I can do in my native tongue.

There’s a lot of fear out there.

John Tessitore (41:04)
Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, as you said at the beginning of our conversation here, because I’m an unusual person in that world, in the language world, mean, I’m executive director of a language organization, probably the only person I talk to in the course of a day who’s not an applied linguist, right, or practitioner teacher in a classroom. I was nervous to come here.

to this conversation because we can take a right-hand turn right now and I’ll be lost. We’ll start talking L1, L2, and I’ll be like, no, this is your world now. And I’ll write the check from MNF MLTA and fund your research. yeah, so still deal with that in my professional life because I was hired to build a small organization and do some communications work to build it, grow its grant programs, give it a voice publicly.

and I leave the technical evaluations of the grants to people who know the technical evaluations of those grants. The exposure is sitting here with you, right? That’s the exposure. The exposure is, okay, I don’t have my committee now, so now we have to make sure we don’t say anything silly. Yeah. It’s the same thing. It’s the same thing in professional life too. It’s the same issue.

Norah Jones (42:18)
are

vulnerable human beings and ⁓ our way of expressing ourselves to each other is especially the area of vulnerability. I would like to ask you about your podcast, which is called Be True. So why did you call it Be True? What is your podcast’s focus?

John Tessitore (42:42)
This is a very, I’m going come, I’m going to do the second one first because the answer to the first one is slightly more embarrassing than the answer to the second one. So when I did get my workout, the creative workout into the world, and this was a COVID thing a lot too. This was a very much a COVID period for me. I was starting to get published in little journals, but little journals are not seen by very many people, although they’re prestigious and you appreciate the publication rights, very small circulations. I mean, I came from…

My original, my first job out of college was the number one men’s magazine in the country. So I was used to big circulations and big numbers and stuff. know, 27 people were reading my poem in these tiny little things. And I felt like I had to catch up. was behind. There’s an older person getting out in the world. And I was thinking, how is anybody going to find my work? And I was a podcast listener since like 2006 or something. I think when I finished my dissertation, I got a

I got the first iPod or something. So I knew about podcasts all the way back then. They’re searchable. You can type a name in in Google or on Apple podcasts or you can find that work. They’re searchable in a way that the poems individually weren’t searchable. No, you couldn’t find them. You couldn’t type anything in and it’d come up. So my marketing brain said, all right, we’ll try this thing. And Substack has a podcasting software attached to it.

I just did it, but I had no plan except how to get the work out in the world. I didn’t even have a theme. I I started talking one day and recorded and put it out just to see what happened. And I don’t even, I mean, I’m still finding it’s 120 something podcasts. It started as my work. It was literally just an experiment to see if I could get my work out. But over time, I realized you miss the classroom. You miss the, you miss other writers. The world’s gotten crazy. You have something to say sometimes about it.

So it became this thing, what I say at the beginning is welcome to be true, the podcast about the writing I love and the writing I do, which was an ad lib that rhymed. It came out of my mouth on the first time I recorded it and I kept it ever since because it rhymed. And for a while I used to say, I promise I won’t rhyme the whole time as a joke because I couldn’t believe I was doing this stupid thing anyway. And so it’s evolved into a thing about writing and literature, sometimes mine, sometimes somebody else’s. I’ve even started to do books, I’ve edited.

As a professional editor, I edited a book about nuclear politics. I don’t have any expertise in it, but as an editor and somebody who can, you know, it can be a quick study for long enough to edit a book, I’ve done that a few times. I did a whole podcast about a book I edited because I thought given the war and some other things that it was an important thing to consider. So it’s literally become about the writing I love and the writing I do. that’s why it’s so, and be true, the reason why that’s it. I just liked the title and

I had experimented with a blog about 15 years ago, something like that. And I called it Be True. And this is why it’s embarrassing. Nobody in the world knows this. This is an exclusive. It’s named after a Bruce Springsteen song that nobody knows. It’s a B-side Bruce Springsteen song from the late 70s. It’s called Be True. just like the title. That’s

Norah Jones (46:01)
There you have it.

John Tessitore (46:03)
It’s a springsteen. It’s a realistic love song by Bruce Springsteen called be true. Yeah. But it’s like I said, it’s a B side. Nobody even knew that. Yeah. And I don’t think Bruce is going to sue me. So yeah. So that, but so the podcast is great because it, it scratches that teaching it a little bit. Not that I need to, I don’t really need a podium, but I get to engage with ideas a little bit, make them presentable and, and, and I keep it within basically under 12 minutes. I’ve said to some, I’ve said to people before it’s long enough for you to drive through the grocery store. know what I mean? Like it’s.

It’s a quick weekly hit of some literary thing. it’s me, sometimes it’s me, sometimes it’s Shakespeare. could be, it’s been Whitman, it’s been, you know, yeah.

Norah Jones (46:43)
And it’s, as you say, you can walk the dog, let them do their thing, bring it on back, and you get a chance to have that hit. That’s so cool. How does doing a podcast differ from your writing? What are the strengths and weaknesses of both with your experience?

John Tessitore (46:58)
Because of the kind of podcast it is, I actually do write it out pretty much. I pretty much map it out because I didn’t want to, I wanted to keep it tight and I haven’t earned, it’s small. It’s a small thing. I don’t feel like I’ve earned the right to do a lot of hemming and hawing. know what mean? Like I don’t want to be on my own podcast stuttering. wanted, so out of respect for anybody who’s listening, I do map it out a bit. But it is a different kind of writing. It’s definitely a

It’s a different voice than if I had to write an essay. ⁓ I find it more conversational, but I also, because of what it is, like actually this week I read a little piece of fiction that’s my own, but started with this three minutes, a little long actually, three minute discourse about the difference between reading fiction on a podcast and reading a book. The art of the excerpt. It’s an excerpt. It’s not the book. It’s going to be misleading no matter what I do. So what I’ve, this is the podcast, what I’ve chosen to do this week.

Norah Jones (47:46)
interesting.

John Tessitore (47:56)
is pull an excerpt that can stand on its own, that speaks to some other topic. And we’ll talk about that topic a little bit, and here’s the thing. But that’s different than writing the book, right? That’s different than writing the fiction. And it’s also different than writing an essay. It’s really sort of framing this piece of fiction around an idea. In this case, this week, was an Earth Day. It was Earth Day last week, so it’s an environmental idea around a little piece of fiction that I had written that’s out of a much larger piece. So it’s very misleading about what the larger piece is. So that’s the difference. It’s very…

I’m still coming to terms with podcasts versus the fiction versus the poem versus the essay versus the speech versus I’m still coming to terms with how the podcast fits, but

Norah Jones (48:32)
Well, I think it’s wonderful because you have a variety of things that are all incorporated in it. And that is also part of the unique individualistic stamp that you would bring to it. John, if you know that there are people that are listening. Wait a minute. Let me try that again. Let’s start that thing again. When you look out, you know that people are listening to this that love language. Some of them are learning it. Some of them are listening because they just know how language is part of the human condition with

all of the background, biographer and journalist and poet and podcaster and professor and leader of these organizations. What is it that you want to be sure that you say that they hear from you because you’ve just learned it, doggone it, and you want them to know it or exhort them in some way?

John Tessitore (49:24)
You’ve helped me see the first thing and that is this, and I don’t want to make it sound like self-help-y. I don’t trust necessarily all the self-help-y kinds of language, but sometimes the strength in the writing is the totality, the way you just said it, of what you bring to it, right? It’s sometimes the biggest strength in writing is, and I’m going to say a stupid word, but everything. And what I mean by everything is it’s the random stuff that makes you you.

It’s the random little, it’s the Bruce Springsteen title for a podcast about Walt Whitman and you know, whatever. That’s a Tessitore stew, right? In fact, I’m working on a thing right now that has all of those elements and more. And I looked at it one day and I thought, this is literally 51 years of Tessitore in this project. There’s no, like I’m tired of myself, but not everybody knows me, so it’s fine. I know where it’s all coming from, but nobody else knows that. So I get to present it for the first time. So that’s the first thing I think, that totality part.

is important for people who are creating anything. The strongest part is the thing that only you’re going to do. The second part of it is maybe an early question. I don’t think we’re paying enough attention to what we’re saying as a culture. I don’t think we’re paying enough attention to discourse and argument and the trading of ideas. This is not a new thought, but it comes back to what you raised earlier.

For example, the conversation about education is not a full-breath conversation about the state of American education. It’s very much directed by two or three simple concerns that we’ve been kicking around for a little while. It’s not about root causes, what’s the best idea, what are we losing? It’s very, very specific. It’s, know, what’s that first job, right? And I don’t know that that’s unusual right now. think, I don’t know that it’s unusual, for example, on social media. I think we get driven into these little pockets. So…

Everybody has to talk about AI this week. There’s no other topic in the world. If you go on LinkedIn, it’s an AI world right now and who knows why, you know. But that’s where everybody kind of follows that trend. That’s very worrisome to me. Just as a person who, as you said, who works with words all day and is constantly writing and stuff, to sort of go one after another after another of the same thing, the same thing, the same thing. In the humanities, we’ve been saying us too, or we’re good for jobs also for at least 30 years.

Norah Jones (51:47)
Yeah. Right. Yeah.

John Tessitore (51:49)
Um,

I used to work with, as I said earlier, I used to work at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. was the program director in the humanities. We had the humanities indicators, which is the data, national data, and then we had social media and every day we were posting us to us to us to us to us to us to to us us us to to to to us we were doing that, but that’s not a strong position to be in. And that has to do with the discourse and the rhetoric that we’re using and the words that we’re choosing. just think we’ve lost the sense of argumentation a little bit without sounding too much like an old man.

that worries me in that I think I would encourage everyone to engage in a little bit more.

Norah Jones (52:23)
Thank you, John. It’s interesting we go back, I think, in what you just said, too, to the idea of facing the fear of exposure, which is actually the strengthening moment.

John Tessitore (52:34)
And I’m only going through it now. It’s hard. I don’t have an answer. don’t have like, and here’s where it ended. I don’t have the happy ending now. just have, I just started it in the last year or two really in, in bridging these worlds that in a way that I hadn’t before. And it’s a late blooming thing. So I don’t, there’s no, it’s not a clear end, but I’m more, I feel stronger as a result.

Norah Jones (52:56)
That’s powerfully said too. John, thank you so much. I appreciate everything you’ve shared today. You’ve been extremely patient with this long conversation, but I’ve enjoyed every minute of it.

John Tessitore (53:07)
Thank you, Nora. was a lot of fun. Thank you so much. And I’m sorry, I brought you through my psychoanalysis, but it’s been very helpful.

Norah Jones (53:12)
I it. I love it. What else do we have to offer, my friend? That’s right. But what it is and to watch you as well as to hear you talk about this last couple of years and there’s no, I’m glad it’s not finished. Why would it be? Right? You’re discovering brand new things and it’s powerful and it takes time to figure out what that is that’s just been opened and how best to share it. So thanks for doing that with us.

John Tessitore (53:41)
Thank you.

Norah Jones (53:42)
I trust that you enjoyed this conversation with John, and I hope that it has given you some room to think. Think about what human beings are so good at, and especially the role of language and the connection of language as the center of that human activity. Please join me for our next conversation. And in the meantime, check out my website, fluency.consulting to…

learn more about John, learn more about the activities in which he’s engaged and the resources that he has for you. And I look forward to following up with you about what you learn and what you teach us in what you have pondered about language, humanity, and the humanities.

Become a Sponsor