Interviewee: Jessica Teich (Connecticut & Magdalen 1981) [hereafter ‘JT’]
Moderator: Jamie Byron Geller [hereafter ‘JBG’]
Date of interview: 14 June 2024
JBG: Okay. So, this is Jamie Byron Geller on behalf of the Rhodes Trust, here in New York City with Jessica Teich to record Jessica’s oral history interview which will help us to launch the first ever Rhodes Scholar Oral History Project. Today’s date is 14 June 2024. Thank you so much, Jessica, for joining us in this project.
JBG: Would you mind saying your full name for the recording, please?
JBG: Wonderful. And Jessica, do I have your permission to record this interview?
JBG: Okay. So, we’re having this conversation in New York, but I know that you’ve travelled quite some way for this conversation. So, where is home for you?
JBG: Great. And how long has LA been home?
JT: I went there from Oxford for four months and now I’ve been there forty-odd years.
JT: There’s this comic notion that you go to LA and fall asleep next to the pool and wake up 40 years later. I think that’s what happened to me.
JBG: And you actually grew up pretty close to New York City.
JT: Yes. I was a dancer, and I used to ride the train into the city to take dance class. It was as if I had this other life: I would come to the city as a teenager and experience a much bigger world.
JBG: It sounds like dance was a very big part of your childhood.
JT: Dance was the very centre of my childhood. It was a world apart from all the petty tensions of high school, and it was a place to dream.
JBG: That’s really lovely. And what were your earliest educational experiences like, your elementary and high school experiences?
JT: I was always a bit of a social isolate. That really shaped me, as a person and a writer: that sense of living my life in the margins, as in the margins of a book.
JBG: And did you think of yourself as a writer at that time, as a child?
JT: I was always writing, even from the time I was very young. As it happens, there was something I wrote in my late teens that I’ve travelled with— literally— throughout my life, and when I wrote my memoir, it finally found a home in those pages. I know the Irish have a saying, ‘writers are failed talkers’, and there is some truth to that for me, because I was so completely enveloped in my own world as a child. The writing was the way out.
JBG: And how far from the city did you live growing up? It sounds like you lived close enough to get in quickly.
JT: I lived about an hour away.
JT: That transitional time, when you’re in flux, on the train, was very interesting to me. It’s almost like an anthropological study, because there were so many different kinds of people on the train, and if you live a sheltered life, as a lot of us do as children, you get to see a bigger world.
JBG: And were there particular subjects that you gravitated toward?
JT: I always gravitated toward English. I was a terrible math and science student, and at Yale, I think I had the lowest math SAT score of anyone I met in four years! Getting into Yale was a real gift. I remember my high school guidance counsellor called my mother into his office and said, ‘You know, I think maybe she’s going to have to go to a two-year college, because I just don’t think she’ll get in anywhere else’. My senior year of high school, my grandmother died very suddenly. My parents were overseas, and it was left to me to go into my grandmother’s closet and choose clothes for her to be buried in. I ended up writing an essay about that and it won a national writing contest, and I think that’s part of the reason I got into Yale. It also launched me on my path as a writer.
JBG: I would love to talk about your experience at Yale, but before we do, you spoke so beautifully about dance being a place to dream growing up, and I was wondering if you would mind expanding on that, on what your dance journey was like.
JT: You know, even at dance, I was an introspective person who stood a little bit apart. There were the younger girls, who were always chatting at the barre and tucking flowers into each other’s hair. And there was a group of older girls—they were adults, really, although everyone’s called a ‘girl’ or ‘boy’ in the dance world—grown women having grown-up relationships with the men in the company. I sat on the stairs and watched these two groups, and I inhabited this intermediary place, this kind of liminal space. When I was young, the dance master would invite me to sit on the floor as he was creating dances, and that was really the moment I saw that you could create patterns and rhythms and correspondences out of the tangle of people’s bodies. It was a very powerful lesson in making order out of chaos.
JBG: I’m thinking about the work that you have gone on to do in the theatre and the impact, I would imagine, of seeing those early choreography experiences.
JT: Yes. The idea that you could use art to make sense was a very early part of my education.
JBG: Wonderful. It certainly sounds as though dance was a very large part of your life. Are there other hobbies that stand out when you reflect on your childhood?
JT: I think of myself mostly as a reader and writer. Those are the two activities that really formed and informed me. I was one of those kids who never went anywhere without a book, because a book was an escape and a kind of armour, and a valued object. I was a frequent library goer, and eventually the local library gave my mom a job because she was always there. She was a big reader too.
JBG: And as you were growing up, before college, did you have a sense of what you hoped to do with your future?
JT: I knew it would involve writing. Like many people, luckily, I had one teacher who really saw me and saw me as a writer, and she was a very tough critic. This was in eighth grade. A few years ago, she was diagnosed with brain cancer. I reached out to her to ask what she most wanted to do, and she said, ‘I’d really like to publish a book of the letters I’ve gotten from parents and students over 40 years, along with essays I’ve written about teaching’. I ended up contacting as many of her students as I could find and editing their essays. Now there’s a book called Love, Brimming with a comma after the word ‘love’. She and I argued endlessly about that comma! I wanted there to be some kind of record, for her and for people who come after, of what it means to be a teacher who changes people’s lives.
JBG: I imagine we’ll talk about this as we move through our conversation, but I love the really powerful work you do to support people in telling their stories, and there’s just a lovely arc of closing the circle in helping a former teacher, who encouraged you to write, tell her story. It’s really beautiful.
JT: Thank you. It really meant a lot to me, and it gave us a chance to reconnect, as two grown-ups and two writers, and for me to thank her for changing my life. When you’re in junior high or high school, I think teachers do the most to help you imagine other possibilities, other lives.
JBG: You shared a little bit about the essay contest that you won in high school and that was part of what you think might have put you on the journey to Yale. What was your experience like there?
JT: I enrolled in a programme for first year students called Directed Studies. We were a very small group, and we moved together through several disciplines: literature, history and politics, philosophy. You had, as your professors, some of the most celebrated people on the faculty. The programme was frequently referred to as ‘Demented Studies’, because it could seem overwhelming. You were plunged into the vast ocean of ideas and strategies and accomplishments of the Western ‘canon’, beginning with Plato and Aristotle and Aeschylus and Thucydides. Now, of course, there are many ‘canons’, as there should be. But at the time, those thinkers were considered the pillars of a liberal education.
JBG: And were you continuing to dance through college?
JT: I did dance, but I had a very traumatic experience at ballet when I was in high school, and it severed my connection to that world. It took a very long time to find my way back.
JBG: I’m sorry to hear that. Thank you for sharing that. And so, as you’re settling into college, it sounds like writing is still a huge part of your life.
JT: Yes. My freshman year, I wrote an essay about The Winter’s Tale, which is a very complex and sort of ‘broken’ late play of Shakespeare’s. In it, events happen that don’t occur in his earlier plays. A child dies and isn’t resurrected. In some ways, it’s a very psychological play. I wrote an essay that ended up winning a Yale prize, and I saw that as confirmation that I should be writing. That was really the beginning of my love of Shakespeare, and that’s why I wanted to win a Rhodes: to study Shakespeare at Oxford.
JBG: And prior to discovering your love of Shakespeare, had theatre been something that you’d gravitated towards?
JT: I acted in a lot of plays when I was in high school. The idea of words and all the different places where they live—in books, in conversation, on the stage— was always a place where I felt at home. As I went through the Rhodes process, and as I’ve met people over decades of serving on selection committees, I’ve realised there are so many people who are gifted in many different ways. Occasionally—or maybe more often— they have trouble figuring out which path to pursue. For better or worse, I never had that problem, because I always only good at one thing.
JBG: A very powerful one, though.
JT: Well, yes. Thank you. I’ve often felt that art was the ‘poor stepchild’ of the Rhodes Scholarship. But I believe the arts not only matter but can create all kinds of opportunities for people, and for peace.
JBG: I love what you said earlier in this conversation, that you started to see the arts in high school as something to help make sense.
JT: I sometimes think that’s the only way to make sense, because there are fundamental truths that elude people in the chaos of war, or even in the hubbub of daily life. I think the arts are a way back to those truths, those shared values.
JBG: That’s really lovely. So, at what point at Yale did you start thinking about the Rhodes Scholarship?
JT: I always knew I wanted to go to England. I love tea and scones. But more, there was something about that culture that always spoke to me. I had another teacher, this time in college, who had gone to Oxford on a Marshall Scholarship, and he opened my eyes to that possibility. I applied for other fellowships like the Luce – there weren’t many overseas fellowships at the time— and I thought I might go to Japan to study Kabuki theatre. But that was just a way out of my world, more than it was a passion. Shakespeare, because of yet another wonderful teacher, had really become a passion of mine. Going to Oxford— not even another British university— and enrolling in its graduate programme in Shakespeare was absolutely my goal.
JBG: Had you been to the UK previously?
JT: I’d gotten two travelling fellowships the summer before my senior year to study the progress of a woman named Augusta Maywood, the first American ballerina to tour in Europe. I was able to visit Oxford, and I met John Wilders, a tutor in the MPhil programme, and talked with him about my love of Shakespeare. Our conversation really cemented my desire to return to Yale and apply for the Rhodes.
JBG: And what was that process like, of navigating the application and then selection process?
JT: The interviews—the entire selection process— was very challenging at that time. I remember walking into the building where the interviews were held, and the man who answered the door said, ‘Oh, you’re much larger than your photo’. And I thought, ‘Well, my photo was the size of a postage stamp, so I would have to be larger’. Then I asked to use the ladies’ room, and it turned out the interviews were being held in a Yale building where there was no ladies’ room. The man who answered the door —who turned out to be the head of the committee—stood outside the men’s room when I was inside. It was humiliating.
At the time, there was a cocktail party the night before the interviews.
When I walked in, I saw dozens of men in dark suits, chatting nervously. I looked around for the other female candidates. Then I realised: I was the only woman in the room. Eventually another woman arrived, and the head of the committee greeted her and asked her to help serve the drinks. Then he looked at me – I was growing ever smaller – and asked me to serve the hors d’oeuvres. I felt so diminished by the process. That’s another reason I was eager to win a Rhodes Scholarship, because the Rhodes was one of the only fellowships that allowed you to serve on a selection committee. I wanted to make sure no one else would be treated that way.
In the second interview—it was a two-tiered process back then— the head of the committee asked, ‘What do you want to do in life?’ and I said, ‘I want to write’. And he said, ‘Well, if God says you can’t write, what will you do?’ I searched my brain for an answer. But at the end of the interview, someone else asked a question, and I said, ‘Is God still in the room?’ and people laughed. In that moment, and maybe for the first time, I felt they could see me as ‘one of them’, because I’d handled the enormous pressure they had placed on me.
In those days, the interviews felt like gladiatorial contests. Committee members would fire, as if out of a cannon, very difficult questions – sometimes the questions seemed almost random – about current events or obscure topics. The questions were definitely intended to throw you off balance. That was central to the idea of a Rhodes Scholar at the time, that you needed to have the ‘strength’ or perseverance to withstand that kind of verbal combat. Again, one of the reasons I wanted to serve on a selection committee was to make sure we never did that to people, because I don’t think you can be your best self when you’re under siege. It’s always been my ambition to put people at ease. That was not really something the early Rhodes committees wanted to do.
JBG: I’m sorry to hear that.
JT: You know, I learned a lot from that experience. When I first returned to the States, the Rhodes Trust sent me to serve on a lot of different committees in different regions of the country, because there weren’t that many women who’d come home from Oxford and could serve as selectors. I remember being on a committee – I won’t say where – and as a female candidate was about to enter the room, one of the men said, ‘You know, she’s not qualified, but she’ll sure give ‘em a hell of a ride’. I don’t even know what that means, but it certainly seems like it has a kind of salacious intent. That was representative of a lot of committees in the beginning. I thought it was not just women who need to be treated with respect, but anybody who walks through the door, and it took a long time, and work on many different committees, for me to have any real impact on that front. In those interviews, I’ve seen people cry. I’ve heard people talk about very personal experiences of poverty or abuse. Those were moments that, afterwards, some committee members would belittle or undermine. I never felt that.
JBG: I think it’s a really beautiful mission, to work to put people at ease. It’s so fundamental to being human, right?
JT: It’s also fundamental to learning something important about someone. Early on, I was the only committee member who would go around and shake the hands of every candidate, not just the four winners. And very often – this was really discouraged – I would talk to each of the people who hadn’t won, to find out more about what they wanted to do. Now that there are so many other fellowships to study overseas, I felt it was important to go round and say to people, ‘If you want to study in England, you might think about this’. That’s how my service on committees evolved.
JBG: And you’ve served for 30 years?
JT: 40, I think. I started serving when I was 23.
JBG: Oh, wow. Right after you got back from Oxford.
JT: Yes. And it’s always been one of the highlights of my year. I’ve enjoyed it so much.
JBG: That’s lovely. And so, jumping back to your own experience of being selected, this is the winter of 1980? You were a senior at Yale during that time?
JBG So, you finished your year at Yale and set off for Oxford the following fall?
JT: Yes. At that time, Scholars sailed to England on the QE2, and that meant you had to go out and buy formal clothes. Even before we set off, we were already launched into a very different world about which most of us knew nothing.
JT: I think the sailing experience was intended to put all the new American Scholars in very close proximity. I know the Trust stopped doing it long ago. But it was a kind of splendour that announced Oxford as a different world, a glorious world of dreaming spires, and in that sense, it was very exciting.
JBG: Was that your first experience meeting your fellow classmates, on the QE2?
JT: Occasionally, it would be odd, because you would wonder who these people were when they didn’t feel they had to present themselves as worthy of a Rhodes Scholarship. Recently you asked me to re-read my application statement, but at some point, I had to stop reading. The person who wrote it was trying so hard to squeeze herself into the confines of what a Rhodes Scholar was thought to be at that time. I was trying so hard to make my interests and activities seem ‘political’, in bold letters, because that was the focus of the Scholarship back then. The question ‘Why do we have these women?’ seemed to linger in the committee rooms. There was still a lot of scepticism.
JBG: I’m curious: how many women were in your class?
JT: As a woman, you sometimes had the sense of being an anomaly, like one of the oddities in the Ashmolean. Magdalen, the college I chose, had been all-male for more than 500 years. There were lots of little, incidental ways in which life in college hadn’t been reimagined for women: High table was almost inaccessible to high heels. I don’t think there was a lot of awareness, self-consciousness, about the need to change. That was surprising too, because Yale had made a very graceful transition to co-education ten years or so before I got there. I think some of these glorious Oxford colleges had yet to embrace the idea that women belonged.
JBG: And you had always wanted to study Shakespeare in Oxford. Did you?
JT: Yes, and I loved it. It turned out the Shakespeare studies programme at that time was very interested in history and context, and I was very interested in the psychological dimension of the characters. I ended up writing my thesis on Richard III and Macbeth. Both plays feature a character who does terrible things, but in Richard III, the character has no inner contour or conscience. He has no psychological dimension. That starts to develop at the very end of the play, when he’s already doomed. But almost from the beginning, Macbeth is aware that what he’s doing is wrong and he’s going to pay consequences. There are celebrated moments in the play, like when he sees a dagger in the air— he calls it a ‘dagger of the mind’—that are psychological manifestations of his growing guilt.
Unfortunately, this was an incredibly unpopular idea for a thesis. In the MPhil programme at the time, you had to write what they called a ‘short’ thesis (which did not seem short to us!) and I couldn’t find a faculty advisor to supervise my work, because my line of inquiry was thought to be so misguided. I went back to the person I’d met the summer before my senior year at Yale and knocked on the same medieval door in the same medieval courtyard and asked if he would be my supervisor. It’s another closing of a circle, because years later I went to London to help lead a Yale theatre programme and I was able to invite my supervisor, Dr. Wilders, to come and speak to the group. I was very happy to offer him that opportunity, since he made it possible for me to write the thesis I wanted to write.
JBG: Wow. So, was your MPhil a one-year programme, or two?
JT: Two. At the end, you had to sit exams and be viva’d on your thesis. It felt a bit like a DPhil, but at the time the Rhodes did not support many people staying on for a third year. So you were able to get a graduate degree in two years.
JBG: In addition to academically, previously the arts and theatre had been such a big part of your life. Did you continue to be involved in theatre?
JT: Yes, and I went to see a tremendous number of plays in London. For very little money, you could see expert productions, ground-breaking productions, of the very plays we were studying. The Royal Shakespeare Company was performing in London, and also in Stratford-uponAvon. That was a remarkable experience, to be reading a play and then to see it embodied and vivid.
JBG: And did you live in college both years?
JBG: What was that experience like?
JT: At that time, a lot of graduate students—not just Marshalls and Rhodes but also British students—would congregate in the middle common room. It was a hub of activity. I also had undergraduate friends, for which I was very grateful. At Oxford, I felt a sense of kinship with a lot of other people for the first time. Those bonds, those consolations, were very new to me. In a way, many of us were misfits, as graduate students can be. We were far from home, and people’s parents were divorcing, or someone’s childhood dog had died. There was a sense of alienation from home, but also this glowing, remarkable sense of belonging. After graduation, my friends and I stayed on for the summer, because we knew we would never again have the experience of being in each other’s company every day. We punted on the river and tried to play lawn tennis. It was an idyllic time, but also bittersweet.
JBG: Were there Rhodes classmates who were part of this kinship at Magdalen as well, or was this a separate group?
JT: It was a separate group. But I became very close to a number of Scholars in my class, including one woman who was recently U.S. Deputy Secretary of Energy. Just before graduation, I was standing in the hallway of the Daubeny Building— in my pyjamas— when she introduced me to her parents. They talked to me about going to Los Angeles to work as an intern at a regional theatre there. They opened a door to the next part of my life. I really didn’t know what I was going to do with a degree in Shakespeare. They told me there was a Rhodes Scholar on the staff of this theatre, the Mark Taper Forum, and would I like to meet him? And he came through Oxford, and we met, and that’s why I went to Los Angeles for four months.
JBG: What was that internship? What was the nature of your work there?
JT: At first, I was kind of an observer, which allowed me to do a lot of things that, if I’d had an actual job, I wouldn’t have been able to do. I could sit in on rehearsals and casting sessions, I could hear costume and set designers describe their vision for a show. I read a lot of scripts initially, and gradually I worked my way up the literary ladder and became more involved with the writing and commissioning of plays. I ended up as a literary manager and dramaturge. It was a remarkable job because, in a strange way, it was connected to my interests at Oxford. It involved reading plays and having ideas about them: how a playwright might reconsider a scene; if certain speeches were unnecessary or perhaps should belong to a different character. You could sit in a rehearsal room with the director and playwright and designers and the cast and they would turn to you and say, ‘Well, what do you think about this?’ I loved it, because it was a way to contribute that was active and three-dimensional, but also cerebral. It was an incredible job that I didn’t know existed before I was lucky enough to land in it.
JBG: Wow. And this is all stage productions?
JT: Yes. Then one of the actors asked me to help write a television show about the U.S. Constitution for the celebration of the American bicentennial. We travelled to D.C. to interview Supreme Court justices about the Bill of Rights and went to the White House to meet the President. It was an interesting shift into TV. But I realised —to this day, I still feel—there is something that happens in the presence of other people that doesn’t happen in any other medium. In the theatre, you can feel the crush of people’s bodies, you can hear people breathing, you can hear people laugh. And you know that the live performance is different every night because you’re there. The vibrancy of that, the specificity, really spoke to me. I knew I wanted to stay in that world.
JBG: It’s so lovely to think back on the experience you shared about sitting with your dance instructor and watching that creation take place, and then seeing this as you exit Oxford and have this experience yourself.
JT: Yes. But I don’t think people’s lives need to have a narrative throughline. The idea of a ‘career’ is a relatively recent construct. A lot of things happen serendipitously, and it’s important to be open to that: to making mistakes, to making poor choices, to trusting that if you fail, you’ll discover something better. That sort of resourcefulness or flexibility is not always emphasised when people are as ambitious as Rhodes Scholars often are.
It's this idea of unknowing; of trusting that there are possibilities, opportunities, that you can’t see yet, that you just have to believe are there. I think that’s true about choices of friends and partners as well. If you’re lucky, you find things you never even knew to look for.
JBG: Yes, certainly. Jessica, we talked about your studies in Oxford and now this transition to your life in LA and this job that you said you couldn’t have imagined existed.
JBG: I’m curious about your own writing during this time, if this is also part of your work, if you’re continuing to do your own writing.
JT: I had an experience working with a playwright and director on a play about a girl who is being sexually abused. I found myself giving them lots of ideas about what she might say and what she might feel. It was strange; no one ever asked me how I happened to know so much about her fear, her sense of isolation. But privately, I began to acknowledge my kinship with the character and the crisis she was facing.
That was a turning point for me, because I began to feel, ‘I want to make something of my own’. When I was still working at the theatre, I received a grant from the American Film Institute to write and direct a film. I made a 30-minute film about a relationship I’d had my senior year at Yale, and that project was a kind of transition for me. I loved directing. I loved being behind the camera. I loved working with actors. In a strange way, it’s a little like interviewing Rhodes candidates, in terms of trying to discover something that’s essential to who they are. It turns out a lot of first films are deeply autobiographical, and as the writer/director you almost always cast a central character who is a much more attractive version of yourself. Making the film marked an abrupt transition from the work I’d been doing as a dramaturge, so it was very welcome. I’m not sure how or if I would have been able to walk away otherwise.
JBG: Well, first, Jessica, I’m so sorry for your own experience. I appreciate you sharing that, and I have such an appreciation for the ways that your openness in sharing your story has served as an opportunity to invite others to do the same.
JT: Thank you, Jamie. Earlier I referred to the fact that I left ballet as a sixteen-year-old. That was because I had gotten involved with a much older dancer in the company, and he began to sexually assault me and beat me. As you know, in 2016 I wrote a memoir, The Future Tense of Joy, which is about a lot of things— Yale, Oxford, being a Rhodes Scholar—but at its heart it’s about abuse and its aftermath. My book was published before the beginning of the #MeToo movement, so people weren’t talking openly about abuse. I’ve travelled around the country to bookstores and community centres to talk about the book, and almost invariably there is someone at the back of the room who comes forward when everyone else has left to say, ‘Your story is my story, too’. Sometimes someone tells me, ‘I’m in a violent relationship and I don’t know what to do’. I always carry with me the phone numbers of the local shelters, so people will have a place to go to feel safe.
I think that’s what made me such a loner in high school: I was having this experience of abuse, and I didn’t know how to tell anyone. I must have seemed like a high-functioning person: I was an editor of the newspaper, and I was writing poetry and dancing in talent shows at school. I think it was hard for people to suspect that I had this secret life. You know, Chekhov says everybody has a shadow life – that’s not the word he uses – that’s running its course in secret. I think that’s part of what keeps women or children—and men—trapped: you don’t know how to bridge the gap between your secret life and your sunlit life, where you work so hard to contain everything, cope with everything, make everything seem fine. Also, you don’t realise that other people can help.
JT: Thank you. Earlier, you asked a question about the ‘world’s fight’. Telling the truth about what happened to me has become my ‘world’s fight’. People say, ‘The wound is the way in’, and that’s been true for me, because this terrible experience, which went on for almost a year, inspired my life’s work. And if I could go back in time to my Rhodes interview, I would answer the questions differently. I would not say, ‘Oh, I can work in advertising’ when someone asked, ‘What if God says you can’t write?’ I sometimes think about going back to see the person who asked that question, not in a confrontational way, but as the closing of another circle, to say ‘Here’s what I ended up doing. And maybe it’s not so bad’.
JBG: I think about, not only the ways that you’ve done it yourself, but the opportunities that you’ve made possible for other people to do it. You know, supporting other people to create art and share their story.
JT: I really believe in that. I believe the world is desperately in need of healing, and it’s only by creating correspondences between people that those ruptures can ever be healed.
JBG: Please let me know if you’d prefer not to talk about this, if it’s too early, but I recall in our last conversation, you shared with me a current project that you’re working on.
JBG: I was wondering if you might be able to say more about that.
JT: I’m working on a musical. I’ve written several books. I’ve written lots of articles for Psychology Today and I’ve also written for The Atlantic and The Nation. But I decided I didn’t want to be alone in my little attic office anymore, hunched over a cooling cup of tea. I wanted to work with other people. It brought me back to those collaborative experiences I’d had in my early 20s, when I left Oxford for an internship at that theatre. And I was lucky enough – again, serendipitously – to meet a young guy who has a master’s in music, and we just hit it off. We have the same love of Sondheim, the same knowledge of the history of musical theatre, and we started to collaborate. Initially, I was also writing the music. When he came on board, it was clear to me that I had no business doing that.
But there’s an interesting alchemy that happens when you find someone who ‘gets’ it. We’ve been working together now for more than six years, and even though we’ve vigorously disagreed, there has never been a moment when we’ve undermined or embarrassed each other. In a curious way, that goes back to what we were talking about with the Rhodes selection process. Embarrassing candidates, trying to throw them off guard; that’s not how you get anything good out of people. My writing partner and I have gone into rehearsal several times to do a workshop for audiences, and we are just now casting actors to spend two days in a recording studio and record about 12 songs. A month or so ago, we were semi-finalists at the O’Neill Music Theatre Conference, which is considered (in their own publicity materials, at least!) the most prestigious musical theatre development programme in the country. We didn’t get all the way to the end, which would have been amazing, but it’s still a kind of recognition we hope we can use to find a producer or theatre.
JBG: That’s really lovely. Jessica, you spoke a little bit about your book that was published in 2016. This was your second book, is that right?
JBG: Will you share a little bit about your first book?
JT: My first book is called Trees Make the Best Mobiles: Simple Ways to Raise Your Child in a Complex World. Again, it’s a product of serendipity: I met another mom in a programme I’d stumbled upon called REI, and we decided to create the kind of parenting book we could never find. We wanted to write in a simple, conversational way about the challenges new parents face, and incorporate some of the ideas we learned from REI, and also from the Montessori and Reggio Emilio philosophies. It was based on the idea that even simple tasks like diapering and feeding can be opportunities to connect with your baby, rather than responsibilities to rush through. The REI programme sees even infants as autonomous people. They believe that young children are much more resourceful than we ever allow them to be, given the degree to which we intervene and make decisions for them from a very early age.
The book also explores the idea of learning in three dimensions. We encourage parents not to buy a lot of toys that light up and spin around, but to give their babies simple toys that can be played with in many different ways. It’s the child who’s active, not the toy. Once I was standing behind a woman at a bookstore when she asked the bookseller, ‘Do you have a DVD I can play for my child so he can see someone going to the post office and the grocery store and the library’, and I wanted to say ‘Just take him. Put him in a stroller. Take him to the post office. Take him to the library’. I think our children, especially when they’re little, live in an insulated, highly curated world, but that’s not what real life is like.
Our book – and this was not common wisdom back then – also advises parents not to let their young kids watch a lot of TV. My two daughters didn’t watch TV until they were older, and there was something wonderful about that, because I would take them to a bookstore and there might be a display of postcards—images of Gabriel Rossetti’s maidens with their mermaid-like hair— and they’d say, ‘That’s what Cinderella looks like’. They didn’t have an image of Sleeping Beauty or Cinderella that had been drawn by Disney animators. I was always grateful for that, because I think it does create more room in your imagination for other ideas. My older daughter is now a rare book librarian, as it happens. My younger daughter works with families whose children have schizophrenia.
JBG: Your work, Jessica, has touched many fields in the arts. You’ve written your own work, you’re currently working on a musical, you’ve worked in film and television, and I imagine there have been many moments of joy and some challenges on that journey, and I was curious if you would mind speaking to what you found most rewarding about your career thus far, and perhaps most challenging as well.
JT: Just recently I got a letter from someone I happened to meet through the Rhodes process. He wasn’t chosen as a Scholar, and he went to sub-Saharan Africa to work. While there, he was violently raped and robbed. And he reached out to me, saying, ‘I remember meeting you and I think about you, because you have chosen to go through the world after these experiences with optimism and humour’. Now he and I are in touch, and I’m grateful to be able to offer him some solace, and hope. Those are the moments that are most satisfying, because someone comes out of the ether and says, ‘Your work really mattered to me, and gave me strength at a time when no one in my world was talking about this’. The conversation he and I had during the Rhodes proceedings must have meant something to him, for him to take up my book and find consolation in the idea that you can go on, that you can persevere despite the pain. I believe people who’ve suffered trauma sometimes think, ‘If I can just put this terrible experience behind me, I can restart my life’. But I believe the experience becomes part of the texture of your life. I think, because I led this divided life for so long, I believe in a kind of integration: not just of your past, and sadly, trauma, but of all the people you meet and all the experiences you have.
When I was working at the theatre, a little pink slip appeared on my desk, with my initials on it and a telephone number. It turned out the woman who called was a counsellor at an abuse centre for women. She said she needed to see me right away. I don’t know why I went. I’d never sought any help. I couldn’t figure out what I was doing there, and she said somebody had contacted her on my behalf. I searched my brain: ‘Who would do that?’ ‘Am I grateful or furious?’ We proceeded to have several therapy sessions, and she would ask questions like, ‘What makes you feel safe?’ And I’d say, ‘What do you mean by safe?’ I didn’t even know the meaning of the word. And she’d say, ‘If someone was going to hurt you, if someone made you feel too vulnerable’. I could barely answer her questions.
Every time I saw her, I would ask, ‘Who told you about me?’ and she would say, ‘I can’t tell. Someone who thought you were in trouble’. At the end of the requisite number of sessions, I said, ‘Now, you can finally tell me. Who told you about me?’ And she said, ‘That message landed on your desk by accident. It was actually meant for somebody else. Someone with the same initials’. It was another remarkable coincidence. At the time, I wasn’t ready to seek help. I never went back. Nor, unfortunately, did I try to figure out who the message was meant for. I didn’t feel any solidarity with other people who had suffered in that way. But as I was leaving, she gave me her card and said, ‘Use what happened to you to help someone else’. It was one of those incredible moments when you see that what happened to you will have meaning, will matter, to someone else.
JT: On my 50th birthday, I went to an elementary school on Skid Row called Para Los Niños and started to volunteer. I worked on a lot of writing projects with the children, and I took them to a bookstore so they could each choose a new book. Most of them had never owned a book before. These children were in a desperate situation: They were living in cars, in shelters; there were discarded needles on the playground every morning from the neighbourhood junkies. On the first day, I sat on the floor with the kids and talked to them about writing, and there was a banner above my head with a quote from Dr. King: ‘The only question is, what are you doing for other people?’ And I thought, that’s it. That’s the question. For me, that’s the ideal definition of the ‘world’s fight’. And that work can take so many different forms.
JBG: That’s really lovely.
JT: Last night, I was having dinner with my younger daughter and her friends, who are all 22 or 23 years old. Many of them have those first jobs that require you to work crazy hours. Those jobs exert unrelenting pressure. Her friends were saying ‘I’m going to spend my 20s just doing this and then I’ll figure out the rest of my life’. And I wanted them to realize that you never get that time back. You never learn what you might have learned about yourself in those years. I feel like no job deserves that of you. I’ve always benefited so much from talking with Rhodes candidates, and one young woman said to me, ‘When you don’t have money, you pay with your time’. I thought that was very interesting, and it made me think about the value of time. People who chose to follow a narrow path may be paying a huge price in terms of their time.
JBG: Yes. So, a few questions as we move toward the latter part of our conversation. This could be professionally or personally – I would love to know what you would say motivates and inspires you at this point in your life and career.
JT: It’s that quote from Dr. King: ‘The only question is, what are you doing for other people?’ I feel so privileged to have had this education—particularly the Rhodes—and all the benefits that came from it. Not direct benefits, exactly, because I didn’t choose a profession in which being a Rhodes Scholar helps you get elected to Congress or offered an academic appointment or a consulting job. But it lifted me into a different world; a world in which I felt that my intellect had credibility. When I was growing up, as a girl, you didn’t always feel your ideas mattered. That’s why those teachers, both in eighth grade and at Yale, had even more impact than they might have, because they really saw me. I have had these wonderful opportunities. I’m ‘safe’— to use a word I never knew the meaning of— and what am I going to do with that? That’s what motivates me.
JT: When I was applying for the Rhodes, I think ‘qualities of manhood’ were still among the criteria. That’s changed a lot. But there is room for the Scholarship to become more flexible, more expansive, more porous. If you’re going to choose incredibly talented young people, but your expectations of them aren’t equally open, then you’re going to lose the benefit of what they have to bring. What they could become.
JBG: I think that leads beautifully into another question I have. We just marked the 120th anniversary of the Scholarships and are looking forward to the next chapter. I would love to know what your hopes for the future of the Rhodes Scholarship would be.
JT: I would like to see many, many more definitions of what it can mean to do something that matters.
JBG: This is an aside from my remaining questions, but I’m curious if you’ve stayed well connected with the other women in your class.
JT: Yes, particularly the woman whose parents met me when I was in my pyjamas! My classmates have done remarkable things. But by the time you get to be our age, everybody has had some kind of serious crisis, with their children, their partners, their health, their work. It’s another kind of ‘world’s fight’, because we all have to fight to stay in the world at some point, and you see an incredible amount of courage in people. I’ve really been impressed by that. My class has stayed in closer touch than some other classes, and they’ve done informal reunions.
JT: I’ll always be linked to those people. I always be proud of them, and proud to be among them. That was when I started to understand what those bonds meant, because I had spent so much time in this world of secrecy and shame. That’s one of the gifts the Rhodes gave me, Oxford gave me: the sense that it was safe to belong to something bigger, and that there were benefits and joys— to use your earlier word—that were totally unsuspected.
JBG: Beautiful. And lastly, I would love to know any advice or words of wisdom that you would have either for the Rhodes Scholars of today or the Rhodes Scholars of the future.
JT: My advice is to take chances. Real chances. Don’t necessarily choose between two well-defined paths. Be willing to ask: ‘What could I bring to this very fraught moment in history that will really make a difference to a lot of other people?’ I would urge them, right from the beginning of their grown-up lives, to say, ‘What do I have to offer that no one else can, and how can I do it?’ Also, I would encourage people to be open – we talked about this earlier – to the idea there are many possibilities that aren’t ready to be revealed. If you’re not open to them, you might not spot them in time. Rhodes Scholars have so much to give. I would urge them to be creative and improvisational, because I think being inventive and resourceful are qualities that are hinted at in Cecil Rhodes’s mandate, but that have new meaning now, new urgency.
