Tess Michaelson
Tess Michaelson is a writer, dramaturg, and psychotherapist in training. Her work investigates
performance, relationality, and language. Tess holds a BA in English from Stanford University, an MFA in nonfiction writing from Columbia University, and is currently a Master of Social Work candidate
at Smith College.
As the doors to the Chocolate Factory opened just past the hour—3 p.m. and raining—wordlessly and more swiftly than most beginnings I’ve experienced lately, Ayano Elson’s Control began—began in that time lengthened upon the lone Amelia Heintzelman, and the air was cleared of something unnecessary and uncertain, and attention narrowed into her form.
I take out the camera and begin filming the buildings as if they are faces—a face disfigured by anger, a face reading. I wanted writing to be like this: the elongation of description rather than vertical event.
A young boy reaches his face around the stroller in which he sits and gazes at me blankly as I pull out my notebook. The wind threatens to turn its pages. His mother coos as he sucks his thumb: What do you think? What do you say? I write this paragraph on the street.
Anna Thérèse Witenberg’s Heat simmers with intensity, dexterously evolving through shifting configurations of drama and desire.
