Tori Telfer's Blog

You dance more than you think you do, says Isabelle Collazo. Whether you’re listening to the radio in your car, moving through the street, or just processing information about the world through your body, your life is filled with more movement than you may realize on first blush. “For a long time dance has been […]

“Once upon a time I tried to explain everything that I do to people at parties,” says Tanya Marquardt. “After years of watching most people’s eyes glaze over, I now say that I am a writer and a performer. But if they inquire further they find out that I dance, choreograph, direct, make theatre, work […]

A couple of weeks ago, I did two things that were extremely minor to the rest of the world but major to me: 1) I started promoting my work as much as I wanted, and 2) I stopped apologizing for promoting my work. Wait, no! I actually did three things, and the third is the […]

I have always been fascinated by how Sonya English gets it done. She’s a real-life working actor in LA, the city where everybody says it’s impossible to be an actor. Perhaps you’ve seen her in a Wendy’s commercial? On “Workaholics,” or “The People vs. O.J. Simpson”? She’s equal parts hustle and thoughtful intuition, and I’m […]

Rhonda Telfer grew up just outside the tiny town of Sheffield, IL, in a beautiful white farmhouse amid her father’s green cornfields, and the landscape of her childhood still figures prominently in her writing today. She has written two children’s books, a young adult novel, and numerous short stories for children; she also posts weekly […]

Welcome to installment three of the series colloquially known as “ART! WORK! WORK! ART! ART! YEAH! BUT MOSTLY WORK!” I’m thrilled to bring you this latest interview, as it is simultaneously aspirational, brutally honest, and full of fantastic advice. Jill Bumby is a performance artist who, along with her counterpart Gill, has appeared everywhere from […]

Shayla Lawson is one of the top five most fashionable people I know. And so when I was moving out of Bloomington, Indiana in a flurry of minimalist purging and giving away mounds of clothes, I was deeply flattered that she picked out a sparkly blue dress I found in a thrift store in New […]

Hello hello! Welcome to a new interview series I’m working on. (I’ll publish it here and on Medium and Goodreads, so follow it wherever feels right.) In it, I’ll be talking to people (mostly wimz [a cool new abbreviation for “women” that I just invented]) about how they get their artwork done and what the work […]

In Los Angeles, outside of my window, I saw a man grab a woman’s arm and shake, hard. I was already at the window because I’d heard them fighting from about a block away. She was pushing an old shopping cart. He was yelling about something. And then the shake. I immediately thought about calling […]

A girl wakes up and a stranger is sitting on her chest, incubus-style. She’s an ordinary human, a regular girl with a regular life, but something inside her wakes up. A crazy, beautiful, almost superhuman force. She fights and fights, her throat is slashed ear to ear, and she keeps fighting. She makes it to […]