Meet Tess Rafferty | Writer, Producer, Ai Storyteller

We had the good fortune of connecting with Tess Rafferty and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Tess, what led you to pursuing a creative path professionally?
Clearly because I didn’t think any of it through. And trust me, I’m at a point in my life where I just wish I had wanted to be a banker or go into sales. Sadly, there was never any question of doing anything else. Ever since I can remember I loved making up stories and pretending to be other people. I did well academically, but I never felt a passion for any of those subjects like I did for writing and performing.

Alright, so let’s move onto what keeps you busy professionally?
Originally I was an actor. But when I got to college in Boston, I became disillusioned with the roles for women. The majority of the parts were always playing someone’s mother, whore, maid or wife. I wanted something better, to see myself and my experiences more accurately represented. So when I was a sophomore, I begged a professor to let me into a playwriting class that was for upper level students only. I had always made up stories in my head, and had been “starting novels” since I was 9 years old. (In fact, I recently found some of my old short stories that I had written for school. One featured a flapper who decides not to get married so she can run her grandfather’s publishing company. Apparently, I have always been this person. But it’s kind of cool to look at the things you did as a kid and see how “you” have always been there.) So while writing wasn’t exactly new to me, the class gave me a forum to get my ideas out there and see them finished.

In addition to playwriting, I started writing some performance pieces, what they called “performance art” at the time, but was really essays or monologues. Whatever I did, humor was always a part of it, and when a local comedy club booker asked me if I wanted to do stand up, I realized that I had a piece that translated pretty easily. I was working with a number of local sketch groups, in addition to writing plays and eventually movies, but I found that doing stand up gave me an autonomy that the other projects didn’t. I didn’t have to wait for someone to produce it (or find the money to produce it myself.) I could perform every night if I wanted to. I could go to open mics to try out new material, or even get booked on shows that paid. (The Holy Grail as an artist.) And I never had to worry about representation because I was up there every night representing me and my own experiences.

After college I moved to LA. I kept doing stand up, kept writing screenplays and TV pilots. But in addition to the usual struggles of living in a new town and trying to break into a difficult business, reality TV was becoming huge and there were less and less jobs in scripted TV. I had gotten really close to a couple of things; I literally walked into the office to sign the paperwork on a screenplay sale only to have the whole thing fall apart. And then a friend reached out to tell me they were rebooting the old Talk Soup and did I want to submit.

The show was going to have a late night format – a host telling topical monologue jokes – and that had previously been a very male dominated area. (Twenty years later, it still is.) And so I was hesitant to see myself in that space. I think as women in this business we get all kinds of coded messages to tell us where we belong and where we don’t. Men are hilarious; women are “cute.” Men write hard jokes; women are good at “dialogue” or “dramas.” And on it goes. But I was lucky in that someone gave me a chance and I found that I not only loved writing monologue jokes, but I was good at it.

I’ve worked on a number of shows in this space over the years, but they always have a twist whether the subject is the internet, or cooking, or current events. And I’ve also been fortunate to stretch myself on other projects, too, having screenplays optioned and getting deals to write the scripts that tell the stories I want to tell. And then a few years back I started writing a murder mystery series. For years I had devoured murder mysteries like it was pie the day after Thanksgiving. Each book promises you that you will get an answer to the question, “Who dunnit?” and that a bad guy will see justice. It’s incredibly cathartic in our chaotic and uncertain times when both answers – and justice – are thin on the ground.

The Kat Kelly Mystery series is in the spirit of Agatha Christie and all of those who came after her. There’s always an international cast of characters in exotic locales (in this case, all of Kat’s adventures take place around Italy.) But Kat is very much a woman in today’s world, confronting issues of sexism and bigotry, because sexism and bigotry find us in our every day lives. (Even when we’re on vacation and solving murders.)

Last year I took a class on Ai filmmaking because I just wanted to know more about it. I understand the sensitivity around the subject and this is by no means a comprehensive discussion about those very legitimate issues. However, one of the things I was surprised to find out about myself, is that it made me more creative and more passionate about my ideas. It was a tool, like so many other things, and like stand up before it, it gave me an autonomy to have an idea and then present it quickly, without having to rely on gatekeepers.

I think one thing I’ve come to realize about myself as a creative person is that the medium doesn’t matter, creative people are always creating, whether you’re getting paid or not. I like giving myself the freedom to not have to work within labels; the world will already try to put you in a box. But I think it’s important to remain open to different formats and ideas. Not everything has to look perfect or the way you think it’s supposed to. For the last year or so, my friend actor Ato Essandoh (The Diplomat) and I had talked about doing a podcast about our favorite albums. We’d recorded some episodes and taken some pitches. But we’re busy people; we didn’t have the bandwidth to start a whole podcast from the ground up. And then one day we reframed the paradigm. What if instead of recording an hour or so about one album, we recorded an hour about 5 and called it “Five Albums for Angry Times?” (This may have been inspired by the recent election.) Instead of trying to stand out in the noise of podcasts and find a partner to help promote and deliver any number of long episodes, we’d edit it into 3 minute episodes, it would have a finite number, and we’d just put it out on our socials for friends, solely because we had fun doing it. And it was fun, and people started making their own suggestions, so now we’re putting out our “Five Albums for Angry Times – Fan Favorites.” I love getting paid to do what I love, And artists can’t survive without getting paid for their work. But it’s also important to reconnect with the fun in what we do, and remember that we can do some things just because of it. Sometimes we have to ask ourselves, “How can I make this easier so it’s still fun? What’s the light lift?”

While words are always the basis of my work, I sometimes think of myself as more of a conceptual artist than writer. That sounds like pretentious horseshit, I know, and I’d be the first to gag at the comment. But it’s fun to look back at a career and see all of the variations – from acting to stand up to playwriting and a variety of TV shows and then novels and articles and newsletters and now Ai filmmaking. I don’t know what the next thing I do will be. But I know I will be the constant. Like my childhood short stories or my stand up or the Kat Kelly mysteries, I am always in there trying to find new ways to express myself and my experiences and say what I think needs to be said.

If you had a friend visiting you, what are some of the local spots you’d want to take them around to?
I like to think about breaking the itinerary into regions. First night would be a welcome dinner and martini at Musso & Frank’s. One day would be spent on Magnolia in Burbank, shopping in the vintage stores like Playclothes and Catnip Coalition – and the not so vintage stores like Audrey K and Stay Home Friend – before hitting the Tonga Hut on the way home. We’d do a whole afternoon at the Sherman Oaks Antique Mall, followed by wine at Augustine. I’d take them walking from Venice Beach to Santa Monica and Ocean for oysters at the Blue Plate Oysterette. We have some of the best museums in the world here and it would be hard to fit in all of the ones I’d like to take them to: The Getty, The Getty Villa, LACMA, MOCA and the Broad. But if we went to MOCA and the Broad, then we could also swing by the historic downtown library and have drinks at Perch or the Hotel Bonaventure after.

The Shoutout series is all about recognizing that our success and where we are in life is at least somewhat thanks to the efforts, support, mentorship, love and encouragement of others. So is there someone that you want to dedicate your shoutout to?
The late Judy Apperson, a talent manager at MBST, was one of the first people to believe in me and try to help me out when I moved to LA. Most of my drinks my first few years here were bought by Judy. I always hoped she expensed them, but she was also the type to have just thrown them on her own credit card, even as she encouraged us to order food, too. When you visited her at the office she was always tossing office supplies your way, always making copies of your stuff for free. She believed in comedy, in creative people, and was always out at night to see someone she liked perform, sometimes going to multiple shows a night. I don’t know how she found the energy for it. I can’t do it now.
In recent years when I would hear from Judy, she would often be reaching out on behalf of someone starting out that she was trying to help, like she always had for me. Judy always tried to help people she liked and believed in, and was always there with a drink or a meal even when she couldn’t, which is really how we all should try to live.

Website: https://tessrafferty.substack.com/

Instagram: @TheTuringTess

Other: The Kat Kelly Mystery Series https://tinyurl.com/Kat-Kelly-Mysteries

Image Credits
Justine Ungaro (The “Help Cake” and “Electric Beaters” photos.)