Rumpus Exclusive: An Excerpt from Tessa Fontaine’s The Electric Woman
Sometimes a story suddenly changes.
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Tessa Fontaine
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Tessa Fontaine is the author of The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts (FSG, May 2018). Her writing has appeared in PANK, Seneca Review, The Rumpus, Creative Nonfiction, and elsewhere, including Hayden's Ferry Review, where her essay that won the AWP Intro Award was published. She has been teaching in prisons for five years, and founded a Writers in the Schools program in Salt Lake City. Find more: www.TessaFontaine.com.
What to Read When You Want to Run Away with the Circus
Tessa Fontaine shares a list of books to celebrate her forthcoming debut memoir, The Electric Woman.
Dispatch from the Carnival #5: Instructions for Losing Your Head
Know that you will be whole only when you run behind the curtain to slide yourself between the wooden planks of the next box, only when nobody is looking at you.
Dispatch from the Carnival #4: Taking in the Sword
What is this body if you take its power over you away? In the torture arts, you are both the creator and recipient of your pain.
Dispatch from the Carnival #3: Bloodlust
What does not occur to me at the moment of this bloodlust, will not until much later, is that I am actively seeking the violence. I want to witness the worst.
Dispatch from the Carnival #2: The Snake Charmer
Sideshows themselves are a place where people come to see a public display of their private fears. Fear of deformity, of a disruption of the gender binary, of mutation, of disfigurement, of a crossover with the animal world, of being out of proportion.
Dispatch from the Carnival #1: The Trick is There is No Trick
We start by lighting parts of ourselves on fire that are easier to put out than our faces. Hands, to begin.