Rome Alfonsas Balciunas
Some say that life is stranger than fiction. It’s a claim that’s hard to dispute when one reads Tessa Fontaine’s debut memoir The Electric Woman, which recounts Tessa’s experiences performing in the last traveling show in America while simultaneously processing her mother’s declining health. Hailed as an “assured debut that doesn’t shy away from the task of holding the ordinary and otherworldly in its hand,” (New York Times Book Review), “fascinating and heartfelt” (Booklist), and “ a behind-the-scenes peek at carnival life, and an ode to unconditional love" (Omnivoracious), indeed, the book has made quite a splash since its publication in 2018. It’s gripping, poignant, and vivid in a way that fully embodies the undeniable beauty of nonfiction.
I had the honor of interviewing Tessa, who will serve as this summer’s nonfiction writer-in-residence at The Priory Writers’ Retreat. Apply now for Tessa’s workshop: “Beauty In Brevity: Finding Power In Flash Creative Nonfiction And Memoir.”
Rome Alfonsas Balciunas: Regarding the experiences in The Electric Woman, at what point did you realize you had to write about that time in your life?
Tessa Fontaine: As a person with a brain wired for writing, every experience has the potential to end up in a piece of writing, whether directly or indirectly. It was clear to me pretty early on that the stories of all the other sideshow performers were amazing, stories I wanted to record. I took copious notes while I was on the road, hundreds and hundreds of pages, but I had no idea what form it would take. I wrote short "Notes from the Road" essays while I was out there, and published them as I went. And then, when it was over and I had all these notes, I started sifting through them, trying to find some organizational principle. The more I reread all the moments, all the stories of the sideshow world, the more convinced I was I needed to try to write it out as a book.
RB: One of my favorite things about the book is how your descriptive language is vivid to the point of being visceral, and indeed hair-raising in some places. Reading your accounts of the different carnival acts made me feel like a member of the audience, witnessing the show with every one of my senses. How did you achieve such a hyper-realist style? Did any writers influence this style?
TF: Thank you! I worked very hard on describing the acts as thoroughly as possible. Giving away how an act, like sword swallowing, is done doesn't make it lose any of the magic—I think understanding that a real person is really putting a sword down their throat makes it all the more magical. Lots of writers influenced my writing - a few people I read over and over again while working on the book were Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, Lidia Yuknavitch's The Chronology of Water, Jesmyn Ward's Salvage the Bones, and poems by Li-Young Lee. All those writers are able to describe a world that I feel, as a reader, I get to fully inhabit.
RB: Your memoir does an incredible job of juxtaposing the difficulties of your mother's health and eventual passing alongside your experiences in the last traveling sideshow in America. When did you see these two strands of your story fitting together? Why did you choose to join the last traveling sideshow, as opposed to any other adventure?
TF: When I was first culling my notes, I thought I'd write a narrative nonfiction account of my time in the sideshow without my mother's story in it. Never in a million years did I expect to write a memoir. But as I was working on the draft, something kept falling flat—like, I wasn't being honest about what I was doing out there, or why. So it eventually became clear to me that I had to tell the whole story. As for why the sideshow—when I went down to Florida to interview the performers and watch the show, before I had any inkling that I'd join myself, I was amazed by these people who could stand on stage and perform away their fear, like their bodies were indestructible. And because I'd been watching my mom's body suffer so much, the sideshow performers seemed almost like they were outside suffering, or perhaps choosing how to suffer, to control their own pain. I wanted to do that myself.
“...when I went down to Florida to interview the performers and watch the show, before I had any inkling that I’d join myself, I was amazed by these people who could stand on stage and perform away their fear, like their bodies were indestructible.”
RB: What are you working on now?
TF: A novel!
RB: Your presentation at The Priory Retreat this summer will be about the beauty of extremely short creative nonfiction. What about flash nonfiction speaks to you in a way that longer styles of writing don’t?
TF: I think flash nonfiction offers us insight into being human through micro-experience - a moment, an object, a morsel. It allows for a super zoomed lens on something that then speaks for something else, much larger, almost the way a haiku can point to something so specific while also raising bigger philosophical questions. Also, it can be a delight for the eye. I love encountering white space on the page - literally, gaps between the text that force the reader to make some narrative connections herself. It allows for the great pleasure of juxtaposition and accumulation of imagery. I'm really looking forward to exploring this form with writers at The Priory Writers’ Retreat this summer!
For more on Tessa’s course at The Priory, click here.