Today, please welcome writer TESSA FONTAINE.

I wake up with light coming just in through the blinds, 6:45 am. My dog is asleep beside me, his head resting on the pillow where my husband usually sleeps, but my husband is in Oman for two weeks with students, and so the dog gets the good spot. Once he sees me awake, the dog rolls onto his back and wriggles, worming around, covering his face with both paws. I give him good belly rubs, staring out the window at the squirrels leaping between trees and sparrows gathering seeds, and back into his face—the face of love, to borrow Jo Ann Beard’s term—and then get up. I make espresso, sit at the dining room table, one of a few spaces I use to write, and answer a few emails. These days, though, I am not supposed to answer emails much, or spend time looking at screens. A car accident in September left me with a brain injury I’m struggling to heal from. As I transcribe this from handwritten notes, in fact, I am typing with my eyes closed.

A friend has been writing lately at a quiet café in the mornings, so I meet here there, say hello, pop in my headphones and pull out my notebook. I like to be in public spaces sometimes, the energy of other people’s lives giving me energy. I’m working on a novel right now, though I’m often unsure about it. With my first book, a memoir, I felt this wild obsession to write the story, to get it right, like I had no choice but to write it. I didn’t realize how lucky that was. I don’t feel that wild obsession with this book, and I wonder whether that means it’s not the right project, or that we just don’t get that feeling with all projects? To make a life as a writer, and a living as a writer, how do we know when a project is worth years of writing time if we don’t feel that internal compulsion? Beyond this question, the other question that has been obsessing me lately is how to determine the best form for a project. With this novel, I’ve done a lot of research, including some fascinating interviews, that has brought me great joy. And with mounting despair and excitement, I’ve been wondering lately if this project should, in fact, be a book of nonfiction instead of a novel. I’m in a writing day mired by big questions. What is this thing I’m working on? What kind of impulse do I trust?

To accommodate my brain and eyes, I print out what I’m working on. I also have a translucent blue plastic sheet to put on top of paper when I’m reading—something about the blue light is easier on the eyes, apparently. I like it not just because it’s less stressful on my eyes, but also because it makes everything feel a little bit like a performance, like the stage has been lit.

After three hours of working on the novel, crafting a new scene, revising an old one, going over some research, I leave the café. It’s just before noon. At home, I eat lunch and listen a bit to my current audiobook—The Cost of Living: A Working Autobiography by Deborah Levy, which is glorious. She’s so damned smart and thoughtful. It reminds of reading Rachael Cusk’s trilogy last year, both authors conveying these profound truths about writing and womanhood and heartbreak and intelligence with simultaneous subtlety and candor.

My vision therapy is in the afternoon. In one exercise, I stand a foot in front of a whiteboard, staring at a blue circular magnet the size of a cherry, right at eye level. I have one dry erase marker in each hand. Go, the therapist says, and, following the beat of a metronome, I am supposed to draw two large squares, one with each hand, and then trace over my initial lines as I go. It’s a measure of peripheral vision. Over. Down. Over. Up. Over. Down. Over. Up. Staring straight ahead at the magnet, I draw the lines again and again, afraid to tell the therapist that I can’t actually see my hands at all—my peripheral vision is shot. Turns out I don’t need to tell her—when she says stop, my “squares” look like two MC Escher mazes, a square becoming more diagonal and getting smaller with each line until it’s just a tiny interior diamond.

Your brain doesn’t trust the information your eyes are giving you right now, she tells me. Your peripheral vision is closing in. I imagine a camera shutter folding closed on itself. How do you use your brain to convince your brain of something it doesn’t believe? How do you trust your brain to determine the best way to tell a story when it doesn’t trust the story its physical receptors tell it?

After an hour of vision therapy, my brain and eyes feel like porridge, so I go home and lie down for twenty minutes. Usually, I use the afternoons to do other kinds of writing—the technical writing I do for an artificial intelligence robotics company, for example, where I try to translate research about things like tactile-assisted autonomous grasping and robotic vision into layperson’s terms, or copywriting, editing, whatever my other projects are. I also run errands in the afternoon, or do a gardening or house project—we’ve been remodeling the rambling ranch house we bought a year ago—or go for a run, or prep for teaching. Today, I had a voice in my computer—Belinda, I call her—read me a manuscript I’m evaluating for a University press while I painted old paneling on our fireplace. I took the dog on a short walk, short only because he’s injured and on vet-directed rest, but just look at his face—he can’t be contained.

After some exercise at the YMCA, I usually cook dinner, the most relaxing part of my day. With my husband gone, though, I eat leftovers and think about whether this book is a novel or nonfiction project, about whether I can even trust the way I am thinking about it because of my misfiring brain. I call a friend, who asks for me to put the dog on the phone before he’ll talk to me. I agree. Do I seem like the same person I used to be? I ask him, when he’s done with the dog. Well, yes, he says. And no. Which is, I suppose, always true.

~

NOT THOSE SAME 3 QUESTIONS…

1. When you’re writing, is there something you return to again and again for inspiration?

• Memories of my mom—her wildness, her humor, my very partial and fragmented recollections of her, my grief, her beliefs, my questions, her questions.

2. Do you write in your books?  

• Yes! I underline and star and kiss and question and dog-ear. Books are living objects for me, and there are many I return to over and over, desperate for a particular line.

3. If you find yourself with an extra 15 minutes, what do you do?

• When it’s nice, wander through our yard, pulling at weeds in the garden, or looking for the heron who fishes in the creek out back, or closing my eyes toward the sun and hoping to find a little stillness inside.

~

By Tessa Fontaine

blu

—Other Writers in the Series—

I have been looking into schedules. Even when we read physics, we inquire of each least particle, What then shall I do this morning? How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time.

On the first of each month,
a guest writer
shares
how he or she spends the day.

February 1, 2019: Tessa Fontaine

This is a woman who eats fire and charms snakes. “What couldn’t I learn in a couple of months?” she wrote in her debut memoir, The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts, the prologue of which is called, “The Trick Is There Is No Trick.”

We start by lighting ourselves on fire. Parts that are easier to put out than our faces. Hands, to begin. Arms outstretched, palms toward the darkening sky, I watch as a flaming torch is wiped across my hand from wrist to fingertips. For one, maybe two seconds, I am on fire.

I’d hoped some magic was involved in learning to eat fire. Something that meant you didn’t really have to do the thing it appeared you were doing… But the class is a total disappointment. There is no trick. You eat fire by eating fire.

I thought the only people who performed in sideshows were people who had grown up in sideshows. Closed-minded on my part and also wrong. But in Tessa’s “TNB Self-Interview,” she wrote this,

Years before I began writing The Electric Woman, before I even knew the sideshow I’d eventually join, the World of Wonders, existed, I was obsessed with sideshows. My stepdad told me stories about a very early friendship he had with a retired sideshow performer, a little person, whose mother had been a bearded lady. I had no idea what path would unfold when I started doing my own research, even when I joined the show. But I followed my obsession.

As fascinating as the fire-eating is, there’s another story. In 2010, at the age of sixty-four, Tessa’s mother had a hemorrhagic stroke, “as big and bad a stroke as you can have and still be alive.” Her mother became paralyzed on one side and could not speak.

For my whole life, I have been scared, terrified, of losing my mom.

I am losing my mom.

Although many mother/daughter relationships are complicated, Tessa and her mother’s was on the more-so side. When Tessa was two, her mother left. One of my favorite parts of the memoir is a section where Tessa alternates paragraphs, beginning one with “in my mom’s story” and the next with “in my dad’s story.” Tessa and her mother’s difficult but improving relationship makes the stroke all the more difficult for Tessa, and three years later, she joins the circus.

The memoir is told in fragments. The sideshow bounces off the aftermath of her mother’s stroke which bounces off famous sideshows of the past which bounce off Tessa and her mother’s charged relationship. By taking us from one event to an entirely different one, the story reverberates and gets bigger, and then bigger again. The reader is drawn in, working not to miss a thing.

And not only that, but Tessa’s relationship with her mother was pre-existing as she began her sideshow life. So I imagine that by guiding the reader between sideshow and relationship, we more closely approximate the experience she had.

The Electric Woman received a fantastic review in the New York Times, and readings last year took Tess to over forty places–bookstores and colleges and festivals, theaters and bars and even a high-end travel bag store. Tessa was a fellowship winner at Writing by Writers Tomales Bay, in 2016 I believe. In an Author’s Note in the book, she writes, “If you want some juicy stories that were left out, send me a postcard and I’ll see what I can do.”

Come back on FEBRUARY 1st to read how TESSA FONTAINE spends her days.