Last Friday, I attended Tessa Fontaine\u2019s book reading in the Mansion. As she read from her prologue, I was mesmerized by her ability to suck me in with her words. The way she nonchalantly talked about lying to get into the carnival sideshow, which led her to eat fire, swallow swords, and charm snakes. This led her into talking about her Mom\u2019s strokes, her time in the hospital, and how it changed her both physically and mentally. She compared the fire she let dance on her arms to her own Mother\u2019s paralyzed one. I thought that the juxtaposition between her adventures in the carnival and the stories about her Mom was very interesting. She then went on to say, \u201cLife extends in all directions outside of that\u201d. I thought that this was an interesting point because even though her Mom\u2019s illness was a very difficult part of Fontaine\u2019s life, she still wanted to make it clear that she still remembered the times when she wasn\u2019t sick or paralyzed in the hospital. She wanted to look beyond her disability but at the same time acknowledge it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
She then went to talk about her experiences with learning how to eat fire and swallow swords, which amazingly she was able to do. She talked about how in order to do these things you need to \u201cuntrain your instincts\u201d and \u201cunlearn your self-preservation\u201d. This ability to just let go and do the unexpected allowed her to go on this amazing journey where she learned about herself and the extent of her limits. When asked why she did what she did, Fontaine could only say that there\u2019s no exact reason why we do the things we do. She was interested in it for a long time, but the reason why she went out and actually did it is something she\u2019s still trying to figure out for herself. Her Mother\u2019s bravery and adventurous nature might have pushed her in that direction but choosing the path she did was for a multitude of reasons still unknown to this day.
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Last Friday, I attended Tessa Fontaine\u2019s book reading in the Mansion. As she read from her prologue, I was mesmerized by her ability to suck me in with her words. The way she nonchalantly talked about lying to get into the carnival sideshow, which led her to eat fire, swallow swords, and charm snakes. This … Continue reading “Kenzie Ward’s response to Tessa Fontaine’s extra credit book reading”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[46,59],"class_list":["post-1267","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-extra-credit-response","tag-tessa-fontaine"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/papJgd-kr","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.chris-foss.net\/dislit19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1267","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.chris-foss.net\/dislit19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.chris-foss.net\/dislit19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.chris-foss.net\/dislit19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.chris-foss.net\/dislit19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1267"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/courses.chris-foss.net\/dislit19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1267\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1268,"href":"https:\/\/courses.chris-foss.net\/dislit19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1267\/revisions\/1268"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.chris-foss.net\/dislit19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1267"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.chris-foss.net\/dislit19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1267"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.chris-foss.net\/dislit19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1267"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}