{"id":1270,"date":"2019-04-07T15:27:22","date_gmt":"2019-04-07T15:27:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/courses.chris-foss.net\/dislit19\/?p=1270"},"modified":"2019-04-07T15:27:29","modified_gmt":"2019-04-07T15:27:29","slug":"tessa-fontaines-reading-on-the-electric-woman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/courses.chris-foss.net\/dislit19\/uncategorized\/tessa-fontaines-reading-on-the-electric-woman\/","title":{"rendered":"Tessa Fontaine&#8217;s Reading on &#8220;The Electric Woman&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">By Amanda Smith <\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed-youtube wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<span class=\"embed-youtube\" style=\"text-align:center; display: block;\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" class=\"youtube-player\" width=\"840\" height=\"473\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/qNciIORDrK4?version=3&rel=1&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&fs=1&hl=en&autohide=2&wmode=transparent\" allowfullscreen=\"true\" style=\"border:0;\" sandbox=\"allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-popups allow-presentation allow-popups-to-escape-sandbox\"><\/iframe><\/span>\n<\/div><figcaption>The book trailer of The Electric Woman <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">On April 5, 2019, Tessa Fontaine created a wild and crowded audience in the William Street Mansion. Tessa Fontaine is an internationally published author who wrote a nonfiction book about her life on the road with America\u2019s last travelling circus and the parallels of fear and horror that her mother faced when becoming paralyzed from massive strokes. On this evening Tessa would be making a quick stop on her national book tour, a year after being apart of the circus.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Her book is titled, \u201cThe Electric Woman\u201d. Mrs Fontaine had come to UMW to read a few of her favorite sections of her book. Her first reading was the book\u2019s prologue. When reading this section, Tessa drew in her audience with her with the tone of her voice. At first, her words were playful and humorous while telling the audience that she had googled sideshow acts and lied to her boss about what she could do acts such as fire eating, sword swallowing, and snake charming. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">She went on to explain later in her next reading section that she would learn how to one of the things she told her boss she knew how to do, fire eating. When telling this compelling story she said that during the days leading up to her fire eating class she was hoping that fire-eating was just an illusion, that you didn\u2019t really have to put fire into your mouth. After taking the audience through a vivid experience of learning how to smother a fire burning on human legs and arms to the burning, charcoal taste of fire burning her tongue as she put out the flame in her mouth. Tessa suddenly deepened and darken her tone as she placed emphasis on the line \u201cthe trick is that there is no trick\u2026you eat fire by eating fire.\u201d I do believe that by saying this she had told the audience the central theme of her book. That she really meant to say, there are no shortcuts or easy streets in life, you just need to go through life and do it. Circulating around this idea, Tessa had introduced the character of her mother and how she went through a series of massive strokes which left her paralyzed, speechless and left her with symptoms of short term memory loss. Her mom would become dependent solely on her and husband, Davey. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Tessa explained that Davey and her mom would set out for a trip to Italy that they have been waiting a long time to do. Tessa had thought the worst, that her mom was taking an extreme risk with her health and that she would facing death right in the face. Which to Tessa had influenced her decision to join the circus. Tessa answered an audience member\u2019s compelling question, \u201cWhy the circus? Why not something else?\u201d to where Tessa would explain that she joined the circus because it would be dangerous. Then she would be facing her fears, just like her mom was or as Tessa put it briefly, \u201cI was building intimacy with something that I feared\u201d Another audience member had asked, \u201chow did you deal with your mom?\u201d Tessa replied hesitantly, \u201cIt was devastating. Having a wonderful humans body fail and not be able to do what its suppose to takes its toll, especially since you\u2019ve seen the vibrant person they used to be.\u201d Tessa went onto a more light-hearted section of how her co-workers taught her how to swallow a sword and that, just like eating fire, \u201cyou just had to untrain your bodies natural instincts to chose and hurl, and just shove a knife down your throat.\u201d as she put it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I believe her reading highlighted the most important idea of her novel. That you need to go through life with every intention of knowing how dangerous it is, and also learn that you\u2019ll need to endure with some amount of pain along the way. There is no trick to life. But the best way to live through it is to just do it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>By Amanda Smith On April 5, 2019, Tessa Fontaine created a wild and crowded audience in the William Street Mansion. Tessa Fontaine is an internationally published author who wrote a nonfiction book about her life on the road with America\u2019s last travelling circus and the parallels of fear and horror that her mother faced when &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/courses.chris-foss.net\/dislit19\/uncategorized\/tessa-fontaines-reading-on-the-electric-woman\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Tessa Fontaine&#8217;s Reading on &#8220;The Electric Woman&#8221;&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":40,"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":[],"class_list":["post-1270","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/papJgd-ku","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.chris-foss.net\/dislit19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1270","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\/40"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.chris-foss.net\/dislit19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1270"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/courses.chris-foss.net\/dislit19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1270\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1271,"href":"https:\/\/courses.chris-foss.net\/dislit19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1270\/revisions\/1271"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.chris-foss.net\/dislit19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1270"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.chris-foss.net\/dislit19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1270"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.chris-foss.net\/dislit19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1270"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}