MEET TESSA
The Official Bio
Tessa Fontaine is the author of THE ELECTRIC WOMAN: A MEMOIR IN DEATH-DEFYING ACTS (FSG 2018), a New York Times Editors' Choice; Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers pick, and best book of the year by Southern Living, Refinery29, Amazon Editors', and The New York Post.
THE RED GROVE (FSG 2024), her debut novel, was named a best book by Amazon Editors’ and People Magazine, and longlisted for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize.
Other writing can be found in Outside, The New York Times, Glamour, AGNI, The Believer, People, LitHub, Creative Nonfiction, and more. Raised outside San Francisco, Tessa has taught in jails and prisons, community centers, and currently teaches in Warren Wilson’s MFA program. She lives in Asheville, North Carolina, with her daughter, kooky dog and sassy cat.
THE UNOFFICIAL BIO
The bio above is the one you should use if you’re going to introduce me for an event or something. But maybe you want a little more juice? Something like this: I’m kind of afraid of butterflies. I don’t like their erratic flight patterns! Obviously they are majestic and gorgeous, but please politely tell them to stop flying toward my face? Ditto moths. Anyway.
On Writing
On Reading
I love to read, and have been an avid and obsessive reader since I was very young. Early favorite books included Hatchet, Island of the Blue Dolphins, and Bridge to Terabithea. I started reading Michael Crichton’s The Andromeda Strain in 3rd grade because I wanted to look impressive reading such a thick book. Couldn’t make it past twenty pages.
I grew up mostly with my mom in a small town north of San Francisco, among the redwoods, where I was shy and into sports but never learned how to do a cartwheel. I also lived a little bit with my dad in Seattle, surrounded by a big French Canadian Métis family. Plus, a little brother in each place, so I’m pretty good at being bossy.
I don’t know when I started writing because I don’t ever remember not doing it. I do remember, however, right around the time of the Michael Crichton pretend-reading experience, starting to write my first novel. It involved amnesia and stolen jewels and a villain named The Juice, and included this line: “Outside, the dead of night tangoed with the atmosphere.” I floored myself. Loved it. It was the first time I wrote something and was overwhelmed by language. I didn’t really know what it meant, still don’t, but it broke something open for me about how the world feels infinitely more understandable and beautiful once it’s written down. I’ve never stopped writing.
Next came poetry, lots and lots of poetry, and plays, and one-woman shows (I performed off-off-Broadway in New York for a little while!), and short stories, and essays, and a failed partial novel, and then eventually my first book, The Electric Woman: a Memoir in Death-Defying Acts, which was published in 2018.
On Writing Some More
The Electric Woman is about a season I spent in America’s last traveling sideshow. I can still eat fire. My daughter has requested it for her 5th birthday party, a Unicorn-Fire party. We’ll see. My novel, The Red Grove, came out in 2024, and is basically a love letter to redwood ecosystems and mountain lions, with a mystery baked in. Have committed no murders in the name of research, for the record.
My next book is wildly different from the first two (which are wildly different from one another!). I am a chameleon in my writing life, always changing as different projects interest me, experimenting with new styles, following obsessions down their rabbit-holes.
READ MORE ABOUT THE ELECTRIC WOMAN AND THE RED GROVE
The thing I love about the writing life is permission to fall deeply into my obsessions.
Why I Write
I am very much in Joan Didion’s camp, who said: “I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means." That’s from her essay, “Why I Write,” which I suggest you read, especially if that sentence rings any bells for you. Life is a lot. It’s a lot when hard things happen, which they have for me, and probably you too–not a lot of us get out of this unscathed.
Life is also hilarious and joyful and blisteringly weird, and for any of that to make sense to me, I have to find a story to tell about it. To put it into language. Sometimes that happens very directly, sometimes it’s buried deep. But however it happens, it brings me immense, concentrated happiness to do.
My Favorite…
Food to cook:
Japanese
Food to cook that I need A LOT of help to get better at:
Japanese
Place I’ve traveled:
Timbuktu, Mali
Birthday tradition:
Eating unlimited Doritos, as many flavors as I can get my hands on
Book…
Yeah, right, can’t choose just one. Ok, ok, a few faves:
Miriam Toews All My Puny Sorrows
Toni Morrison’s Jazz.
North Woods.
Frankenstein.
Coming Through Slaughter.
Jessamyn Ward.
Robert Hass.
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles.
The Only Good Indians.
Bewilderment.
Tender is the Flesh.
Nobody is Talking About This.
This poem by What Work is
Catch More Here
The New York Times
Publisher’s Weekly Radio
WNYC New York Public Radio’s Midday Show
BBC World Service’s Outlook
Elle
Outside Magazine
The New York Post
The Wall Street Journal
Portland’s ABC TV News
Live Wire with Luke Burbank
Glamour
Vogue
People Magazine
Southern Living
MEDIA KIT
BIO
Tessa Fontaine is the author of THE ELECTRIC WOMAN: A MEMOIR IN DEATH-DEFYING ACTS (FSG 2018), a New York Times Editors' Choice; Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers pick, and best book of the year by Southern Living, Refinery29, Amazon Editors', and The New York Post.
THE RED GROVE (FSG 2024), her debut novel, was named a best book by Amazon Editors’ and People Magazine, and longlisted for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize.
Other writing can be found in Outside, The New York Times, Glamour, AGNI, The Believer, People, LitHub, Creative Nonfiction, and more. Raised outside San Francisco, Tessa teaches in Warren Wilson’s MFA program, started Salt Lake City’s Writers in the Schools program, and has taught in jails and prisons for years. She co-founded and teaches the Accountability Workshops with writer and pal Annie Hartnett, and lives in Asheville, North Carolina, with her daughter, silly dog and sassy cat.
IMAGES
EXPLORE MY WRITING
Essays & Stories
The Electric Woman
The Red Grove