The sense of possibility, the dazzle and glitz and sadness of them. And the more I told Tessas story, which, naturally, included the story of how she came to be that girl in the air, I learned more and more about circuses, went to more and more, and fell in love with them. Rain Village became the place Tessas mentor Mary Finn was from, and the original narrator Alice dropped out completely. Anyway, years later, as that short story developed into a book, the trapeze girl Tessa became one of the narratorsthe first draft was five narrators all talking about Rain Village and their relationships to itand then, eventually, the sole narrator, when it became clear that her voice was the strongest. This was just a random couple of lines I had been taken with the beauty of trapeze because of the German film Wings of Desire, those gorgeous, melancholy black-and-white scenes of Solveig Dommartin with her white feathered wings, Nick Cave playing in the background. That original narrator, Alice, mentions, very briefly, how a carnival goes through the village once a year, how they all go to see the girl on the trapeze, who hangs above them like a wingless bird while they wait for her to fall. I had written a short story for a class I took in college with Paul West, about this strange rain-soaked place called Rain Village. It really began a bit randomly, the way things do. How did you decide to write about circuses? Carolyn Turgeon discusses why the circus had such a strong influence on her first book, Rain Village.

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