feast day: a lyric

By Tess Fahlgren

Issue 42 • Fall 2020 • Nonfiction

1st Place Nonfiction
2020 Summer Contest

“Feast Day” is beautiful and daring in its structure, fluid in its haunting commute between the visceral and numinous, the literal and metaphor. While this is not the first story to conflate the bodies of women and livestock, its indictment of the dumbing down, the stockade, is wildly original. Pulsing with paradox and a rage that should be understood as fierce devotion, “Feast Day” bucks at the idea that domestic and docile are saintly qualities for any female body, and does so with a rare and nuanced intelligence.

– Amy Irvine

Click here to access a PDF of feast day: a lyric

Tess Fahlgren

Tess Fahlgren was born and raised in rural Montana. Her fiction and essays have appeared in Joyland, Permafrost, Five on the Fifth, The Missoula Independent and more. She was the recipient of Montana Quarterly’s 2016 Big Snowy Prize for Nonfiction.

A graduate of the University of Montana, she is currently an MFA candidate in nonfiction at the University of Minnesota, where she was awarded the College of Liberal Arts Travel Grant, the Gesell Fellowship, and twice the O’Rourke Travel Grant. Previously, she co-directed the Montana Book Festival and taught art in rural Montana with the Art Mobile of Montana and in the town of Nashua. She lives in Minneapolis with her partner and dog and is at work on a memoir.