Introduction: {TOURNELLE DU SOLEIL} (Patreon)

For your autumn / winter entertainment and edification, I present to you the raw and unfiltered beginnings of a new circus adventure collection:

TOURNELLE DU SOLEIL

I'll tell you all about it below the dotted line, but the gist of it is this:

Every weekday at 7am EST (1pm CEST) a small story instalment will land in your inbox. I made them short and sweet – about a 5-minute read each. There are content warnings ('CW') at the top of instalments where the writing touches on sensitive or difficult subjects. The story instalments begin on Monday November 20th and continue all the way into 2024.

YOU READ THAT RIGHT.

ALL THE WAY INTO 2024.

I didn't set out writing this with any length in mind, but it's ... well, it's a small novel. (Are we surprised?)

What's it all about?

In June of 2023, I was contracted with the special events division of Cirque du Soleil (that means: short contract, not a long touring contract). I kept a detailed journal of that experience from start to finish and wish to share this story with you now.

It's a circus adventure, to be sure. But it's also about transitioning mid-career; about trans and non-binary identity; about trying to capture and share some of the ways I see and navigate the world as an autistic artist while traversing the entertainment industry. It's about self doubt, success, failure, and faking it til you make it. Some of the story is funny; some of it is stressful; and some of it is cringe-inducingly personal. (I'll be writing about my junk. There. I said it. It's part of the story. Get ready.)

I'm sharing it here with you in a pretty raw form; I've only very lightly edited for flow. It is my hope that this project helps me work on my writing craft as much as it pushes me to resist the urge to make something 'perfect' before sharing it with a small, generous audience like yourself.

At the end of this experiment, I'll be gathering the pieces together, editing it again with the clarity that time, space, and maybe some of your feedback (at the end!) has to offer, and self-publishing the collected stories to increase the ranks of my strange, wonderful little library on my website.

Serializing this content into little bites makes it easier to consume on the internet, but it does make it a bit harder to follow the thread of what segments are in-the-current-moment and what segments are little deviations into relevant stories from the past. I'm using dates at the top of each section to help make sense of things as I jump around in time a bit here and there in the story (or, at least, that's my plan at the outset so I figured I'd mention it).

(And - if you're a paranoid little bean like me, don't worry, I made sure I had written go-aheads from the nice folks on this project with Cirque before I started all this)

Additionally!

• I will be making the first week (5 instalments) of the story public here on Patreon, a week after you folks get to lay your eyes on it first. If new folks come this way and stumble across this story, I want them to be able to have a small taste to see if they might want to come along for the rest of the ride!
• My mailing list will be receiving the first three weeks of this story.
• The rest of the story will live here on Patreon only for now. There is content and subject matter in this story that is deeply personal; they're subjects that I believe are worth writing about, but are nonetheless things that I have not spoken or written about in more public areas of the internet before – and I'd like to keep it that way. I trust this Patreon community with my overall goals as an artist and author, and keeping the bulk of those more intimate conversations behind a paywall (for now) is what I feel comfortable with.

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A {nerdy} NOTE ON THE TITLE

For the non-French speakers and readers among us, this title roughly translates to 'Tower of the Sun' (although I've chosen a somewhat archaic and bougie word for tower; 'tournelle').

It's a nod towards the company that employed me in the stories you are about to consume, and about the nature of the performance I did for them; as well as a gesture towards the symbolism of the Tower card in the Rider-Waite tarot deck. (I'm mentioning Rachel a lot lately, but I credit her Woo Corner monthly newsletter for keeping the tarot deck floating around my subconscious – clearly it bubbled up to the surface here. I'm not a big 'woo' person, but I'm a sucker for symbolism and this one is too perfect).

The Tower card is intense: a card in particular of unforeseen catastrophe, associated with misery, distress, adversity, ruin. It's not all bad, though: the Tower card can also, more broadly, point towards sudden change, transformation, obstacles, awakenings, higher learning, and liberation.

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HISTORY

This is bringing my Patreon back to its roots as a home for my writings, reflections, documentation of life working and performing as a contemporary circus artist. If you're an older patron, I hope this will be a welcome return. If you're a newer patron ... get ready!

I first began this Patreon in winter of 2019 to essentially long-form live-blog my time in Zhuhai, China with Troy as we competed in the 6th International China Circus Festival. Afterwards, I wrote about our time competing on La France À Un Incroyable Talent. I've written pieces of our story from one short, glorious, glamorous contract at the Moulin Rouge (find it in Collections). I tried the same long-form live-blogging of my time bringing VACUUM to Germany for an ill-fated contract mid-pandemic in 2020.

You've all followed along with my intense interest in documenting and archiving small pieces of the daily, monthly, yearly realities of contemporary circus artists in my INTERVIEWS project (Volume 2 will be out soon); and this TOURNELLE DU SOLEIL project represents the personal side of that coin.

Here's to the next (and the next, and the next, and the next...) chapter!

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Parting Thoughts

Because this contract was for such a huge company, and because the nature of Cirque's special event's division means that there is an additional client who needs to sign off on things, I had to sit on these stories for a few months instead of sharing them in-the-moment (like I've done with other circus adventures of mine in the past). I'll be honest – it's really hard to share unpolished writing long after I wrote it! This feels much harder than when I've written stories of my adventures in the moment they're happening and shared them right away.

I find myself feeling slightly nervous to do so now, but I know that I might avoid sharing it forever if I don't begin, and you –dear patrons– give me the space to do exactly that. Just beginning this process has been immensely helpful in terms of helping me see where I can improve my writing craft. I know I'm on the right path. And I know better than to let myself be seduced by the myth of perfection over progress. I want progress. And I know you're all in it for the ride, warts and all.

Your first instalment of TOURNELLE DU SOLEIL will land in your inboxes on MONDAY.

HERE WE GO!

Until then, stay strange & wonderful –

XO ess

P.S. You'll also be getting small updates from me in the coming weeks about SLOW CIRCUS: BARBETTE (the big beautiful coffee table book companion to SLOW CIRCUS: VACUUM), which is in the works. The second volume of THE INTERVIEWS is currently being edited and I hope to send it to print in December. Besides these two print projects, Tournelle du Soleil is going to be your constant companion for the next little while.