Tess Fahlgren
Tess Fahlgren spends her time thinking about rurality, loneliness and the geology of personal identity. Her fiction and essays have appeared in Joyland, Blue Mesa Review, Permafrost Magazine, Five on the Fifth, The Missoula Independent and more. She was the recipient of Blue Mesa Review’s 2020 Summer Nonfiction Contest and Montana Quarterly’s 2016 Big Snowy Prize for Nonfiction. She is a graduate of the University of Minnesota’s MFA program, 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, where she lives with her partner and dog. She is at work on a memoir.
Student Feedback for Tess
Tess was smart, kind, encouraging, and knowledgeable. I thought she was great. She gave good feedback. I appreciated her sharing information about publishing with us. Carol Severino
“Tess is warm, supportive, helpful, and overall a wonderful teaching mentor.”
“I think the biggest thing that helped my learning, especially in a creative writing course like this, she made sure that we kept trying and writing and pushing ourselves and pursuing what we were interested in. The diversity of assignments allowed each of us to explore and develop our own writing styles, as well as challenge ourselves.”
“Tess assigned very engaging readings and provided amazing feedback on short stories.”
“Tess brought a passion and creativity to class that made learning exciting and engaging.”
“The most helpful thing was how adaptive and fluid the assignments were, without much pressure to follow overly specific instructions. It felt open and welcoming, like a creative writing class should. There was a sense of community that was built because of the more loose teaching style, a great environment for creative expression.”
