The Gunman and The Carnival: Stories

The Gunman and The Carnival

Stories

by Catherine Gammon

Timely and introspective, Catherine Gammon’s The Gunman and the Carnival is the meeting of contemporary voices and visions that offer not relatability, but an intimate encounter open to strangeness and its embrace.The stories in the inimitable Catherine Gammon’s The Gunman and the Carnival — loosely linked and set in Los Angeles, California — center on women of various ages and backgrounds. Constructed around themes of solitude and connection, creation and destruction, love and loss, these sixteen stories unfold in a world haunted by individual and collective violence, systemic injustice, pandemic, and environmental duress: not with genre sensibilities of the dystopic or apocalyptic, but with compassion and wisdom that renders a staid, meditative examination of our contemporary challenges. The Gunman and the Carnival does not aspire to be a panorama or to portray the city (or the nation) in its extraordinary complexity. Rather it shines a roving light into the minds and hearts of an idiosyncratic handful of characters living in our difficult times and invites each one to sing. Some of the stories are realist, some oblique and fragmented, others metafictional or surreal, and the urban / suburban landscapes are accented by the occasional appearance of wildlife and the presence (and voices) of trees. Handled with grace and intelligence, these stories chronicle contemporary struggles: the violence and the joy examined in equal measure.

an excerpt from “Cloudy with a Chance of Rain”

The toddler next door is crying. The neighbor on the other side is yelling fuck. The temperature has dropped after weeks of relentless record-breaking heat. Our tempers should be sweeter.

All things grow toward the sun.

I don’t get depressed, exactly. What I get is the I-don’t-want-to’s.

The heat came back and finally dropped again, and all night at last it rained. In the early morning I could feel the happiness of the plants and the birds. The human world was full of grief. Explosion. Fire. Pandemic. Idiocy at the head of nations. Incompetence or malign intent, no difference for us who live on the ground.

In 2013 or so, I thought the story was that life goes on, human life goes on, no matter what, some humans would still be here, remembering, singing about the dark times. In 2020, I see the illusion that was.

The garden is full of lessons. A big young stag was in the yard this late afternoon, close to the houses, eating from a half-wild mulberry bush. He was not afraid of me but when he moseyed over to the tomatoes, I asked him to go eat knotweed instead. He regarded me long enough to seem to be considering and turned and trotted off, to hide himself in the little copse he knows as his domain. Later I saw him again and went out to the deck to talk to him down the length of the yard as he chomped on peppermint and weeds. When I thought he was getting too deep into the garden I told him once more to go eat knotweed. He stared at me, then scratched his haunches and started back in on the mint. I made a discouraging sound that stopped him (Anh! Anh-anh!) and he considered me again for a moment before turning and disappearing through the invasives into the copse. I thanked him as he left.

About the Author

Catherine Gammon is author of the novels The Martyrs, The Lovers (55 Fathoms, 2023), China Blue (Bridge Eight Press, 2021), Sorrow (Braddock Avenue Books, 2013) and Isabel Out of the Rain (Mercury House, 1991). Her early story collection is Beauty and the Beast (lulu.com, 2012).

Catherine’s fiction has appeared in literary magazines for many years, Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, Iowa Review, New England Review, Cincinnati Review and The Missouri Review among them. Her work has received support from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts among others, as well as from colonies including the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Yaddo, and Djerassi.

After growing up in Los Angeles, Catherine lived in Berkeley, Yellow Springs, Iowa City, and Provincetown before moving to Brooklyn, where she lived for ten years, working most of that time at The New York Review of Books. In 1992, she joined the faculty of the University of Pittsburgh, before returning to California for residential training at San Francisco Zen Center’s Green Gulch Farm. Ordained in 2005 by Tenshin Reb Anderson, Catherine continued in residence and served as shuso, or head student, in 2010. She lives again in Pittsburgh, with a garden and a cat.

Praise for The Gunman and the Carnival

Catherine in the News

• The Gunman & the Carnival reviewed by Sam Sacks forThe Wall Street Journal  (Feb. 7, 2024)
• The Gunman & the Carnival reviewed by Fred Shaw for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (Mar. 11, 2024)