Catherine Gammon’s most recent book is a story collection,
The Gunman and the Carnival
“Ms. Gammon, who publishes her fiction with very small presses, deserves to be more widely read…. These stories portray the suffering caused by desire without censure or sentimentality, in a way that might be Zen detachment or might simply be called wisdom.” — Sam Sacks,
Her novels are
Isabel Out of the Rain
What Samuel Beckett achieves in so many of his works through the exploration of “absence,” Catherine Gammon in Isabel Out of the Rain also achieves but through presence, accumulation, excess. I am always suspicious when someone describes a work as poetic, always wondering why then the work isn’t a poem. Gammon manages to be poetic, while never sacrifici…
Catherine’s earlier collection of stories is
Beauty and the Beast
Fiction from the 1970s, early stories of loss and obsession, voices from another century, another planet, voices exploring themselves, both innocent and haunted, a time capsule, message in a bottle from a forgotten present, memory of the future. Or simply a collection of stories, an old collection, early successes and failures, the young writer this ol…
Before leaving academia to begin formal Zen training at San Francisco Zen Center, Catherine served on the faculty of the Master of Fine Arts program of the University of Pittsburgh. She practices, writes, and lives again in Pittsburgh, with her garden and her cat.
When I started this Substack I imagined it as a place for conversation and exchange — about books, about reading, about film, about art. I wrote this then:
Welcome to @nonabiding, a gathering place with Catherine Gammon and friends, writers who read and readers who write, with help from a painter or two. We won’t show up too often, just once or twice a month, and we’ll never ever ask anyone to pay to subscribe.
We like books and cats and gardens, birds, forests, and some dogs.
We’re here to celebrate and mourn, to read and write and listen and see. Join us!
Help create a community of writers and artists reading, sometimes reading together, watching, seeing, loving, ranting, raging, exploring the world.
Take a moment, if you like, to say hello.
I imagined I would find time and energy for engaging here, for playing, for interacting. I imagined conversations. I imagined I wouldn’t want to use the site for promoting my own work, the sort of promoting I have always been not very good at anyhow, and mostly hate to do. But that isn’t how @nonabiding evolved. And it has fallen silent.
So I’ve changed direction and from now on am using the site only as a newsletter, a place to share information about new publications, readings, and reviews of my work. It will be very quiet here, for the most part.
Thank you for hanging in!
To find out more about Substack, the company that provides the tech for this newsletter, visit Substack.com.
