The Midnight Carnival
A Tale of Remembering
There are some things ordinary language cannot hold.
So I built a Carnival.
The Midnight Carnival is a work of myth and memory born from my own journey through grief — a story where loss, identity, creativity, belonging, memory, and the strange work of returning to yourself are transformed through imagination.
Anessa walks the grounds in white, gathering the memories and sensations others have left behind into the library of her lungs.
She believes she’s there to remember for everyone else.
But as the Carnival begins to change, the story she has spent so long carrying starts to reveal itself as her own.
This book was born from grief.
In September 2021, my parents died seven days apart.
What followed was not only loss. It was a fracturing of time, memory, identity, creativity, safety, and the version of myself I thought I knew.
I had years of training and language for healing.
None of it prevented the unraveling.
But eventually, those practices became part of the way I learned to listen to what grief was asking of me..
This is fiction.
Kind of.
The Midnight Carnival came through in the space between memory and myth.
I didn’t want to write a conventional memoir.
I wanted a story spacious enough to hold what ordinary language could not — a ceremony disguised as fiction, where grief, memory, and imagination could change shape.
Inside the Carnival
You will move through secondhand identities, motherhood, childhood, desire, loss, creativity, ancestors, memory, and the future self who has been waiting for you.
There are tents, shops, thresholds, elephants, a carousel, a forge, and a mirror.
But the Carnival does not explain its symbols.
It leaves room for them to meet your own life.
Read it slowly. Let it find you.
This is a book you may read all at once or wander through tent by tent.
You may close it when something needs time to settle and return when the story calls you back.
It is for anyone carrying a grief ordinary language cannot hold — or feeling the ache of a self not yet fully inhabited.
For the reader who knows healing is not a staircase.
It is a spiral.
From women inside this work
“There is something sacred in the way Jocelyn speaks — like she’s holding open a door I forgot existed. I return to myself each time I listen.”
“Jocelyn’s words stir something ancient and true within me. I feel seen, softened, and invited to come home to myself.”
Enter The Midnight Carnival
Paperback — $19.99
Kindle — $9.99
Signed Copy — $33.00 + shipping
Order directly and receive a personally signed copy from Jocelyn.
Audiobook — Coming Soon
I’ll be recording the audiobook myself, along with a companion podcast sharing the stories behind the chapters as I record.
The book is the map.
The Remembering is where we walk it together.
If the book opens something you are not ready to put down, The Remembering is the living community where that recognition becomes practice and relationship.
The door has always been open.
You only need to enter.