There are some things ordinary language cannot hold.
So I built a Carnival.
The Midnight Carnival: A Tale of Remembering is a mythic spiritual memoir disguised as fiction — born from grief and transformed through imagination.
A story of memory, identity, creativity, belonging, loss, and the strange work of returning to yourself.
This isn't a book you simply read. It's a doorway you walk through.
MEET ANESSA
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 wasn't only loss.
It was a fracturing of time, memory, identity, creativity, safety — and the version of myself I thought I knew.
I had language for healing.
Grief didn't care.
It asked something different of me.
Not to understand it.
To enter it.
The Midnight Carnival grew from that descent.
This is fiction.
Kind of.
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.
Where the things that resist explanation could finally move.
INSIDE THE CARNIVAL
There are places here you may recognize.
A library filled with what other people have left behind.
A carousel carrying old identities.
A forge.
A mirror.
An elephant.
Threshold after threshold.
You will move through motherhood, childhood, desire, ancestry, creativity, grief, memory — and the selves we become in order to belong.
But the Carnival will not tell you what any of it means.
It leaves enough room for your story to enter, too.
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.
Choose how you enter
SIGNED COPY — $33 + shipping Order directly and I'll sign your copy before it enters the world.[Request a Signed Copy]
PAPERBACK — $19.99 Available on Amazon [Order on Amazon]
KINDLE — $9.99 Available on Amazon [Order on Amazon]
AUDIOBOOK — COMING SOON Read by the author. A companion podcast sharing the stories behind each chapter as I record. Follow on Substack for Updates
IF THE CARNIVAL OPENS SOMETHING —
You don't have to close the door when you reach the final page.
The Remembering is the living world surrounding this work — a community where story becomes practice, creativity becomes inquiry, and the questions the Carnival opens can continue to unfold.
You don't need to have read the book to enter The Remembering.
And you don't need to join The Remembering to experience the book.
They are two doorways into the same world.
The door has always been open.
You only need to enter.