Letter from an Upstate Prison: An Excerpt from “Sorrow”, a Novel

Catherine Gammon is a fiction writer and Soto Zen priest in the San Francisco Zen Center lineage of Shunryu Suzuki Roshi. Her novel Sorrow (Braddock Avenue Books, 2013) was a finalist for the Northern California Book Award. Her novel Isabel out of the Rain was published by Mercury House in 1991, and her fiction has appeared in many literary magazines, among them Ploughshares, the Kenyon Review, New England Review, Iowa Review, and Other Voices. Other recent work appears in Artifice 4.