Kurt Andersen talks with Cathy Day, author of The Circus in Winter. Her stories are based on the Indiana town she comes from, where a circus wintered until recent years. Cathy explains how an elephant’s rampage killed her own great-uncle.

Cathy Day is the author of The Circus in Winter, a collection of stories about the performers in a turn-of-the-century circus and their descendants. She is a native of Peru, Indiana, a wintering town for a circus, where her great-uncle was killed by one of the elephants. She teaches writing at the University of Pittsburgh.