“For me the Ashley character became all about what we are most afraid of. And also about the gunfighter story in the western movies that are such a part of our Americana. Ashley is our young gunfighter. We quite literally first meet her at the gun range.

While our ghost cowboy characters and our modern ranching family the Hammonds are the more obvious western family saga components of This Is Dismal as a western, Ashley is the actual core of that sort of western story.

She is afraid of being incarcerated underground without a trial. She is afraid of her family disappearing. And she is afraid of living out her life never knowing what happened to them.

Ashley has spent her young adult life under the coercion of the high level operative David. As he moves to bring her more closely under his authority she must move to prevent her ability to extract information from being used in ways she never intended.

Ashley will save herself ultimately through resilience and grit but even that is rarely that straightforward.

Her story, her gifts and her problems, did not start with her. Therefore in this fiction story, she will not fight alone but instead will find that her ancestors will pursue justice far beyond her own circumstances.”

-Bunny Hammond