Owen Egerton on Unexpected Weather Events: "Erin Pringle is my favorite living writer."

 “Erin Pringle is my favorite living author. This breathtaking new collection more than solidifies that opinion. Her writing is soul-rich with wonder and terror, tapping into a child’s dream-like experience of family, change, and death. These are not only stories; each piece is a spell swirling with grief, love, and the bitter-strong beauty of being alive.” 

— Owen Egerton, filmmaker, comedian, actor + author of HOLLOW and HOW BEST TO AVOID DYING

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Pre-order Unexpected Weather Events from Awst Press. Purchasing books early and from the publisher always helps fund the printing, marketing, and distribution costs along the way. Visit Awst's website by clicking here: https://awst-press.com/shop/unexpected-weather-events

Tonight! March 3: One Page Salon with Owen Egerton at The North Door, Austin

🎙 You're invited 📚

• ONE PAGE SALON
• Doors at 7 PM, Show 7:30
• THE NORTH DOOR, AUSTIN
• This month's readers:
• Erin Pringle
• Emily Franklin
• Tammy Stoner

I've never been (because I live 2,000 miles away), but all my Austin friends say it's a fantastic time, and that they can't wait to come to this one. So, I think that's a pretty good endorsement. Owen will lead, ask questions, say wry things, and as is my way at any Owen event, I'll grab his tie and hold on.

Also, I'll read one page.

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From the One Page Salon to AWP: Erin Pringle takes Hezada! to Texas Hill Country

I'm about to celebrate my ten-year anniversary living in Spokane. It's long enough for people not to know where I came before. It's short enough that I don't think to say it. That I grew up in Illinois but spent my twenties in Texas is somehow a confusion for most people. It's not a straight timeline or topography. 

But I came to Spokane from Texas, having moved from Illinois to San Marcos for graduate school, and then staying for seven years to live, to teach, to start a marriage, lead three dogs into middle-age, celebrate my first book's publication, and know what time Dirk would come by the coffee shop with his newspaper, when Michelle would be working in her garden, and what newest questions Jonathan had about human nature after a long night of thinking.

Now, in a few days, I'll be back in Texas, with friends who knew those years of me, and I them, and the chance to puzzle ourselves back together the best we can.

Below you'll find my Texas schedule. Let's find each other.

Tuesday, March 3: Austin, TX

• One-Page Salon hosted by Owen Egerton
• 7 PM - 9ish PM
• The North Door  (502 Brushy St.)

Friday, March 6: San Antonio, TX

• First event: AWP Bookfair, signing Hezada! at Awst's table #1522
• Second event: 5 PM, Awst Party and Reading @ The Cove (606 W. Cypress)
• Third event: 6-8 PM, Blood Orange Review, Fugue, and Willow Springs @ Web House (320 Blanco Rd.)

Sunday, March 8: Austin, TX

• Erin Pringle in discussion with Owen Egerton about Hezada! I Miss You (a short reading and signing, too)
• 5:00 PM
• Book People (603 N. Lamar Blvd.)

My friend Owen.
And me.
2017

See you soon, Texas.

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To Be Curated, Inside a Project with Awst Press

AWST PRESS

IMPRESSIVE WORKS FROM DIVERSE VOICES

So, it's official, I have been curated.  And I couldn't be happier, really.  What does that mean?  I'm part of an innovative project run by Awst Press, an Austin-based small press, that specializes in new writers and writing.

The project: Awst chooses a guest curator who selects a handful of writers whose lives and work will be featured with Awst over the course of a few months; the project culminates in a chapbook of new work by those writers.

My curator is writer, filmmaker, teacher, and performer Owen Egerton. For the next two weeks, Awst Press will, from behind the glass of your computer screen, display my stories, words, answers to questions; my new story, "The Wandering House," will be available as a printed chapbook for purchase.

And so it has begun. Come with me to Awst Press: http://www.awst-press.com/erin-pringle-toungate/

Follow Awst on Twitter: @AwstPress

Find Awst on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AwstPress/?fref=ts

In Review: The Summer Library Series

The first time I tried to check out a book from the library, that is, a book with no pictures, I was in first grade.  The book was A Vote for Love.  Evidently, I had been roaming on the other side of the children's section and found the metal racks where the teenage romance novels were kept.  When I took the book to the circulation desk, the librarian eyed the book then eyed me, and wanted to know if I realized the book had no pictures.  I was terribly insulted.  Yes, I knew it had no pictures.  Obviously, it has no pictures.  Maybe she even dared to ask me to get my mother's permission.

. . .

Forgive me.  I want to go on, but only because I need another library story to read.  It is Friday, after all.  And dedicated reader, you've been following What She Might Think, so you know what every Friday has meant all summer: a visiting poet or fiction writer has appeared to share a new, original essay on his or her childhood experience at the library. More than 1,000 readers know what Friday means here at What She Might Think, for that's how many readers came to read library essays this short summer.

But the wind is busy pushing summer backward in order to allow autumn to do what autumn has always done best: signal the end of warm, good things.  The Summer Library Series is over.

Editing the series has been, for me, one of those experiences that, while it's happening you both know you don't want it to end and that it absolutely will.  The essays themselves will not stay on What She Might Think forever.  It is, after all, each writer's work, and this website is no library archive.  Every writer wrote out of interest in the project and, I would say, a generous understanding of generosity.  Because of that, we must give them back their work.  Even the grasshopper knew that the ants' generosity had its limits.  So it is not just the end of summer, but nearly the end of our time to read the essays, too.

But now is now, and so reflections are here for only now, and they're artful, beautiful, strange, beating things:

Children reading in New York Public Library, circa 1920

Once upon a time, in a library, Owen Egerton smuggled horror novels into the children's section and "wished to God [he] could read!"  Matthew Brennan's mother was a painter, and her paintings hung in a library long gone.  Jack Kaulfus rode her bike almost every day one summer in Texas to air-conditioning, to a library, to a man who never questioned why she was choosing the books that she did, only her thoughts about them.  Dan Powell waited for a van of books to stop so that he could climb up the stairs to one of the most traveled vehicles that came through Colwich. Laura Ellen Scott's desk was empty at school because she was busy walking four miles to a library where there were enough books that she never encountered a nurse romance if she didn't want to.  The library discarded what came to be TJ Beitelman's favorite book, and he took care of it so that he could return it to the library, not knowing that they wouldn't take it back. John Kenny's library was a toyshop. Juliet E. McKenna just read and read read and read. Heather Anastasiu's town took place at her library. David Hadbawnik became David Hadbawnik over the course of reading in libraries while in Van Nuys, California, a little girl named Kathryn L. Pringle, fell in love with a statue outside her library and then decided to become an archaeologist.  Steinbeck killed Stacey Swann's pony in Sealy, Texas.  And then the library ended on a Saturday in Cincinnati for Stona Fitch.    

The series is over, but autumn is lovely, with the leaves how they change, and the air on your cheeks.  It is just the weather for a long walk that leads to a library. All our library authors are there, too, waiting for you in the shelves.

Warm Regards,

Erin Pringle-Toungate

THE SUMMER LIBRARY SERIES

LIBRARY AUTHORS

• In a Town With No Bookstores by Owen Egerton
• Buildings and the Love of Books by Matthew C. Brennan
• A Kind of Beacon by Jack Kaulfus
• The Library That Delivered by Dan Powell
• A Truant in the Stacks by Laura Ellen Scott
• The Mother of Libraries by TJ Beitelman
• My Regrettable Non-Relationship with Libraries by John Kenny
• All Sorts of Freedom by Juliet E. McKenna
• Library as Locus by Heather Anastasiu
• From Branch to Main and Back by David Hadbawnik
• On Raising an Ontological Architect by kathryn l. pringle
• Then Steinbeck Killed My Pony by Stacey Swann
• Library Days by Stona Fitch

Special thanks to the photographers who gave permission to What She Might Think expressly for this project. Many of the photographers were librarians themselves.

Summer Library Series: In a Town With No Bookstores by Owen Egerton

Children reading, New York Public Library

It's that time of year, where, at most local libraries in the United States, librarians are climbing up ladders as rickety as the federal budgets that keep the air-conditioning going and the doors open. And above the circulation desk, they hang the motto of this summer's reading program: I Want You to Read As Hard As You Can. Then, they fold up the ladders, straighten their shoulders and the free bookmarks, and wait for the onslaught of children.  

This summer, What She Might Think will be running a special reading series of original short essays about libraries and childhood, written by authors from the United States and abroad.

And so, kicking off the Summer Library Series, is humorist Owen Egerton, who grew up exploring the library in Friendswood, Texas.  Enjoy!

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In a Town With No Bookstores

by Owen Egerton

. . . I'd sneak a copy of some 

bloody horror or erotic thriller 

into a nook of the children's area 

and wish to God I could read!

Friendswood Public Library

Friendswood had one library. Of course, this excludes the pillow-padded, lunch-hour harbor school library which locked its door for the hottest months. In the summer you had one choice: the small, early-70's-style, green-carpeted, pale-walled, nearly air-conditioned public library. My sister and I would tag along with my mother once or twice a month. In a town with no bookstores, in a time with no internet, it was her one outlet for new writings. I found the place mysterious and overwhelming. So many books! And unlike our child-proof school libraries, the public library had adult books with dark, forbidding--and by forbidding, inviting--covers. Flowers in the Attic, Coma, Carrie. These dark books my mother or the elderly librarian (I'm sure she was nearly forty!) would snatch from my palms as if they were hot tubes of black-tar heroin.

But sometimes I'd sneak a copy of some bloody horror or erotic thriller into a nook of the children's area and wish to God I could read! I'd imagine the stories, whisper plot lines to match the covers and wonder at the weight of the pages.


As years went by, I recall other hours spent with my bicycle parked outside browsing science books and old copies of National Geographic. In those days you could check out newspapers from around the country, too. Like the post office, this place seemed to be in conversation with parts of the world I only knew from maps. This one, clumsy building was the town's nerve link to Africa, Australia, Europe. But no one seemed to care. One thing I clearly remember. The library was never crowded.

For a middle-school project, I used the library like an eager post-grad degree candidate, passionately researching how to build a kite, making weak copies from the buzzing Xerox machine and feeling incredibly scholarly. That one project was a heady experience. I had walked in not knowing something and walked out with enough new knowledge to teach my 6th grade science class a hands-on-lesson on kites.

I don't recall any guides in the library, can't picture a helpful face recommending the perfect book or new subject. I'm sure they were there, but I mainly recall the massive amount of options--shelf after shelf after shelf of hardback, mysterious texts.

I went to library less as a teenage. Looking back, I'm surprised I didn't spend more hours there. At the time, I believed books were serious, quiet things. I believed the customary hush was not so others could read undisturbed, but so the books might sit undisturbed--like ancient, dead gods. I still believe books are serious--but they are also lusty little demons willing to yank, cut, kiss and steal. As a young man, I had yet to balance my reverence with irreverence, yet to learn that the contents of book can sing and scream.

We now live a block from a public library in Austin, Texas. Just a month ago, newly seven-years old, my daughter applied and received her first library card. I let her check out whatever books she wanted for the family. We left with a children's book on space travel, another on dinosaurs and also a collection of Thoreau's letters and Bukowski's poems. Brilliant.

*

Owen Egerton

Owen Egerton lives and writes in Austin, TX and Los Angeles, CA.  He is a performer, screenwriter, and the author of three books of fiction, Marshall Hollenzer is Driving (Writer's Club Press, 2001), How Best to Avoid Dying (Dalton, 2007) and The Book of Harold, the Illegitimate Son of God (Soft Skull Press, 2012).

Egerton is currently on his book-tour for The Book of Harold. Check out his schedule on owenegerton.com.  


To find out if your local library has books by Owen Egerton, visit Worldcat.org. 

Next week's library author: 

poet, Matthew Brennan