Unexpected Weather Events featured in Spokane's Northwest Passages Event

This Thursday, February 22nd, please attend the Northwest Passages event. I'll be in conversation with Spokesman-Review writer Lindsey Treffry about my newest book, the story collection Unexpected Weather Events. I hope you can attend; if not, send someone in your stead.

What to know

• Thursday, February 22nd at 7 PM
• Tickets are $7 each and available for purchase here (https://spokane7tickets.com/e/nwp-erin-pringle)
• Address: 999 W. Riverside Ave., Spokesman-Review building, 7th floor Chronicle Pavilion
• Books will be available to purchase at the event, but should you want to purchase in advance, you can find Unexpected Weather Events locally at Auntie's Bookstore, Wishing Tree Books, and Giant Nerd Books.

🕮

Spokesman-Review: Unexpected Weather Events in your newspaper

This coming Thursday (February 22, 2024), my newest book Unexpected Weather Events will be the focus of the Northwest Passages audience at the Spokesman-Review building. The event will include a conversation led by Spokesman writer Lindsey Treffry, questions from the audience, and a reading from the book by yours truly. Today, Treffry's article about Unexpected Weather Events ran in the paper. She discusses the book itself and spun in a few words I'd spoken during a recent phone conversation we had.

“Grief is this – trying to carry tragedy at the same time you’re trying to buy Oreos,” Pringle said. “I think losing, in itself, is this trying to balance the mundane livingness of life with what feels like life-changing tragedy and not letting either one of them take over to the point that you’re neglecting the other.”

Northwest Passages is a book-focused, author-centered discussion with regional writers or books on regional subjects. Copies of Unexpected Weather Events will be available to purchase at the event, thanks to Auntie's Bookstore.

Read the full article here: https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2024/feb/18/erin-pringles-unexpected-weather-events-may-bring-/ 

More information about Northwest Passages with Erin Pringle in conversation with Lindsey Treffry

• Thursday, February 22nd at 7 PM
• Tickets are $7 each and available for purchase here
• Address: 999 W. Riverside Ave., Spokesman-Review building, 7th floor Chronicle Pavilion
• To purchase books in advance, you can find them locally at Auntie's Bookstore, Wishing Tree Books, and Giant Nerd Books

I hope to see you and your best book-reading friend there!

🕮

Unexpected Weather Events is January's Get Lit! Book Discussion

 

Banner Advertisement for Get Lit! Book Club

As most any Spokane-area reader knows, the Get Lit! Festival is a big deal for books, readers, and writers every April in the city. Initially a day-long event, the festival has since grown in popularity, size, and opportunity such that this year the four, fully scheduled days will hardly be enough. From April 11th, 2024 to April 15th 2024, the reading and writing scene in Spokane will be a-buzz with live readings, panel discussions, Q & As, workshops, a book fair, and more. The first time I attended Get Lit! was several years ago when Joyce Carol Oates was the headlining writer. More recently, I went to listen to Roxane Gay. This year, we're lucky to have Carmen Maria Machado. 

In addition to the festival, Get Lit! Programs does community outreach, helps fill local classrooms with guest creative writers--all the while supporting the literary arts. One of the cool events that has blossomed recently as part of Get Lit! is a monthly book club featuring a book by a writer who will be at the upcoming festival. It provides a wonderful opportunity for readers to feel fully immersed in the festival once it arrives because they will already be cover-to-cover familiar with many of the guests. 

My newest book Unexpected Weather Events will be featured in several events at the festival (details forthcoming), which is why it has found itself the January 2024 book selection for the Get Lit! Book Club, which meets the last Sunday of each month at Auntie's Bookstore, 6 PM. 

So, if you're looking for a book club, reading community, and a swell place to find yourself on a Sunday evening, then pencil yourself into Auntie's Bookstore on January 28th from 6-7 PM. (I will not be present for the discussion, but you can find me at Northwest Passages on February 22nd; see Calendar for details.)

More information about the Get Lit! Book Club here.

🕮

Thanks to Auntie's Bookstore for a busy afternoon

The Auntie's announcement board
with my event written so artfully.

I spent the hours of 11-2 today greeting customers from where I sat near the front doors of Auntie's Bookstore. In 2020, I'd sat beneath the giant metal fish, but perhaps out of an abundance of caution of an author being eaten by a sculpture, the staff set up the book-signing table across from the main cash registers, which made for a good place because I could say good morning when people swept in and goodbye when people left, and it made sense for all of us--and so the only awkward moments are the ones I created for myself, and will not go into here (there were two, and very small in the scheme of things). As an unexpected bonus, one of the booksellers was super awesome and we swapped funny stories between the lulls.  

This morning the annual Spokane marathon was held, with its starting point near Auntie's, and so perhaps in part due to that, the bookstore was hopping. There might have been something at Gonzaga, too, as there were more than a few families coming in with their college-aged children. The day itself was beautiful, too. The best of what Autumn can do when the leaves are changing and the sunlight lights through them. Light sweaters optional.

More than one person treated themselves to a tote-bag of books, and several more walked out with full stacks balanced against their chests--like old bellhops carrying too many packages to see over. 

It was nice having more than a moment to admire the old wooden doors, the radiator in the breezeway--now protected by a metal grate--the wooden floors and long counters. All of it created a good vibe. Children carrying a book with one arm while holding hands with a mother or grandfather. Couples browsing separately then coming together at the cash register with their discoveries. The purposeful walkers, the meandering browsers, the two women on their way to lunch at an adjoining restaurant but with plans to return to browse, as they seemingly must often do. And when they returned, and I asked, they raved about their eggs on toast, their French toast covered in fresh berries, and the bread made by the woman downstairs. I'm not sure what is downstairs, the woman said, but that's where the woman bakes the bread. It's such good bread.

After today, I now know that if I owned a store and then retired from working there, I'd still return weekly to say hello and chat with the customers of the day. 

Thanks to everyone who came by--to friends who took the time and to the shoppers who approached the table. By the end of my time there, far fewer books were left than had begun. 

Just before I left, a woman rushed into the store, husband following, and asked if I knew whether this had always been a bookstore, and did I know its history? I'm not sure, I said, but it has been a bookstore for as long as I remember. 

And isn't that the sort of place you want to be in? 

I certainly do.

(P.S. Even if we missed each other, there are a few copies of Unexpected Weather Events left to buy.)  

🕮

Unexpected Weather Events on Spokane's KPBX, Arts (P)review

I recently sat down with Karin Emry in the old Spokane fire station that now houses Spokane's KPBX. We talked about my new book, Unexpected Weather Events, and it was actually the first time I'd held a copy (her copy), so that was really lovely. I read from the book, talked about grief and the stories, as well as how I'm finding writing time these days. I didn't think to take a picture, but luckily, she remembered to record the discussion. She edited it down to a segment for this week's Arts (P)review. The recording will be available for a few weeks, so if you missed it, you can listen again: https://www.spokanepublicradio.org/show/thursday-arts-preview/2023-09-28/sep-28-2023-minecraft-at-the-mac-unexpected-weather-events-ewus-risograph-residency

🕮

Unexpected Book Events: Release Party at Shadle Library, Spokane

Recently, a number of Spokane libraries underwent large renovations. The main structure may have not lost its main walls, but enough has changed that it's difficult to walk in and remember the original library. Our neighborhood library, Shadle, was one of those. Library construction is likely happening in many places outside of Spokane--adapting buildings to the changing needs of the communities they serve. Our new Shadle Library features a large indoor play area whose accompanying shrieks of delight reverberate from wall to shelf, and would have led every long-ago librarian to faint dead. Children whirling down slides in a library would have been something akin to a librarian's version of Dante's inferno.

Books now sit on portable shelving, here and there stand self-serve kiosks that provide check-out services. Of course, the days of card catalogs are long gone (I'll never get over that), but now the catalog is not only on the computers but also on large touch-screens that are attached to the ends of a few bookshelves. Checking in a book means setting it on a conveyer belt that whips it out of sight and registers your accomplishment on a screen. 

In fact, on Sundays, only a security guard mans Shadle Library, and everyone is left to use the library without the steadfast eye of a librarian. It's bizarre to me, but according to the information board, it's a cost-cutting solution, and according to my son, nothing that calls for surprise.

The previous version of the Shadle library had one meeting room that I remember. Maybe two, but I'm hard-pressed to conjure it. Now, it has several, and one very large one--all with the functionality of a university classroom. Fancy ceiling projectors, drop-down screens, microphones, surround-sound speakers, a bevy of moveable tables and chairs on wheels, as well as a computer set-up that connects to a laptop (yours or the library's) to control all of these gadgets. 

Shadle Library Event Room

Like a perfectly created conference room without stuffy carpet or generically interesting art, the large event room in Shadle Library looks more like a modernist theatre, but with floor-to-ceiling windows that look out into the surrounding park. 

Not only that but library cardholders can also use these event rooms for free. (There are a few exceptions.)

So, as soon as I knew that Unexpected Book Events would appear on October first, I reserved the large event room in Shadle Library for the book-release party. And as I have done the past three book releases, I went about creating the posters, hanging them around town, and adding the event to the various online calendars that residents and visitors sometimes check when they need activity ideas. 

Imagine my complete and utter surprise when months later, a librarian emailed me out of the blue and brought it to my attention that the book-release party could be an official library event, which would add it to the library's public event calendar and event newsletter. It also came with the added support of a person to set up the room. A person to set up the room? And with an hour of leeway included, which means I don't have to pull my wagon of things into the library six minutes before the start of the release party and set the room up with the speed of magic or Mary Poppins.

And that above graphic? All the library's doing. I didn't have to find free online design programs to do it, enter my email for a 30-day trial, spend an hour inserting images and then another hour after the program crashed my browser. I didn't have to send the order through FedEx, only to pick up my order and discover that the black for inserted graphics was a lighter black than the background black. It certainly didn't look like that on my screen. (Okay, I had already done this for the book-release party, but the above graphic I didn't do.)

Just. 

Wow.

I would also like to note that I'm billed as a "local author," which I haven't been before. I've lived here for thirteen years, but I don't think that you can decide when you become "local." 

My first book came out when I was in my sixth year living in Texas--three of those as a graduate student, which renders a status that makes one feel more transient than local. The Whole World at Once came out seven years into my living in Spokane, but five of those years I'd spent raising a small child, which meant I knew the neighbors, Bernie Sanders supporters, and our child's preschool teachers. 

As someone who came out of an MFA program in Texas and not the nearby MFA program, I lived not on the far outskirts of the local writer community but positively out in the boonies--all of my writing people were back in Austin. 

In 2020, Hezada! I Miss You marked ten years of living here, but the whole novel is set in the rural Midwest, which makes claiming "local writer" status seem . . . silly, even if I physically wrote the whole book in Spokane. 

But now, friends, it's 2023. Probably half of the stories in Unexpected Weather Events are set in the Northwest. The other part, of course, is in that rural Midwest that haunts all my work.

All of this is to say that the BOOK RELEASE EXTRAVAGANZA for Unexpected Weather Events will occur on October 1st, 2023 at 2 PM. Shadle Library, Spokane. And you're absolutely invited.

🕮

 

• Reserve your copy of Unexpected Weather Events from Awst Press: https://awst-press.com/shop/unexpected-weather-events
• Plan to attend the book release party on October 1st, Shadle Library at 2 PM

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

🕮

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

Unexpected Weather Events, a New Book of Stories

I'm happy to share the good news that my next book is a collection of stories entitled Unexpected Weather Events, and that it's found a home with Awst Press, which published my last book, Hezada! I Miss You. The wonderful cover is by L.K. James who also did the cover for Hezada! 

• Now available for pre-order through the press: https://awst-press.com/shop/unexpected-weather-events
• Publication date: October 1, 2023

“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, author of HOLLOW and HOW BEST TO AVOID DYING

🕮 

"Chair, $75 OBO" forthcoming in Moss.

Good news. My story "Chair, $75 OBO" will be published in the next issue of Moss. The story will be in my next collection of stories, which I have finished but am shipping out to potential publishers. So, you'll definitely have access to the story from Moss. before you can find it in any book by me.

Stay tuned for details when the issue of Moss comes out. The literary journal focuses on work from the Pacific Northwest. 

Moss. here: https://mosslit.com/

Pandemic Meditations: Tea by Mandy Chapman Orozco

A Pandemic Poem

by Mandy Chapman Orozco

Tea 

The world breathed it in 
and stopped turning.
Those left to live, dirty.
Those left for death, free.
          We sat for tea 
poured in fragile cups
painted shades of soil and sky.
A place for the stuffed butterfly. 

❤

Mandy Chapman Orozco

Mandy is passionate about the power of spoken and written word. She works full-time at The Bail Project, writing to combat racial and economic disparities in the bail system. Mandy also serves in her local community of Spokane by consulting and writing for smaller nonprofits that are fighting big inequities. Mandy holds an undergraduate degree from University of California, Los Angeles and an MBA from Whitworth University. When she’s not speaking and writing for change professionally, she’s having interesting conversations with her philosopher husband and their children, going for a run, drinking good coffee, and creative writing (she just verbed that).

😷

Pandemic Meditations is a weekly series in which creative people share responses to the COVID-19 Pandemic. Find more meditations at http://www.erinpringle.com/p/pandemic-meditations-series.html

Pandemic Meditations: A Wild Rabbit by Trace Kerr

Pandemic Meditations is a weekly series in which writers, artists, musicians, and all the creative sorts share reflections, journals, and more in response to the current pandemic. 

October is about to go, but you need not worry--we will return next week because November is scheduled, even if the pandemic refuses to be.

Please welcome YA author Trace Kerr to the series.

~ E.P. 

😷

A Wild Rabbit

by Trace Kerr

By nature, I am an Optimistic Pessimist. I’m always certain things will go wrong. On the face of it, I may sound very doom-scrolly, like some Cassandra shouting all the terrible crap that might happen to the world. 

However, as an Optimistic Pessimist, I also constantly formulate contingencies in case SOMETHING needs to be done. 

Honestly, in a good year it’s tiring listening to my anxious mantra of “what might be?” 

And now? 

2020 is driving my brain into the ground. There’s an entire pet store’s worth of thoughts running in the wheel of my brain. How can you plan for this kind of year? I can’t. None of us can.  

That trailing spiderweb in the wind of loss and uncertainty has stretched me to a ravelling. When I’m at my most desperate, I turn to poetry because painting with words makes me feel safe and gives me hope. Here is one.

October

Tuesday morning bit with the teeth of autumn

and I felt. For the first time 

I didn’t worry over shoulds.

Nothing amazing happened 

yet the day was wonderous:

a golden treasure of small things.

I

Baked bread

Hung out laundry and watched my hens bully yellow petaled Brown-eyed Susans

Read and read and read

Talked with my children and marveled at how damned funny they are together

My mother-in-law texted: A wild rabbit needed rescue

He was calm in the old fishing net before we let him go

I 

held the day in my hands and didn’t think 

about how March to September passed in a confusion 

of masks and 

social distancing and 

our fucking pandemic. 

Seven months. Until I woke up 

on this single Tuesday 

and discovered myself

outside my head.

🕮

Trace Kerr is a lifelong Pacific Northwesterner who loves writing stories about undaunted queer teens and magic. Her debut YA novel, The Names We Take came out in May of 2020. 

When she isn't writing, Trace is the producer and co-host for Brain Junk, a lighthearted fact-finding podcast that sometimes airs on Spokane Public Radio. 

She lives, loves, and sometimes goes a little crazy in Spokane with a gardening-crazed chemist, one kid who's still at home, several chickens, three cats, and the sweetest chocolate lab named, Ruby.

You can find her on Twitter as @teakerr, on Instagram as trace.kerr, and on her website TraceKerr.com

❤ Read more Pandemic Meditations at http://www.erinpringle.com/p/pandemic-meditations-series.html

On Writing, Rural Life, and Hezada!: Erin Pringle talks about her new novel on KYRS's Art Hour

I recently met with the hosts of Art Hour, a weekly radio show and podcast aired by Spokane's community radio station, KYRS. Because we live in pandemic times and the stale air of a small radio studio isn't the ideal place to record these days, we set up chairs and a folding table on an old stone bridge in Cannon Hill Park. The air was late summer, the sprinklers zipped in circles, and we spoke about my new novel, Hezada! I Miss You. Which means that we talked about growing up in the rural Midwest, the difficulties and benefits of such a life, why the book took a number of years to form, fully, and more. 

The podcast of the episode is available here: https://anchor.fm/arthour/episodes/65-Erin-Pringle---author-of-the-new-novel-Hezada--I-Miss-You-eie7fm

Thanks to Eric and Mike for the time, finding such a nice space, and to Eric for stitching the interview together from the recordings from each of our phones. And, of course, thanks to all the volunteers at the radio station for keeping our community together, no matter the conditions of our lives.

P.S. My friend Shelli has listened to all the interviews for the book and says it's one of the best. 

Cannon Hill Park 

© 

by Steve Saad 
Used with permission

🐘

Book Signing: Hezada! I Miss You at Auntie's Bookstore

For the first time since The Floating Order, I'll be doing a book-signing event. That is, an event at which I will not read aloud but will sit alone at a table with my books in order to greet book-reading strangers who accidentally stumble upon me in their bookstore. Usually, the people are unsure what to do with me, a book-writing stranger in their space: a quiet but inviting bookstore. Or, rather, I'm unsure what to do with them because I fear they didn't expect me to appear on their way to another aisle.

I think that a book-signing event, when you're Erin Pringle, and not Stephen King, is closer in genre to encountering the person offering samples of cheese, crackers, little smokies in the grocery store. 

Photo by glindsay65
(used under CC license)

There you were, pushing your cart alone, trying to remember to return to produce to get bananas when all of a sudden there's a polite person at a folding table. 

If you're like me, were raised like me, the best thing to do is avoid eye contact and hurry by. Because what if you take a sample?

Well, then you have to buy the whole box, don't you? 

And then where does it end? 

Will you be adding this to your grocery list for the rest of your life? How will this change your kitchen, your family's expectations, your understanding of food?

Better to push on by, and if you happen to make eye contact, a quick smile and no thank you is better than the slippery-slope of taking free samples and then ending the relationship by not then taking the offered coupon, the recipe, the product. 

Similarly, there you were, driving/bicycling/walking to the bookstore, your weekend sanctuary. A place where writers usually stay inside their author photos, have no feelings, do not mind if you set them back down on the shelf. You might stay the whole morning, the whole afternoon, moving through the sections. Maybe you'll find yourself in Poetry. In War History. You don't know, but it won't upset you to find yourself opening a book on Northwest Birds or Impressionists. Maybe you'll even sit in a corner, disappear into a book until no one sees you. You know, that Heaven. And this is what you're expecting, this is what you woke to looking forward to, this is why you won't be meeting your friends or having a pedicure. Because you. are. going. to. the. bookstore. 

You push open the lovely, old wooden doors of Auntie's Bookstore, closer to meditation than you've been all day, in months, maybe years.

Auntie's Bookstore Entrance
(photo from here)

And there I am.
Sitting at a folding table.
With nary a sample of cheese.

Worse, I am sitting with a stack of a book I wrote.

You don't know me.

You don't know this book.

You don't even read books like mine, whatever my book is. 

Or maybe the book signing is a cross between grocery sampling and art fairs. If you go into the artist's tent--if you talk to the artist--Jesus, if you dare compliment the work aloud . . . well, you're going home with a garden sculpture or handmade leather wallet. 

Perhaps this doesn't bother you. Perhaps you're fine with the terms. Perhaps you can walk out without a sculpture and without any feeling of impropriety for doing so. Maybe you even take samples at grocery stores with an adventurous spirit--perhaps excited that you might have stumbled into an opportunity to expand your palette.

Surely there are people who think like this. A sample's a sample. An artist talks about her paintings in a tent in the middle of the park--of course. A bookstore may hold a writer signing her name in books that she herself wrote.

I mean, sure. Maybe.

But when you grow up with little money like I did. You were warned all of your childhood: 

If you touch the comic book, you have to buy it, and we're not buying one today. 

If you break it, you buy it, and we can't afford to buy it.

Or maybe had conversations like these:

Mom, why is your underwear so thin?

Because, daughter, there are more important things to buy than underwear.

Or maybe you watched your mother at the counter after your pediatrician's visit:

Secretary: Do you have insurance?

Mother: Yes, but it's not good, so I'll be paying in full. 

Or maybe you heard the story of your father, how when he was a boy he fell through a floor and into glass--how the glass stuck into his back--how he shuffled to the roadside--how someone finally picked him up and drove him back to the village--and when he finally got home, got to the doctor, his mother (your grandmother) would not pay for anesthetic. You've always imagined her standing with the doctor, holding her purse with both hands as she stares down at her child on the table--his bare, bloody back. How much would it cost? she says. The doctor gives her the number. Not today, she says. Jimmy, you're a tough bird. Maybe she pats his foot before leaving the room so the doctor can tweeze each shard of glass from the boy's back--your father's back who holds all the scars and you will examine as a child as he sits on the edge of his bed playing clarinet. Maybe it was the lack of money, but then again, maybe it was something darker, worse that even as an adult, you haven't had the stomach to dwell on.

And so you brake hard when money is on the line.
And when you see people trying to encourage you to spend money, you've basically encountered the wolf of fairy tales. That sweet-talking wolf. And you know that not every version ends with someone cutting you out of its belly. Not every version ends with the wolf filled with stones and running nowhere but to its death.

Oh, Erin. A book signing should not be so complicated.
I know, I know.

But.

Oh, Erin. Is this your way of encouraging people to go to your book signing? Really, Erin?

I know, I know.

But here's my plan, and you can tell me if it's a good idea: over the course of writing Hezada! I acquired two circus posters, very large. Also, a book of circus photos. Glossy pamphlets sold by the circus at performances. And the last time I was in my hometown, I took many pictures. So, I thought, I'd have all these at the table. In this way, I could talk to people about those things. Should they ask what my book is about, I can point to what I learned. I can point to the picture of the road I walked most every day of my childhood to age 18 and then on visits, even though they've been few and far between. In this way, I can just be a regular person who somehow landed in the bookstore at a folding table. And everyone else can be regular people, too.

If you know any regular people in Spokane, send them my way this Saturday, February 15. I'd love to talk to them about the rural Midwest, the spectacle of poverty and the circus, of loss by suicide, and this strange society we're caught inside--all the while pretending we aren't caught because that's part of it, too.

Also, I can sign Hezada! I Miss You, since it will be there, too, with me. And while it's no sample of grape jelly on a cracker unlike any cracker you've ever tasted, I think it's pretty good.

Saturday, February 15

1-3 PM

Auntie's Bookstore

402 W. Main, Spokane, WA

Erin Pringle signing Hezada! I Miss You
(photo by Kayle Larkin)

🐘

"People as stories performing like poems": Poet Julia Drescher Reviews Hezada! I Miss You

Julia Drescher

Words by Julia Drescher on Hezada! I Miss You

Here are just a few of the various nostalgias that we live with & work through that Hezada! I Miss You asks us to attend to: the frequently brutal nostalgias for a past we believe to be better than the present ; the nostalgias for what we are supposed to desire ; & the hopeful nostalgias (that break the heart too often) for a future where we are loved (& so accepted) for who we are.

Here is a book that gives in novel form—people as stories performing like poems (“Where did your death come from?”) Where language is velocity & mass whereby the turn of phrase is the continually changing way people fall into or out of collective speech, demonstrating how our vulnerabilities to each other can transform into our feeling with others.

Here, as readers, we are asked to attend to the cruelties (banal or otherwise) that we perform when we insist on reading people or towns or countries or times as contained, as only one thing. Which is to say the meanings we make to make ourselves feel like we have “a place in this world.” Too, the profound grief when making these meanings will no longer do—when what we think it means to have a place in this world might be the very thing that undoes us, that guts us.

Here is the circus as the representation of this crisis & the attempt to perform that crisis’ relief (if only for human beings).

Here is a story reminding us of what we forgot we knew: that the wonderful, the devastating, often walk this world wearing the same shoes.

Here in this book in your hands right now.

🐘

This is the story of how Julia Drescher came to read Hezada!

Or, how I came to befriend her

(by Erin)

Though I've not been a smoker for six years, some of my best friendships came from that aspect of my life. 

Julia Drescher and I used to smoke cigarettes between teaching classes at Flowers Hall on the Texas State University campus. We were adjuncts, knew it, and met in our rain boots and confusion as to how we came to be at this point of our lives. 

During one smoke break, she brought me examples of the journal she and her husband Chris had put together and she had stitched on her sewing machine. 

On another smoke break, she brought a glossy proof of the volume she'd put together with Chris, this time of deletion poems. I'd never seen a deletion poem before. I'd never met anyone like Julia before.

Another smoke break, she carried a handful of thesis statements.

Her ideas about whales.

News about moving to a different apartment.

Advice for her sister, but that I took to heart, about walking at night with 9-1-1 dialed into your phone so that all you have to do is push a button.

News that people were stealing political signs out of her parents' front yard.

Texas, she'd sigh. Then roll her eyes, which she can do without doing it. That's how wry yet calm her face can be.

She imparted wisdom about poetry readings. Have you ever gone to a house poetry reading? she wanted to know. I hadn't. She nodded. They look at your books, she said. It's a thing poets do. They wander around looking at your bookshelves. They expect to see their books there, too. She nodded as wise people do, as though to punctuate and assure at the same time. Ever since then, I wander my own house, wondering what poets would think of my books--if my selections would offend, irritate, bore.

In retrospect, I couldn't have stopped smoking in those years because it was the only way I knew how to keep seeing Julia Drescher. I'd drop by her office. She'd appear in mine. 

You ready? she'd say. 

Want one? I'd say.

Our offices flanked the entrance, hidden away by beautiful blue tile. The tiles were beautiful, so much so. But it's hard to tell the truth about anything around such tile.

So there we'd be, meeting on the low brick wall that runs outside by the stairs. 

We watched Lyndon B. Johnson appear, after many curious stages of his creation, from a pedestal to orange cones, and then, him, reaching out.

We were there when a group of students kicking hacky-sack appeared every day at the same time for a full semester.

We were there and there and there, trying to figure out where else we could be. We'd gone through the MFA program at the same time, but she was in poetry, and I was in fiction, and so we might as well have been on opposite sides of the country as far as shared events or shared classes went. The only class I had with her was the one to prepare us to teach 101. She taught me (the class) not to erase the chalkboard side to side. She demonstrated by erasing with one hand, pointing at her bottom with the other, then pointing at the invisible students who watched, amused or horrified. 

Erase vertically, she said. 

We laughed.

She smiled.

But I erased as she said, and would for the next thirteen years of my teaching career, from Texas State to Spokane Falls Community College.

Now she's in Colorado. I'm in Washington. Sometimes, a package will suddenly appear in my mailbox from her. A bookmark she's made. A collage-painting. A chapbook.

Now and then we'll exchange an email.

She wrote for the Summer Library Series (here); she wrote for the Book Your Stocking (here and here); I interviewed her about her newest book, Open Epic (here).

I asked if she'd review Hezada! I Miss You. 

She said she'd give it a go.

When she sent me the email with her words in it, I cried. 

Poets. 

Poets know your mind better than you think anyone will.

That is the danger and importance of poets.

That is Julia Drescher. 

And this is why I wanted to share her thoughts on Hezada! on this day, the day Awst Press officially releases into the world.

• Order her poetry book Open Epic here: https://deletepress.org/julia-drescher/
• Learn about the press she runs with CJ Martin, Further Other Book Works: https://furtherotherbookworks.com/
• Read a sample of her work at likestarlings: http://www.likestarlings.com/author/juliadrescher/

🕮

(P.S. If you are reading this on February 9, 2020, I hope to see you at the celebration of Hezada! today at 2 PM at Washington Cracker Building, 304 W. Pacific, Spokane.)

Erin Pringle on Northwest Arts Review: Thursday, February 6

I met up with Chris Maccini of Spokane's NPR to talk about my new novel Hezada! I Miss You. The best part was reading from the opening chapter. Otherwise, it was morning, and I'm no good for mornings, which I should have taken into account when scheduling the interview but didn't. So, thank you to Chris and my apologies to Chris.

But, regardless of my anxieties, you can listen to the discussion once or twice today: 

• 91.1 FM/KPBX: Thursday 12:30-1:00 P.M. 
• 91.9 FM/KSFC Thursday 3:30-4:00 P.M
• Online: https://www.spokanepublicradio.org/term/hezada-i-miss-you

If you found your way here from the interview, that's fantastic, and I thank you greatly. You're invited to the book celebration this Sunday, Feb 9th at 2 PM/Washington Cracker Building/304 W Pacific. It's free and local blues musician Neil Elwell will play music after the reading. The book will also be available to purchase from Auntie's and online retailers.

May 1: The Whole World at Once at Garageland, Book Release Party

May 1 is the official publication date of The Whole World at Once! So, we're celebrating over here in Spokane with a release party. I'll read a few stories then sign books while the wonderful Liz Rognes sings her folk-swaying ways. Books will be available for purchase.

Join us!
Garageland,

230 W. Riverside Ave.
May 1
7 PM-9 PM
Click here to to view event on Facebook

The Whole World at Once (cover)

Erin Pringle

The Liz of Liz Rognes.

2014 Summer Library Series: Some Kind of Reader by Tim Greenup

From Montana to Delaware, from Michigan to Indiana, this year's sometimes-annual edition of the Summer Library Series comes to a close "somewhere in Oakdale, Minnesota" with this reflection by writer, Tim Greenup.  Thanks to all the writers who took the time to write original work for the series, and for all the readers who have enjoyed the work (and hopefully a bit of summer reading via your own local library). Without further ado, Tim Greenup, everybody:  

*

Some Kind of Reader
by Tim Greenup

I can only recall two things about my childhood library - itchy red-orange industrial carpeting and a wall of windows with sunlight coming through them - which both strike me as pretty commonplace sights for a suburban public library of the late 80’s. For certain I can say this of the library: it was somewhere in Oakdale, Minnesota and my family rarely went there.

Growing up, we weren’t exactly “book people.” We were TV people, and TV was king. We watched Cheers and Roseanne while eating hard shell, ground beef, tacos on flimsy foldable TV trays. We rode our bikes around the neighborhood and laughed about Balki from Perfect Strangers. We went to church and stopped for donuts afterward, never exchanging a word about the sermon, but about the Starship Enterprise instead. We enjoyed our simple cathode ray pleasures, and reading, we’d been taught by TV, was, well, boring. We just couldn’t bring ourselves to do it.

That said, we did have a few books on a shelf in our living room, like a 12 book series on various peoples of the American West ("Plains Indians", "Mountain Men", "Homesteaders", etc.) and some book about the Civil War. I never saw either of my parents open these books, and I cannot recall anyone in my family ever voicing an interest in these topics. But the books remained on that shelf until the whole house got packed up and sold off a few years ago. The mint condition of the binding at the time of their packing suggested that no one had ever read them.

As a boy, I puzzled over the origin of these books. Perhaps they had belonged to a brave warrior and my family had been entrusted to keep watch over them while he fought valiantly in some far off place. Perhaps the only thing keeping him fighting was knowing that one day, when he got home, he could sit down and read at length about the Dust Bowl. It was our duty to keep that dream alive. More than likely, though, we'd been gifted the books one Christmas and didn’t know what else to do with them, so we put them out and went on with our lives. Nevertheless, I grew to like how the books looked lined on that shelf and what this small library suggested, albeit inaccurately, about the type of people that we were - smart.

Through grade school I began to build my own library of unread books. At school book fairs I bought as many as my pet sitting dollars would allow. When teachers handed out Scholastic and Golden Books catalogs for class book orders, I was always able to convince my mother to order me a few, for I would read them and reading them would lead to many future successes. Or that’s what I told her at least - something I’d picked up on 20/20. In reality, I thought that if my classmates saw me with enough crazy stacks of books, the smarter they would think I was, the more they would respect me and, in turn, the better I would feel about myself. I collected books with a desperate, misguided passion.

Whether my intellect ever crossed a single one of my classmate's minds, I will never know. I do know, though, that eventually the stacks of unread books in my bedroom got to be too much. They crowded my dressers and grew dusty. They stared at me, feeling neglected. I felt guilty, but turned away. I couldn’t read, it was just too boring, something teachers urged you to do and why should I listen to them? Urkel was on.

At some point, my father saw all the books I had amassed and made the wild assumption that I was some kind of reader. He offered to take me to the local library, that strange place with orange carpeting and sun blasting in from all sides. On our way there, we decided we would check out a book that we could read together. I stared at the paperback covers on the revolving plastic book rack. They didn’t seem all that different from the books I had in my bedroom. Some looked scary and haunting, while others looked heroic and brave. Some suggested hijinks or mystery or romance. We opted for a book titled You Are a Monster, which was part of the popular Choose Your Own Adventure series of the time. Cramped on my twin bed, my father and I read and read. It didn’t make me feel smarter or more respected, but my brain seemed to stretch in ways it never had before. Had my father not been there, I may not have allowed it to stretch like it did. But he was there, and I felt safe. The room was quiet and warm. I thought about the story long into the night.

*

Tim Greenup is a writer and teacher in Spokane, Washington. His poems have appeared in Redivider, Leveler, interrupture, and elsewhere. 

Superb News! Pringle-Toungate 2012 Artist Trust Fellowship Recipient

A Washington arts foundation, Artist Trust has awarded Erin Pringle-Toungate a writing fellowship.  She is one of sixteen artists in Washington state to be awarded the honor, and one of eight in the literary arts category. Over 400 people applied for a fellowship.  Artist Trust is a not-for-profit arts organization that supports regional artists in their pursuits.  


"Fellowships award $7,500 to practicing professional artists of exceptional talent and demonstrated ability."  ~from the Artist Trust website


To read the list of other winning artists, please see the Artist Trust website or the press release in The Seattle Times.

***

Needless to say, she's very pleased and will be able to finish Midwest in Memoriam completely this summer and make a deep start into a new book.  A new book?  It's dazzling to consider.

Cheers!

Pringle on Spokane's KYRS

She recently dropped into the KYRS studio and read a few stories and talked with the host of Open Poetry, about writing, the Midwest, and more.

Spokane listeners can tune in to 92.3 or 89.9 FM on March 6, 5:30-6:30 P.M.