Sharma Shields calls Erin Pringle a "Great Ringleader" and the world seems good again

"Mournful, funny, piercing, and profound, Erin Pringle's Hezada! I Miss You is a stirring, vivid novel about a declining circus and its dynamic denizens. Like a great ringleader, Pringle highlights the most exciting, daring, death-defying, and dangerous aspects of the human condition. Hezada! I Miss You is a breathtaking work of art.”

— Sharma Shields, author of The Cassandra and The Sasquatch Hunters’ Almanac 

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Sharma Shields
(photo by Rajah Bose)

This is the story of how Sharma Shields came to read Hezada! I Miss You. 

Maybe I'd lived in Spokane a year, though probably less, before I was talking to a librarian who asked if I knew Sharma Shields. I did not. I'd never met anyone in my life named Sharma.

Oh, she writes stories, too, said the librarian.

I liked the sound of Sharma. It sounds beautiful enough to be anyone, and fragile enough that one ought not to assume who this person might be.

A kind of fairy-tale beginning, I think. 

I would encounter Sharma at a reading at a different library; she read a story from Favorite Monster while I carried my baby from shelf to shelf, trying to keep him more silent than giddy. Or maybe that was another reading, same shelves. Maybe there was no baby yet.

A few years passed before we would meet. Or maybe it wasn't that long. But in feeling. Years.

It was in the lobby of The Bing Crosby Theatre before Lilac City Fairy Tales, an annual event Sharma curated. She'd found my email, asked me to participate. Our first in-person conversation went something like this:
Sharma?
Erin?
Yes.
She hugged me, and I thought it was very nice that she should hug me, and that people named Sharma must be very nice. 

Several years passed before we'd meet again, which seems impossible when most of the writers in Spokane seem to run into each other monthly. Sometimes, I think they actually live together, share laundry, memories, electricity, and only pretend it's funny to find each other outside their shared home. But that might be the way with writers. They're an interesting species.

One day, Sharma thought aloud on Facebook that she might not make it to an event--an event she seemed to want to attend. She has MS. It takes over her, sometimes. Probably more than sometimes. It reminded me of my best friend Alexa who had similar experiences toward the end of her life, so I immediately wrote to Sharma and said I'd be happy to take her wherever she need go. 

Luckily, artists are immune to quirky people, so she graciously thanked me for offering to carry her on my back. Me, who'd hugged her once in a lobby.

Time passed. A year? A June came, and we found each other in Seattle, doing a reading at the Hugo House with  Gary Lilley and Ann Tweedy. I'd read the same story she'd asked me to write for the Lilac City Fairy Tales--now, it was bound in my book of stories.

After the reading, listen to this: she bought everyone's books right there--her arms full and her face bright. I was so confused. People named Sharma hugged in lobbies, asked for fairy tales, then bought books at readings she was a part of.

Then, damn if she not only read mine, but also wrote about it in Spokane/C'oeur D'lene Living Magazine. 

The rest is either history or bullet points.

• She wrote a piece for Book Your Stocking (read here). 
• I sent Scablands Press (her press) Hezada!  
• Then Awst took it. 
• She congratulated me.
• Later, I would ask her to read Hezada! I Miss You as a potential blurb-writer. She said she would. She said it with enthusiasm. 
• Every few months we summon the energy to schedule a walk, a coffee, a casual time, and then after a round or two of our calendars, we give up.
• Sharma's newest novel The Cassandra came out. 

The Cassandra seemed written for me--not me Erin, but me as a mind. A woman of my grandmother's era, and told in that era, goes to work at Hanford, where the plutonium for the atomic bomb used on Nagasaki was manufactured. But it's set in the past, so no one knows what's going on. The book winked at me unlike books ever do. Like, it expected me to get inside jokes that women looking back into time and forward from the past would understand. Nobody has ever expected this of me as a reader, or given this to me, or showed me how that was missing from merely all of literature. 

But aside from all of this, I think it comes down to Shirley Jackson. Sharma loves her. I love her. So, were this a fairy tale, this is how I would have met Sharma: There she'd be, holding The Lottery in her hands, and I'd wait until she looked up so as not to interrupt.
I'd tell her it was a sunny day.
She'd say it was a longtime ritual.
Then we'd sit together before the story, heads bowed, until the child picked up a stone.
We'd shake our heads as though to say, But isn't that the truth? 

• Follow Sharma on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SharmaShields/
• Buy The Cassandra here: http://www.sharmashields.com/new-index/
• Learn more about Sharma and her work at her website: www.sharmashields.com 

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"It's a tender novel": Rajia Hassib on Hezada! I Miss You

“Set against the fascinating backdrop of a traveling circus, Hezada! I Miss You is a meditation on sorrow—how people deal with it, how they attempt to escape from it, and how, for some, it’s inescapable. It’s a tender novel that should be read slowly, each line given the careful consideration it deserves for the beautiful, heartbreaking insights it holds.”

— Rajia Hassib, author of In the Language of Miracles and A Pure Heart 

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Rajia Hassib

Rajia Hassib and I have yet to meet. When I meet her, I'll first make sure she accepts hugs, and then I'll hug her so tightly. It will be one of those, stop-hugging-hold-shoulders-admire-the-hugged-then-hug-again hugs. A double hug. Triple hug. 

The first time I met her words was in a recommendation from my friend Michael Noll when he was running Books are not a Luxury. I bought In the Language of Miracles and fell in love with it. 

I fell hard. 

Then I sent her a note to thank her for the book. Because when you read a book so deeply considered in its rendering, so full in how it grows around you, you must thank the author. 

She responded. 

I felt wowed. 

(I've yet to achieve desensitization when encountering the walking gods I imagine writers to be.) 

Later, I gathered up my gumption and asked if she'd share an essay about her childhood library for the Summer Library Series. She said yes. And then commenced to write about her library: the world's most famous, if not first, library (read here). 

So. Wow.

Later, she wrote a piece for the Book Your Stocking series. And, again, she wrote it with the same seriousness that I'm learning marks all her work (read here).

In this way, the word appreciate--even when mining the depths of that word--does not begin to describe how I think about her. 

This is probably where I should have stopped asking her to write things. In a fairy tale, I would have known better. What has she asked of me? Nothing. Geez, Louise. 

I didn't know better, or I buy too hard the old "you-won't-know-if-you-don't-ask" wisdom, so I asked--I asked if she'd read Hezada! I Miss You. I just thought, the author of In the Language of Miracles would understand what I'm trying to do. 

Politeness says that you should not ask people you admire to do things. 

Then again, when you find a working writer whose work you admire to the moon, and she keeps writing back, don't you help hope by asking? 

Although, when recounting all of this to you, I clearly should have asked her where to send armfuls of gifts instead of yet another thing. I should have just sent her the book when it came out. 

But she did read it. And she saw it! She saw it the way I hoped when I used hope to get me through the hardest parts of the book. And as I have a very tense relationship with the novel, I think I need her words about it as much, if not more than, any reader. Perhaps it was my heart that asked her and elbowed my brain aside.

So, this is my plan: at the end of the Hezada! book tour, I'm disappearing for a while and taking A Pure Heart, Rajia's newest novel with me, which seems the better way to recover.

• Learn more about Rajia Hassib on her website: https://www.rajiahassib.com/
• Order In the Language of Miracles
• Order A Pure Heart

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Hezada! at the Washington Cracker Building, Spokane

Washington Cracker Building
(photo from this Inlander article)

We are a week from the official launch of Hezada! I Miss You. I arranged to celebrate the book at the Washington Cracker Building because it seems of the era the novel reaches back into. Though Hezada! is told in the present-day, it's set in a village whose heartbeat was steadier a century ago, and whose stories of that time persist into the abandoned-now. The Washington Cracker Building is the same, and the first time I saw it, I felt Casey, Illinois--from the building's red brick to its faded, painted signage.

The building sat empty for a long while before it was acquired and put back together into the thriving space it is today, which has served for two-story art shows, private and public events, a permanent art gallery, bar, and work-spaces. The Cracker Building is basically what the villagers in my novel dream their village could be again in some utopian future. And so, the Cracker Building seems perfect to celebrate the novel--both my completion of it and its public introduction.

If you haven't read up on the history of the Cracker Building, here are several useful articles regarding its past:

• Spokesman Review: https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2016/jul/18/then-now-washington-cracker-company/
• Spokane Historical Society: https://spokanehistorical.org/items/show/341
• Inlander: https://www.inlander.com/spokane/the-next-era/Content?oid=2361069

You and everyone you know is invited to come to the celebration.

Sunday, February 9

2 PM

Washington Cracker Building

304 W. Pacific Ave.

I mean it. You're invited.

Donna Miscolta and Erin Pringle Walk into a Montana Bookstore in 2017

“In language that pulses with poetic precision, Erin Pringle depicts with clarity and intelligence a dying village and the dying circus that each year stirs its heart and heartache. In this observant, often mesmerizing novel, Pringle shows how each is hoping to find something in the other to save it, how each succeeds only a little while failing immeasurably in other ways. This novel is a lovely meditation on how the inevitability of change and loss is sustained by nostalgia and memory, and survived by that quiet beat of hope that lives in us all.”
— Donna Miscolta, author of Hola and Goodbye

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I was sitting at the kitchen table when Donna Miscolta's words came in about the book. I immediately shared them with my family. Because not only was the blurb long and beautiful but she'd seen it. She'd seen the novel in the way I'd hoped. For me, it felt akin to the moment in a fairy tale when a person is recognized, or when a person becomes visible--Cinderella in her hut with the bloody stains of her sisters' feet printing the floor; the girl without hands standing tiptoe to eat a peach from a tree when someone wandering the forest sees her and leads her to safety.

Donna Miscolta

I met Donna on a panel at the Montana Book Festival back in 2017 when I was wandering around with The Whole World at Once. I'd proposed the panel, one on the tragedy of fairy tales, or something like this. They'd taken it. They asked me to moderate. I'd not known I was proposing a panel, so the request was a surprise; I thought I was offering subjects I could speak on so they could know what to do with me. Thankfully, they found a moderator. Thankfully, they filled the panel. It took place at the back of Fact and Fiction Books, which serves as homebase for everyone during the festival. 

I sat beside Donna, and I'd bought and brought her book Hola and Goodbye! to the festival in order to read it and thereby have a way of talking to her that didn't rely on nicety and manners. I was in therapy actively working on my social anxiety. People with social anxiety don't do well following a script of niceties (because the script ends, and . .. then what?). I had to create my own, or one that made sense to me. Melissa Stephenson was on the panel, too. Wendy Oleson. All of us will join again in April at the Hugo House to discuss tragedy, fairy tales, and all between. More on that later. 

I finished reading Hola and Goodbye! that autumn. It's an involved work, storytelling through generations of family over the course of nearly a century. Later, Donna would allow me to interview her about the book (read it here). Then she would take part in the Summer Library Series and the Book Your Stocking series. Meanwhile, she's attending writing residencies, writing for the Seattle Review of Books, working a full-time job, writing her own fiction, and maintaining a blog (and I suppose eating and sleeping). And still she agreed to write for these little projects I kept thinking of. Still she agreed to an interview on my website instead of a bigger elsewhere. Still she agreed to read my book and write a blurb. 

Now, I know she was reading Hezada! while her daughter was pregnant and she was in the midst of retirement, moving, becoming a grandmother, and the final round of her own next book. 

Grateful. I'm grateful that I was sat beside Donna at a folding table. I'm grateful that she responded to my emails. That she kept responding. And I'm more than grateful that she read Hezada!, much less that she took the risk of putting her name on my book, beside my name, within the writing community that is smaller than you'd ever imagine (than I ever imagined coming from my cornfield childhood). 

I don't know that Donna would call me her friend, but whatever kindness describes our relationship, I'm happy for. 

This is all to say, or I'll this is how I'll end by saying, that when a book comes out, especially by a small press, there is so much more going on beneath the good words written by writers on the dust jacket. Those words don't fall out of the sky or wand. Those words aren't bought by a publisher (or at least not in small press world). Those words were a sacrifice by the writer who agreed to spend x number of hours reading a brand new book whose destination and value is unknown--hours reading that could have been spent on their own writing, own life. 

So, thanks, Donna Miscolta. 

Thank you. 

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Hezada! on KYRS Radio

I was on KYRS Community Radio last Saturday to talk about Hezada! I Miss You. Thanks to hosts Liz and Neal for reading the book and putting the show together. I forgot to summarize the novel, but hopefully you can piece it together enough to keep listening. Also, I cry, but that part lasted longer in my mind than in reality (so they assured me afterward).

Listen here: https://www.radiofreeamerica.com/show/personally-speaking-thin-air-community-radio
(I'm the January 18th episode.)

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"To the bone, with cadences that sing": Regi Claire on Hezada! I Miss You

Regi Claire
© Dawn Marie Jones, Stoyanov and Jones

“Brilliant. A heart-wrench of a debut novel. The writing cuts right to the bone, with cadences that sing. Reminiscent of Bradbury and Sherwood Anderson, Pringle's Hezada! I Miss You is a kaleidoscopic vision of love, desire, loss – and life.”

— Regi Claire, author of The Waiting and The Beauty Room

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I have not asked Regi whether she knows Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio is on the top of the book-list I casually refer to as DEVASTATING-FANTASTIC-STORY COLLECTIONS-BROKE MY HEART AND THE BIRD THAT LIVED INSIDE IT IS NOW FREE. But I should ask her.

I loved Winesburg, Ohio so much that I waited a year before reading the last story because I did not want to finish the book.

Regi Claire and I encountered each other back in 2009 when my first book, The Floating Order, was published by the same publisher of her collection, Fighting It. When Two Ravens Press was sold and then suddenly fell off the face of the earth, we navigated what that meant--how to re-own our books. Then she was always game for my blog ideas and contributed to the library series ("Cigarette and Astrid Lindgren") and the book-your-stocking series (2017 and 2018). In this way, slowly over the past decade, we have forged a friendship that deepened once we both had sisters who died suddenly.

All of this is why I hoped she'd understand what I was after in Hezada! and asked if she'd be willing to read and blurb it. She agreed. And that is one story of how the words on the dust jacket got there.

• Visit Regi Claire's website
• Enjoy this interview with her in small print magazine

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"Spare, haunting": Jack Kaulfus on Hezada! I Miss You

“Spare, haunting, as honest as poetry gets, Hezada! I Miss You is a dream of a novel that conforms to neither expectation nor demand. Though the external forces at work on this family succeed in tugging them away from one another, Pringle's precisely woven narrative connections are unbreakable. She again finds a way to render time and place as emotional states, while making memory as corporeal as you or me.”

— Jack Kaulfus, author of Tomorrow or Forever: Stories

Jack Kaulfus

Jack Kaulfus is the author of Tomorrow or Forever, serves as fiction editor at Gertrude Press, plays in the band Brand New Key, and teaches and lives in Austin, TX. More importantly, Jack is my dear friend and we attended the same MFA program in Texas. Jack is the person you hope to meet in grad school, the person who will understand your work in the deepest of ways and who you will turn to over your writing life to look at work you'll give to no one else. I am grateful to have found Jack, blessed to have them as a friend, and in love with the writing that comes off Jack's desk--the angles of the stories, the way they click together (or against themselves), the clear empathy and curiosity beneath the rendering of the characters, the language--all of it. So, when I needed to ask writers to review the book, you can see why Jack was first on my list.

• Read more about Jack in this interview at American Short Fiction.
• Visit Jack's website to learn more and read a story or ten.

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