Sunday, August 13, 2023

Reading The Member of the Wedding on Wake to Words and Brew Some Coffee (8/13/23)

Yes, You Should Absolutely Read The Member of the Wedding

Unlike all the other Sundays, today I'm reading prose because I find myself away from home and poetry. Please enjoy the beginning of Carson McCullers' novella, The Member of the Wedding. It's an absolutely fantastic book that I began a few weeks ago and quickly devoured. If you haven't read it, I hope that this serves as a gateway into the full book. It is definitely one of the best books I've ever read and one that I'll return to. The writing is thick and smart, wry and hilarious, deeply observant and packed with pitch-perfect sentences. 

The story takes place in the mid-century South and follows Frankie, a twelve-year old girl walking the tightrope into adulthood and the grim reality of such a balancing act. She lives with her widower father and spends her time with her younger cousin John Henry and her nanny/house-help Berenice. Frankie is finding herself less drawn to pastimes that used to take her whole summer, such as digging a swimming hole with neighborhood children or putting on shows in the back yard. 

Like Scout Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird, Frankie is more interested in throwing knives than playing dolls, but as an older version of Scout, she's becoming more curious about the larger world, her place in it, and the town she's grown up in. When she learns that her eldest brother is to be married, she starts fantasizing about becoming a family with he and his bride after the wedding--despite receiving no invitation or even a gesture toward it. She decides that this will be her way out of town forever and into the world and goes about dreaming the dream until she has convinced herself of its truth in her attempts to convince others. 

She begins to experience the town and her home as though she will never return, and like the childhood she is leaving behind, she starts to feel both the loss and the excitement of living a different version of her life than she has until now.

Evidently, the novella became a movie only a few years after its 1946 publication (and again 50 years later), and was one of McCullers' best known or most heralded works--aside from The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.

I so very much wish that I'd read McCullers before now, but I'm so happy and grateful to read her work now that I've cracked it open. Much like my experience first reading Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, I reveled in the discovery of every sentence and scene. McCullers is amazing. From the way she designs the telling of the story to her observations about the characters to the vivid, perfect details (from John Henry's quiet perfectionism to Berenice's blue glass eye and stories of her deceased husband to Frankie's meticulous pantomime pretending to be a jeweler in her father's store window). 

It's on-point, as the kids say. (Do they still say that?) 

Do yourself or your book-loving friend a favor and find a copy of The Member of the Wedding


 

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🠊 Catch the live show Sunday mornings at some time-ish: https://www.facebook.com/erintpringle 

Thursday, August 10, 2023

Unexpected Weather Events: New Stories by Erin Pringle


🕮 2024 ðŸ•®
APRIL
April 1: Casey, Illinois 
  • Hometown Reading and Book Signing
  • 2:00 PM (Central Time)
  • Casey Township Library (307 E. Main)
🕮 2023 ðŸ•®
AUGUST
August 5: Virtual

OCTOBER
October 1: Spokane, WA
  • Book Release Party for Unexpected Weather Events
  • 2:00 PM
  • Shadle Library (2111 W. Wellesley Ave.)
October 19: Missoula, MT
October 26: Portland, OR
October 28: Olympia, WA
DECEMBER
December 14: Interview 
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Wednesday, August 9, 2023

Mczyzniejewski on The Whole World at Once: "Pringle writes haunting, stark narratives that send her characters out to investigate"

My time with Erin Pringle’s stories in The Whole World at Once was well spent. Pringle writes haunting, stark narratives that send her characters out to investigate what they can’t understand, be it a snowy ravine, the death of another, or the imminent death of the self. Curiosity is a solid trigger for any story, and Pringle handles her sleuths with an adept hand, getting close enough to look over their shoulder, though not close enough that we know their names. Mortality, and their existential relationship with it, makes for some tremendous pondering. - Michael Mczyzniejewski from his review of The Whole World at Once

I'm not sure how I missed sharing this wonderful review of The Whole World at Once, my last collection of stories. This review came out in 2020, three years after the book's publication and a few months after my novel Hezada! I Miss You was published (which corresponded with the pandemic). 

I remember reading the review and messaging Michael about it. I maybe even promised to send him a copy of Hezada! but I don't think I did. I guess that was the way of life back then. Covid affecting our physical environments led to a shift in how we stored our memories. Or how I did, anyway. 

Regardless, he said some super awesome words about the stories, and it's damn fine luck when your book falls into the hands of someone who can spin such words and wants to.

It's easy to forget that writing a book is for someone to read--to absorb the feelings and thoughts that you carefully created over so many hours and years and find the experience worthwhile in a way that affirms both your experiences of reality. 

Now it's three years since he posted his review, and I'm back at the point of marketing a new book of stories (Unexpected Weather Events); I'm at the Sisyphus part--at the bottom of the hill, pushing the ten-ton boulder called Publicity up Nobody-Cares hill, yelling about it every step so that readers will emerge from hiding and start whisking the book away. If I'm lucky, a reader will find these new stories worthwhile, too. It's a magnificent bonus when awesome words appear a few years later. 

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Tuesday, August 8, 2023

Ann Tweedy reads Erin Pringle's Unexpected Weather Events

You've likely heard me read a number of poems by Ann Tweedy on Wake to Words. I happily met her work when we read together at a Hugo House reading, and the two of us later read at Last Word Books in Olympia, WA. Now she lives in the Dakotas, so I'll need to make a trek out there to read with her again. One of the best parts of our writership or frienwrit is the support we give each other's work. Although it's not typical for fiction writers to have poets blurb their books, I'm not typical and neither is Ann. So, when I asked if she'd read Unexpected Weather Events and blurb it, she said yes. I had no idea, of course, that she would write something as beautiful as this, and I'm absolutely honored and humbled. Because Ann Tweedy tells the truth, make no mistake.

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Ann Tweedy, on UNEXPECTED WEATHER EVENTS

In prose rich in metaphor, Pringle masterfully and hauntingly narrates the interior lives of children and adults facing life’s greatest struggles. Pringle’s characters are inspiring and courageous as they encounter unthinkable catastrophes. 

In these stories, we see from the eyes of children watching a parent die from cancer, witnessing a parent’s ongoing struggle with mental illness and the debilitating effects of medication, and experiencing a holocaust-like mass killing of residents in their town. We see adult characters who escaped horrific childhoods question the viability of their own happy lives to the point that everything begins to crumble. 

Pringle’s stories deftly and unsentimentally address heartbreaking and sometimes taboo topics like the grief of miscarriage and the destructive force of homophobia. Often, the lines between reality and delusion blur, and the reader becomes unnervingly ensnared in the protagonist’s confusion. 

Many of the stories are quintessentially Midwestern, infused with wide cornfields and an ethos of practicality and personal limitation that is brought into stark relief by Pringle’s uncritical presentation. Pringle’s many gifts as a writer are in full force here. Particularly striking is Pringle’s ability to powerfully and convincingly evoke a child’s point of view. As always, Pringle’s work will break you open and at the same time fortify you.

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Monday, August 7, 2023

Yes, you should read Lord of the Flies by William Golding (even if you've lived under a rock for the past 50 years)

Upon finishing Lord of the Flies,
barefooted
Lord of the Flies by William Golding came into the world in 1954, and while I am typically not a fan of the question regarding whether a book can live past its epoch, I repeatedly wondered this while reading. Is the book of its time, such that it can't fully reach us in our present? Or am I uniquely numbed to terror, listening nightly to true murder stories, such that I am not shocked to find a group of choir boys descend into chaos, murder, and tyranny?

A few years ago, I bought this copy of Lord of the Flies in one of those weak moments in a bookstore when you find yourself at a display shelf of new covers on old books, and decide that yes, you need this book, despite the fact that you can locate it in every library and used bookstore in the same city.

(I somehow missed every class and professor who assigned this book, yet found myself reading The Great Gatsby three or four times. This is neither here nor there but simply the power-ball situation that is syllabi book lists.) 

And this week, I finally read it. The book has saturated our culture to the point that nothing was surprising about the story or its pointed questioning of the world. When left to our own devices, child or adult, will some kind of internal, ethical compass save us from our human desire for power? What in us gravitates toward reasoning, democracy, and community? What external forces prevent us from descending into an irrational death spiral in which we take out anyone who seems weak as a way to solidify the group?

The answer in Lord of the Flies is that a few people will have an ethical, well-meaning compass and follow it, no matter the cost to themselves, but for the most part, everyone else will kill you first and worry about it later, if at all.

It was, of course, novel for Golding to situate such questions within the world of children; much of the story's horror comes from the collision of the murderous adult world with the idealized perception of children as innately good, prone to kindness, and perfectly innocent. 

Lord of the Flies begins with a plane crash on a remote island, with a couple dozen surviving children--perhaps members of a church or boys' choir. No adults survive the crash, and so the remaining children eventually gather, begin trying to create a livable situation and tend an ever-burning fire such that a nearby ship might see and come rescue them.

All manner of books and stories have since explored the same theme and questions. Most popularly, the Hunger Games series, any number of Stephen King books (e.g., The Running Man or The Long Walk), the well-known story "The Lottery" by Shirley Jackson, Octavia E. Butler's Parable of the Sower, and innumerable others. 

This isn't to say that writers should stop exploring the human heart, its drive to be all-powerful and revered, or how murder and war are a terrifying cycle from which no one can seemingly save us, child or adult. Unlike fire putting out fire, war does not seem to put out war. 

What I do think is that Lord of the Flies is a well-told story, but it will not shake anyone to the core now that we live in a world where children shoot each other in schools, roadsides, and homes. Where children bully each other online until the bullied child dies by suicide. Where children haze each other until someone accidently dies, and everyone feigns surprise. Where adults with guns barge through schools, malls, concerts, parades, and movie theaters. Where we can daily find images, should we choose to search--of dead immigrant children washed onto beaches, drowned with their parents, or if by luck, starving into a slow death. Children left in pieces in bombed cities or left to live, blind and torn apart by landmines left over from old wars.  

In Lord of the Flies, the children elect one of the older children, Ralph, to be the leader. The children talk about themselves as tribes and savages. There's another kid who wanted to be leader, and eventually, that desire for power leads to the mayhem and murder that come toward the end of the book. Early on, the children go about the business of creating a mirror of what they know: shelter, food-finding, a democracy in which every child is allowed to speak as long as he's holding the beautiful conch shell. Later, once the child who yearned to be leader successfully kills a wild pig with the help of others, the monstrosity of the killing starts the slow plunge toward anyone now being seen as nothing more than a wild pig--or less than, since the children who later die serve no purpose other than to terrify the others into following the new leader/tyrant.

Here are some reasons to read it:

  1. Everyone else has read it, so you ought to read it in order to understand how deeply the book has permeated the culture;
  2. It will shed some light on the era of its publication, and the concerns that come out of WWII and the Holocaust; 
  3. You'll be reminded of how saturated our lives are with murder and death, such that this book does not feel full of terror as it must have many decades ago;
  4. Should the book-banners remember this book exists, it will be banned again, and one ought to know what others find worth censoring (I just learned that it's one of the top ten most challenged/censored books);
  5. To have an uninterrupted time dwelling on why people form groups and how that can go terribly wrong with the leader who takes power;
  6. The scene wherein you learn why the book has its title and then dwelling on that and its implications regarding the children;
  7. Perhaps you are a teacher and need to assign a book like Hunger Games that will not be immediately challenged by parents. I'd think that this seventy-year old book will have slipped off the radar of the well-meaning censors. (But, if it's still in the top ten challenged, I clearly know little about any of that.) You will need to deal with the book's savage/civilized duality and the writer's implications that native people are representative of destruction while white people are inherently "civilized." That the story exists without girls, except for the off-stage mothers that the children yearn for, should be factored in when selecting it and be a topic of discussion. "The Lottery" would be a well-chosen companion reading.
Overall, I'm glad to have read it, to meet the character Piggy beyond what I've picked up here and there, and to read how it ends. I did not expect to become endeared to Ralph but here we are. There were a a handful of images so vivid and shattering that the book is probably worth reading simply for those. One, for example, is the corpse of a parachuter that gets caught in the trees. 

Note: The edition I bought came sandwiched between introductions, notes, and theory, but I think you'll be fine reading an edition that contains only the story. But if you like the extra pages to expand your own illuminating thoughts, then go for a newer edition.

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Sunday, August 6, 2023

A Game of Telephone on Wake to Words and Brew Some Coffee (August 6, 2023)

Today is a departure from the usual poetry of Wake to Words and Brew Some Coffee. I'll be reading the story "A Game of Telephone" from my forthcoming story collection Unexpected Weather Events. Reserve your copy now from Awst Press: https://awst-press.com/shop/unexpected-weather-events

This was recorded for a live Facebook event.  

If you live in the Spokane area, I hope you can attend the book release EXTRAVAGANZA on October 1st, Shadle Park Library, 2-4 PM. You're absolutely invited. 

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🠊 Catch the live show Sunday mornings at some time-ish: https://www.facebook.com/erintpringle 

Friday, August 4, 2023

Read a Book in the Park: August 5, 2023

Read a Book in the Park

READ A BOOK IN THE PARK

I realized that as a writer, I can hardly fret over people buying but not reading my books if I myself have a difficult time reading books. Social media, true-crime podcasts, animals behaving hilariously on reels--all of these not only suck my time into the black hole of a quickly passing present, but also make it difficult for me to focus or transition to a concentrated activity that requires mental participation.

An idea was then born that seems silly when you first think about it: Read a book in the park. Together.

And so here we are. I'm officially inviting you to join me in Audubon Park tomorrow morning (Saturday, August 5) from 8-9 AM. We will read our books together--but silently, alone, and from our own blankets, hammocks, or other reading apparatus.

Bring the book you're reading or have been meaning to read.

Leave your cellphone in the car or at home. (Audio-bookers are encouraged to read a print book for this event.)

No book? No blanket? No worries. I will have both for borrowing--for all readers: infants to teens to those who crave Cormac McCarthy on a bright Saturday morning. Ha!

At the end of our hour of reading, we share what book we're reading or we don't. We pack up and move into the rest of our day, or we read for longer. The first time we gathered (and we've so far only gathered once), a reader remarked on the revolutionary nature of the event--how it felt like she was participating in a silent protest. 

Yes. I want my brain back. I want books back. If you feel the same way, join us. 

Then maybe we'll wind up reading in a park near you, and if you're not near us, I hope you read in your park.

Read a Book in the Park

  • Saturday, August 5
  • Audubon Park (Southeast side, closer to Northwest Blvd. than to Finch Elementary)
  • 8:00-9:00 AM
  • Free

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NOTE: More reading-in-a-park sessions have been scheduled. Our next one is Saturday, August 19 (same place and time). For updates, new reading meetups, or to share and enjoy pictures of books and parks, join the FB group Read a Book in the Park: https://www.facebook.com/groups/fusediversity

Erin Pringle talks writing with Spokane Public Library's THE HIVE

A few years ago when I had a writing residency at The Hive in Spokane, they interviewed me on the good old camera and microphone. I talk a little about my creation process, thoughts, and goals. Here's the result!


At the time I was working on a novel that I continue to draft. Since then, my newest book, UNEXPECTED WEATHER EVENTS is to be published. In fact, at the filming of this interview (winter 2021), I didn't have a publisher for it yet, and it's saved on the desktop of that computer.

UNEXPECTED WEATHER EVENTS
strange, sad, and beautiful stories
October 1, 2023
AWST Press

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Thursday, August 3, 2023

October 19: UNEXPECTED WEATHER EVENTS in Missoula, Montana

Meet me in Missoula 
Unexpected Weather Events by Erin Pringle
from AWST Press
 (cover art by L.K. James)

I'll be reading from my new book of stories, Unexpected Weather Events, at my favorite Montana bookstore, Fact and Fiction Books. I had a reading there for Hezada! I Miss You, and first met their acquaintance at a Montana Book Festival in 2017 for my last book of stories The Whole World at Once. I've always appreciated the friendliness and warmth of the staff, and have been extra pleased since the store was bought by Mara, who seemed to be the unofficial coordinator of the festival--if coordinating means knowing everything, answering every question, selling all the books, and directing confused writers to their events.

October 19

7 PM

220 N. Higgins Avenue



Have a BOOK-READING FRIEND in Montana? 

Send them my way!

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Sunday, July 16, 2023

Wake to Words and Brew Some Coffee (July 16, 2023)

 

Poems:

  • Waking at Night
  • Cherishing What Isn’t 

(Both by Jack Gilbert from his Collected Poems)

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🠊 Catch the live show Sunday mornings at some time-ish: https://www.facebook.com/erintpringle