Friday, October 6, 2023

Unexpected Weather Events at Auntie's this Sunday, October 8th

As we draw closer to Sunday, when I'll be signing copies of Unexpected Weather Events at Auntie's bookstore, I will inevitably begin to have deep worries like these. And I have already begun thinking of the giant fish that looms above the book-signing table, threatening to swoop down and eat me. 

Giant Auntie's fish, as pictured from
the last time I sat beneath it.

But! Here are some really great things that we should think about when we think about book signings:

  1. I will have awesome vinyl decals of the book cover for your water bottle, car, guitar case, old peanut butter jars, or whatever it is that you sticker-ize. 
  2. You're shopping local the minute you stand at the Auntie's counter and take your receipt.
  3. You'll be in a bookstore, which is one of the best places to be. You'll see books you wouldn't notice anywhere else. 
  4. The giant fish won't eat either of us.
  5. If we find each other some moment while we're both there, we will be pleasantly surprised and have a lovely discussion.
  6. My publisher will be happy that you and I did what she hoped we would do with the book now that it's in its corporeal form.
  7. Books. Us and books. All those words. There can't be anything bad when we're surrounded like that.
See you there. Wear bells.
Or not.
People say that around here.

Book Signing
Sunday, October 8th
11-2 PM
Auntie's Bookstore
402 W. Main, Spokane, WA



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Can't attend? Let's find another time. Event calendar here: http://www.erinpringle.com/p/events.html

“Reading UNEXPECTED WEATHER EVENTS is like looking into a snow so mesmerizing and crystalline you are unable to turn away, at once illuminated and profoundly lost. They are stories of winter madness—troubling, tender, and hallucinatory—stories of connection and misconnection, of love and grief and isolation in the increasingly dangerous and tenuous reality of our contemporary condition.” — Polly Buckingham, author of THE EXPENSE OF A VIEW and THE RIVER PEOPLE

Thursday, October 5, 2023

Unexpected Weather Events at Giant Nerd Books, Spokane

After the weekend release of Unexpected Weather Events, I stopped by Giant Nerd Books to drop a few copies off with Nate. 

It had been a hot minute since our last visit, so we swapped updates. The store itself is more full of books than I've ever seen it, and it's hard to imagine the very small space that the bookstore began in years ago. In addition to any sort of book you'd want, for your visual delight and curious heart, the store has a sarcophagus bookshelf, a few giraffe bones, local art, and so very much more. How the Garland District survived without Giant Nerd until a few years ago, I'll never know. It is clearly an essential part of the good vibe.

While I was there, Nate pointed out the winner of the recently held Giant Nerd Books logo art contest. The winner is a block-printed design and displayed atop a book shelf nearest the front door. T-shirts will be made! The main rules were to include the name of the bookstore and the store's mascot, Nate and his girlfriend's dog Elvira (who was so quietly curled on the chair beside the counter I didn't see her until she was pointed out).

Outside, on the large display window you can view all of the logo art entries. This one caught my eye in particular, thanks to my great appreciation for The Little Prince. Do you see the reference? 


Now is one of the best times to visit Giant Nerd, what with the weather inviting cozy evening reading. And there is simply no other place in Spokane where you can browse books with an eclectic energy mixed from drive-in culture, B-movie affection, spiritualism, and the strange and curious. Take yourself and a friend with even one interest, and you'll be sure to find what you're searching for, from vintage comic books to classic children's novels to long-lost paperbacks. Giant Nerd bookstore is a living collection like no other, and we here in the Garland District are damn lucky that we're allowed to wander through it, much less take a part of it home with us--whether that's signed first-editions, glass eyes, thick art books, local nostalgia, or the unexpected.

Tell Nate I said hi when you go, and give Elvira the dog a sweet gaze.

Giant Nerd Books

607 W. Garland

Spokane, WA 99201

509-868-0420

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Wednesday, October 4, 2023

John Kenny on Unexpected Weather Events: "at the centre is the warmth of love and family"

Unexpected Weather Events
cover by L.K. James
book published by AWST
Good news! Over in Dublin, Ireland, writer and editor John Kenny has been reading my newest book, Unexpected Weather Events, and sometime in my night and and his day, he published his thoughts on the book. 

I met John over a decade ago at a writer's convention in Dublin. Since then, John has been a steady supporter of my work. Early on, he read and reviewed The Floating Order, and later included my story "Lightning Tree" in the anthology he edited entitled Box of Delights; that story would later be collected in my book The Whole World at Once. More recently, John helped my story/novella "Water Under a Different Sky" find a home in Albedo One, the science-fiction/fantasy magazine based in Dublin. That story now stands as the final work in Unexpected Weather Events 

And now that I've published my next book, John has written about it. After he shares a masterfully concise and accurate description of each story, he concludes:

For all that this collection examines the heartache of loss and the destructiveness of the world around us (‘Room Under the Stairs’), it’s important to highlight, though, that at the centre of all these stories is the warmth of love and family, which is made palpable through the keen eye of Pringle’s beautifully crafted prose. 

Please, read the full review here: John Kenny reviews Unexpected Weather Events

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Past writing John Kenny has shared on this website:


Erin Pringle Book Signing at Auntie's this Sunday, October 8th (2023)

On Sunday, I'll be at Auntie's downtown signing copies of Unexpected Weather Events. You can find me there from 11-2. Please do stop by. We can converse about the weather, books, and whatever we'd like. And if you'd like my John Hancock, then I'm happy to do that, too. I think books are always the best stocking stuffers. Wink.

Sunday, October 8th
11-2 PM
Auntie's Bookstore
402 W. Main, Spokane, WA

Can't attend? Let's find another time. Event calendar here: http://www.erinpringle.com/p/events.html

“Reading UNEXPECTED WEATHER EVENTS is like looking into a snow so mesmerizing and crystalline you are unable to turn away, at once illuminated and profoundly lost. They are stories of winter madness—troubling, tender, and hallucinatory—stories of connection and misconnection, of love and grief and isolation in the increasingly dangerous and tenuous reality of our contemporary condition.” — Polly Buckingham, author of THE EXPENSE OF A VIEW and THE RIVER PEOPLE

Tuesday, October 3, 2023

Guess what Tim Martin gave me for my birthday.

Soon after I met my best friend Alexa in college, she told me that I needed to meet her dad. You two will get a kick out of each other, she said--or something akin to it. She would talk like that. Get a kick out of. Or she'd call me a toad when I was being punchy. 

In the twenty years since she predicted how he and I would react to each other, I have come to learn more fully what she meant--far more than she or I ever could have imagined. My dad would have died only a few years before I met her or her father. (Her mother is extremely dear to me, too, but the focus of this essay will primarily feature Tim Martin.)

Early on, I learned that Alexa's father read all of the time. For his birthday or Father's Day, she and I went to a bookstore and she found him a tree identification book. Tim Martin will like this, she said. He likes to know what he's looking at. 

She always referred to him by his full name in conversation, and sometimes in the presence of him--though, if she used his full name, it meant to warn him about his toes being awfully close to the line--typically due to a joke he'd told to rile her up (something poking at her feminism or liberal ways . . . which were, from his point of view, new developments but, from my point of view, simply part of who she was).

Later, I would learn that this was a habit she'd picked up from her mother. Both affectionally calling people toads if they were behaving in a silly way bordering on rude or calling a person by their full name (with simultaneous eyebrow raising and wide eyes) to warn someone of their nearness to a personally-created catastrophe.

Alexa told me how he often visited the library, and that she used to go with him often. She told me of their debates. That I'd have to watch myself. That he'd be liable to get going if I started getting going (in our political talk and our embedded points of view--he on his end, me on mine on a teeter totter that would seemingly put one of us always in the air, and the other firmly on the ground and glaring up at the other).

Of course, because I loved her I would love her family. I didn't know that then. But it happened quickly and I've never let go. 

A few years later, she learned she had pulmonary hypertension--a fatal disease that can be mediated by treatment but not cured. She told me via a Valentine's Day card that came to my apartment 1,000 miles away; by then, I was in Texas at grad school, and she was married and in grad school at our alma mater. She told me not to worry and not to look the disease up on the internet. She said there wasn't a cure but that thirteen years more of living was a good bet. She didn't say bet. I don't know if she said thirteen years, but I read that number somewhere because it's engraved in my memory. First in my hopes. My dreams. My whatever-it-is you have when you need to find a cure for a disease before that number happens--even though you aren't a doctor or scientist and it will take that amount of time to become a doctor or scientist, and even longer, to become the sort of scientist who discovers a way to stop a specific death in its tracks--freeze it until it thaws at the same rate as everyone else's. 

It wasn't thirteen years, though. 

Wrong number.

Maybe that number was not from the time of diagnosis.

Maybe she'd already lived twice as long as anyone would if anyone had suspected long before anyone did--but no one did.

She had twin daughters. They were babies at my wedding. They were three years old at her visitation, pretending to be cats on the playground where I took them for a while, in view of the church and the parking lot of mourners but at least outside with the blue sky--how goddamned blue that sky was. A bright, sunny day. I remember the heat on the black sweater dress I'd bought. Short sleeved, but the thickness of the yarn held the heat.

I stayed at her parents' house during that early grieving time. She'd moved back in with them due to the disease--how erratic, unreasonable, unpredictable. And her with a husband and twin toddlers. I was in the house while phone calls were made, relatives gathered at the table, the rituals were laid and the stream of food and visits began. All of it was familiar, having witnessed my own version of it when my father died. The plant deliveries. The unexpected faces of those you otherwise would not have seen for months, perhaps it had already been years.

I imagined that her other friends--friends who'd known her far longer than I had--thought I was a jerk to stay at her parents' house, where she herself had been alive only days before. Couldn't I have stayed at my mom's house and driven the two hours, or booked a hotel? I was intruding on a family's grief. Voyeur. 

Of course, no one ever said so. No one hinted at it. This was my fear, my insecurity, my worry. The authenticity of a friendship seems to waver when one of the friends is no longer present to verify it.

In the years since Alexa's death, her father Tim Martin and I have talked regularly over the phone. When my sister died, I flew back and Tim Martin picked me up from the airport and drove me to my mother. Seven years later, my second story collection was published and I flew home for the first time since my sister's death, Tim Martin picked me up from the airport. Later, we would sit in the backyard at night, talking to a fire like he and Alexa used to, like he and Alexa and I once did.  

We are not like a father and daughter, but our friendship is welded by the daughter-shaped hole and father-shaped hole broken so deeply through the layers of us--and our friendship does a little to let those holes be visible. While I run at night or drive home from work, I talk through my headphones to him. He asks if I'm wearing my reflective vest. I ask how the heart-doctor appointment went. We argue about politics. We ask each other why we think what we do. We talk about Alexa's twins. How they are now. In college now, with faces like hers, walking the same campus where she and I met. He asks about my mom. I ask about his. He tells me he listened to this week's episode of Wake to Words and Brew Some Coffee. He says I looked well. He says if I don't. He asks why. Sometimes we talk about Alexa or my dad. More often we don't. We save that for the anniversaries, like anybody else. It's too much otherwise. You know what I mean, if you do. 

When Alexa's brother died, which is its own terrible story, Tim took over the machine shop that Alexa's brother had started. This was a few years ago. Alexa was always worried about her father working too much, being gone too much (travel often took him away for weeks, months--when 9/11 happened, he was in that region . . . the relief when he'd called home, alive). He still works too much, but he's in one place, and it's his son's place, and he loves what he does. He welds, he creates, he fixes problems, he talks to old friends and longtime customers (interchangeable as they are). He learns new machines, teaches himself how to make a tool as part of a solution to something else. He teaches the young men in his employ--advises, mentors. But mostly he's alone, in his head, in his shop. Thinking, working, and in the zone where taxes, time, and death do not exist. That zen space. 

We've now come to what I've wanted to share with you. 

I received my birthday present from Tim Martin. I never used to get one, but in recent years, he has begun sending me a present related to whatever he's working on at the shop at the time of my birthday. The package arrived today. At first, I walked right past it--after work, after returning from a jaunt from one bookstore to another, after dropping the child off for dinner with his own dad, after making dinner for my partner and me. And then I finally stopped. And approached it. My son had asked what it was I'd ordered. I don't know, I'd said, waving away the time it would take to think about it. But now I read the shipping label. More than once, a package arrives that belongs next door. But no. This was to me. Erin Pringle. And it was from Tim Martin.

So I opened it. 

Guess what Tim Martin gave me for my birthday. 

I am absolutely delighted.

I'd like to show you this perfect present that he made while learning a new machine.

Can you guess?

He welded a sign for me--my own special plaque, and it says Wake to Words . . . and Brew Some Coffee.

Alexa was right. Her best friend and her father would get a kick out of each other. Aren't they both toads prone to overworking, standing on soapboxes, and happiest when alone with their own thoughts and creations? 

Yes, we are. 

We are also very, very sad. 

But take the blue skies and joy when they're there. And this present feels like both. 

I think Tim Martin would agree with me, even if I'm a gay Marxist Feminist and he's a Moderate Republican. 😉




Me and Tim Martin

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Unexpected Weather Events on Your Autumn Must-Reads List

Good news! Electric Lit recently published a list of "The Must-Read Small Press Books of Fall," and my new story collection Unexpected Weather Events made the cut! Wendy J. Fox writes of the book, 

In these nuanced stories, often told from a child’s perspective, death is right around the corner and is just as predictable as wintertime snow. Six years after their father’s suicide, a trio of brothers go get milk while their mother is on a date and find a valentine for the oldest boy in the grocery store; a wife and husband reunite after his terminal cancer diagnosis; the ghost of a long gone sister appears to purchase a chair from her living sister; war breaks out over the Illinois cornfields. What Unexpected Weather Events speaks to as a collection is the fragile hold we all have on the scaffolding that props up our lives. Despite the often bleak premises, moments of hope and even joy manage to shine through. Though Pringle’s characters do not always find transcendence, her storytelling does.

Read the full article here: https://electricliterature.com/15-small-press-books-to-read-this-fall/ 

Order Unexpected Weather Events from Awst Press: https://awst-press.com/shop/unexpected-weather-events

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Monday, October 2, 2023

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


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Sunday, October 1, 2023

How did that book release party go, Erin Pringle? Very well, thank you!

It's true! Unexpected Weather Events has been released into the world. The Shadle Library room was exactly right and beautiful; over sixty people attended, I read two stories with only one coughing fit (I'm recovering from a bad cold), and then my friend Neil Elwell and his friend Ken Danielson played wonderful music while people mingled, bought books, and I signed them. 

Thank you to everyone who came, and to everyone who considered it. And thank you to the Spokane Public Library and Sharma Shields for making the event an official library event and helping to publicize it.

This is a pretty nice place to live, I think. You people are swell.

(All photos and film below are by Sharma Shields.)








Music by Neil Elwell (guitar) and Ken Danielson (percussion)

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Couldn't attend? Let's find another time. Event calendar here: http://www.erinpringle.com/p/events.html

“Reading Unexpected Weather Events is like looking into a snow so mesmerizing and crystalline you are unable to turn away, at once illuminated and profoundly lost. They are stories of winter madness—troubling, tender, and hallucinatory—stories of connection and misconnection, of love and grief and isolation in the increasingly dangerous and tenuous reality of our contemporary condition.” — Polly Buckingham, author of The Expense of a View and The River People

Wake to Words and Brew Some Coffee (October 1, 2023)

 

Poems:

  • Night Letter by Diane Thiel (from her book Resistance Fantasies)
  • Under Stars by Tess Gallagher (from her book Under Stars)
  • Ghosts by Jack Gilbert (from his book The Great Fires)

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

Sunday, September 24, 2023

Unexpected Weather Events by Erin Pringle--now listed on Small Press Distribution (SPD)

If you have a favorite bookstore, please let them know about Unexpected Weather Events. The book is now up on the distributor website, which is where they’ll hunt it down:

https://www.spdbooks.org/Products/9781736765968/unexpected-weather-events.aspx

Your conversation might go like this:

You (approaching book counter): Oh my goodness I can’t find my favorite writer’s newest book on your shelves!! (Hands to cheeks for emphasis and bewilderment.)

Bookseller: Gracious me! How can that be? Let me help you. What’s his name?

You: Her name is Erin Pringle.

Bookseller: Thinking then typing.

You: Pringle like the potato chip.

Bookseller: Backspacing. More typing. Hmm. I can order it for you. It retails at $25.

You: Great! I’d much prefer to order it through your store than through [insert infamous online bookstore and seller of everything else].

Bookseller: Thanks so much for your support! 

You: I remember when a paperback cost 1.25.

Bookseller: Or even 5.99.

You: But bread was 10 cents.

Bookseller: And gasoline 99 cents/gallon.

You: My mother quit smoking when a pack cost 50 cents. Too rich for my blood, she said.

Bookseller: Nodding.

You: Thanks again for keeping culturally important spaces in the community.

Bookseller: Thanks for reading!

You and Bookseller start to dance together among the aisles, and others join.

(Curtain)

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