Wares and Words at Spokane Zine Fest 2017

Sewing the cover design for digging

I am so very excited to take part in the Spokane Zine Fest this year. Spokane Zine Fest is a day-long event in which people creating zines, printing with small presses, and selling chapbooks and other handmade word art gather up and share their work with the community, and much of the work, if not all, is for sale. So, basically, the most awesome event ever.

As long as I've been making stories, I've been making little books to put them in--so, I mean, let's go back all the way to age three? Four? I know I have a copy of the book somewhere, as my mother just sent it the other day or month. Therefore, you can imagine my delight!--my absolute delight!--when I learned of the festival and then learned I could have a table at it. 

Delightful!

While I will have the more traditionally printed copies of my books for sale, The Floating Order, The Whole World at Once, and the two story chapbooks from The Head and the Hand and Awst----that didn't seem quite enough. My rumbling brain rumbled. And as it rumbled, I began to imagine handmade ways to take part. And then I began making a mental list of supplies. And yesterday, I started printing and cutting and pressing the pedal of the sewing-machine.

Now, I'm happy to reveal some of the results that I've made, and will be for sale at my table. 

1. A Mourning Story 

This is a newly written piece made especially for the Zine Fest. It hasn't been published. I've printed it on transparent vellum and quilted that to the image of a crazy quilt that's housed in the Indianapolis Museum of Art and from 1885. So, the story, the image, the sisters in the story, and the writer are Midwestern. I really like how this turned out. 

Close-up of one quilted corner of A Mourning Story

Close-up of a quilted corner of another quilted
version of A Mourning Story

2. Digging

Digging is one of my favorite stories, and definitely one of my best read-aloud stories. I wrote this in San Marcos, Texas, originally published it with Lake Effect, and included it in my first story collection, The Floating Order (Two Ravens Press 2009). The history of the story nearly contains the history of my writing career. The story is fairy tale set within a war zone, in which only two children remain alive.

Covers for the story "digging" before tying loose ends

First page of the story "digging"

3. Why Jimmy
The story received second-place in the Austin Chronicle Story Contest, years ago. This is the other story that I read aloud when I'm asked to do so because of the narrator's captivating and energetic voice. The story also appears in The Floating Order. It follows a child's recollections of how she and her cousin Jimmy came to live with their grandparents, and how it happened that her cousin melted to the roof of the house.

Cover of the story Why Jimmy

First page of Why Jimmy; pages are stitched into the cover 

4. Trolls
This is one of my lost stories, in that while it was published (Whistling Shade 2007), I didn't include it in The Floating Order, and just left it to the wind, and the wind and time took care of tending it until now. This seems like a good opportunity to bring its life back to awareness. One day, a soldier appears at the narrator's house, as he is being pursued by trolls.

Production line

Cover of trolls

First page of Trolls, book complete and story stitched into cover

In sleepless and grand conclusion, I look forward to meeting everyone tomorrow and the experience of participating in the festival. (My own table! My stitchery!) Come by for a visit and to purchase my wares and words for your favorite people, including yourself.

three chapbooks: digging, trolls, and why jimmy

made by erin pringle

Measurements:

Digging - 4x6ish

Why Jimmy - 5x7ish

Trolls - 4x6ish

Event Details

Spokane Zine Fest 2017

at The Bartlett (228 West Sprague, Spokane, WA)

11 AM - 5 PM

Saturday, October 14

Facebook Event Page: https://www.facebook.com/events/352542188482324

Free and open to the public: you and you and you and you, too

Grief as Fractured Prism: New Interview with Michael Noll at Read to Write Stories

My broken stained glass (CC)

Read to Write Stories is a twice-weekly blog that provides writing exercises and interviews with contemporary writers. It is the virtual living room where page-storytellers gather to discuss what they're up to, why, and the craft behind the words on the page. And then everyone leaves with a new writing exercise to ensure that the tradition of printed storytelling continues.

This week, I'm super lucky to be the writer in the living room with Michael Noll.

The story under discussion is "How the Sun Burns Among Hills of Rock and Pebble," which is the first story in The Whole World at Once. Finalist for a Kore Short Fiction Award and a Pushcart nominee, the story was originally published in minnesota review, then as a chapbook by The Head & the Hand Press. It follows a sister's disappearance and the sister who is left.

From interview:

Erin: All these stories are written in the world of death, the mourning of it, the attempt to stop it, the happening of it, and the grief following it. Each death is different in how it’s mourned, which I didn’t know, but now I do, and so as I would try to show grief, how it works. But one story wasn’t enough to sing grief or end mine. 

• "An Interview with Erin Pringle" (in which we talk grief, motion, and rural writing)
• "How to Intimately Connect Character and Setting" (Writing Exercise)

Read to Write Stories will soon be available as a print book, with new interviews and exercises for the curious writer (and writing student). If you enjoyed the interview and exercise, please let Michael know: https://www.facebook.com/Read-to-Write-Stories-435606919843085/ 

I Love My Local Letterpress Artist: TypeBee Printshop

Thanks to Breanna White and crew over at TypeBee Printshop for these wonderful business cards. They are made on an old, working letter-press in Post Falls, Idaho, situated in the warehouse behind DOMA Coffee. In fact, if you love DOMA coffee, and bought it in a bag, guess who printed the bag. TypeBee Printshop.

I'd originally learned about Breanna and TypeBee from an article about her that ran in Spokane's weekly, The Inlander. As soon as I read it, I wanted to meet her because she went to school in Illinois, was an artist, interesting words came out of her mouth, and luckily, she was nearby. It took about a year before I had a good reason to email her, beyond a fan letter, which I couldn't write out of the awkward. But once I met her, I did! And then I got to tour her shop, see the wedding invitations, business holiday giveaways, broadsides, calendars, posters, prints, and more that she makes.

Black Lives Matter letters laid out
for pressing for Spokane's MLK parade. The
type is from MLK's era.

Letterpress cabinet where the different type is stored. 

Close up of the blocks that she has used for different projects.

Breanna White running the press

Breanna White running the press

Breanna also has a desk press that she uses for demonstrations and workshops that she teaches at the local library and around town, and so she showed my son Henry how to work the small press.

     

It was a wonderful day, and now, time has passed, and I have these really elegant business cards, a great story to go with them, and better than all of that, a connection to another artist making her way in the world, within the Inland Northwest.

Learn more about Breanna White and TypeBee here:

• "Sweet Prints at TypeBee" 
• "A Pressing Matter," article from The Inlander
• TypeBee Printshop on Facebook

And if you have a project in mind, 

I know she'll be awesome to work with.

Let's Meet at Fact and Fiction Books in Missoula, September 30

Meet Me in Missoula

Fact and Fiction Bookstore, Missoula, MT (link to origin site for picture)

Northwestern writers will soon leave their own cities and towns to pour into Missoula, Montana to read, meet, talk, learn, and generally celebrate all things literary at The Montana Book Festival. I will be one of those writers.

The festival runs Wednesday, September 27th through October 1st and will host a number of interesting panels, readings, and activities that writers, readers, and community members can participate in. Rather than taking place in one main area, the festival will be popping up in local bookstores, art galleries, bars, event centers, hotels, and more. Sort of like a flash mob everyone expects.


Aside from other places, chairs, or quiet corners, here's where I'll most definitely be:

Saturday (9/30/17) 

12:30 PM 

Panel: "Embracing the Unhappy Ending: Why Sad Stories Matter"

Panelists: Donna Miscolta, Wendy Oleson, Erin Pringle, and Melissa Stephenson

Where? Fact and Fiction Bookstore, 220 N. Higgins Avenue

2:00 PM

Reading: "A View of The Whole World at Once"

Polly Buckingham and I will read from our new story collections.

Where? Fact and Fiction Bookstore, 220 N. Higgins Avenue

I hope to see you there, or to run into you at any of the other cool events. I'll be the writer chasing alongside her child who's riding his balance bike down the sidewalk. To view the daily festival schedule, including evening events (!), visit the festival website or go directly to the schedule here.

Montana Book Festival 2017: website

Fuse Spokane Book Club: Barefoot Dogs in October

Please join the Fuse Spokane Book Club this October to discuss Barefoot Dogs by Antonio Ruiz-Camacho. Stark and beautiful, Barefoot Dogs is collection of stories that follows a wealthy Mexican family forced into exile after the patriarch is kidnapped. 

Details:

Oct. 11, 2017

6 PM-8 PM

Spokane Library (downtown), floor 2, Level-Up Classroom

Free and open to the public

Event on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/127275941338479/

Book Details:

Link to Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Barefoot-Dogs-Stories-Antonio-Ruiz-Camacho/dp/1476784973/

Link to Auntie's: http://www.auntiesbooks.com/book/9781476784977

More information about the book itself: https://booksarenotaluxury.com/tag/barefoot-dogs/

About the group: The Fuse Book Club is an arm of the Immigration and Inclusion Action Team; we meet the second Wednesday of every month to discuss books by writers of color. Fuse Washington is the largest progressive organization in the state. Learn more about Fuse Washington.

Please join us!

In My Defense: Waiting Years to Visit Riverside State Park

Swinging Bridge at Riverside State Park
photograph by Erin Pringle, CC license

Never an avid trail walker, I do remember walking as a child with my aunt and uncle, grandmother and mother in Wesselman Park, in Evansville, Indiana where my mother had grown up and we visited once or twice a year. Then there was Fox Ridge, which is any easy drive from Casey, IL, where I grew up, and so my mother and I went once a year, or every other. My sister liked walking trails, and took her family when she thought of it, and she was good at thinking of it.

The time I spent with wet leaves, unidentifiable wildflowers, and leaf-covered skies, came less from nature parks and more from bicycling a mile down the rural road to Ruley's, which, may not be how it's spelled but was how it was pronounced.

Rue-lee's.

Roolie was the sound of the name of the old man who once owned the tree-covered property, or maybe his was just the house closest to the woods where my brothers took me to sled then roam, and later find old vases, part of cups--the bits of people's ghosts they left behind or purposely dumped. I never have known. Which is probably why broken things in the ground tend to appear in most every story I write.

Riverside Wildflowers
photograph by Erin Pringle, CC license

But even for my limited adventures, I didn't roam that much. I was not a Tom Sawyer, not an Anne of Green Gables. Though I did read both and loved Anne. Not so much her love of nature but her love of high romance and her wish for the glamorous-never that wasn't her life. Now that I think of it, most of the books I read, and loved, were set in nature. Where the Red Fern Grows, Bridge to Terabithia, My Side of the Mountain, and all the books by Mary Downing Hahn. .

Though this tendency toward reading rural settings may not be a proclivity so much as impossibility of escaping as a child reader since there has long been a symbolic connection between the child and nature, and a tendency to romanticize one as symbolic of the other. Isn't Rousseau's Emile a much healthier and better boy the closer his knees are to crawling through the field? And the enchantment of Kate Greenaway's children seems not fully possible without their flowers and green grass. Dorothy and Alice both leave countrysides to more crowded places, and so those places are more nightmarish than ideal. A warning, then, of leaving nature. Or perhaps, like myself, I read a vast number of children's books by writers with social anxiety, and so of course the books are set in nature. They were simply set where people were not.

River view from Riverside State Park
Erin Pringle, CC license

So, maybe I did spend a great deal of time in nature, it was just the imagined sort, and so, compelling in a way the cornfields and country roads around me were not. Sometimes, I would be passenger to my father's long country drives. He carried a gun and camera everywhere he went--moreso the camera than the gun, but he shot with both, and while I assume he took more pleasure from the photograph than the death, I can't say. He collected as many cameras as he did guns. But when he needed peace and calm, it was to the country roads he went. He'd grown up rural, too. More rural than me. And while I'm not his age yet, the age he was when I was a child, I am closer than I have ever been, and have begun feeling, more deeply, the urges to find a country road and follow it. And a raw belief that I'll feel better once I do, the more free, the more myself, the more in the world I will feel, instead of hovering outside of it, pushed there, perhaps, by the awareness of others.

The thing about living far from the place where one grew up is feeling somewhat lost all the time. Not in a pervasive way, but it hovers, that feeling. Whereas my faraway hometown and the entire area of it is in my bones. I know every road to home from every direction, and as far as two and three towns away, if not further. The way animals know where their dens are, or at least the way they seem to. The longing for that knowing hovers in me, too. Perhaps both feelings will fade as time moves on. I somehow doubt it. Maybe I don't wish for it, either, the fading.

But I began all of this to share with you that I finally visited Riverside Park after nearly a decade of living in the Northwest and a meager ten minutes from it, and I assume you would wonder why it took me so long. Because I've never been much of a trail taker. Because I've never known how to see the beauty of nature as more interesting than people. Because I lived smack in the middle of it instead of in an urban place that might send me running to a trail faster. Because I didn't fit in my hometown, and so lots of people assumed I'd be happier in a much different place, and much different meant a city. And so I thought I'd be happy in a city, too, and still have a tendency to avoid nature rather run to it--after years of blaming it for a life that didn't seem to suit me, even though it was mine.

That is to say, I wish I had visited years ago. I fell so in love with the place and so immediately that the only way I can figure out why it took me so long is to tell you this story.

It felt good to be there. I liked the rocks in my path and under the path and along the path. I liked the sound of the rocks against the river. The ducks floating by and quacking as though grumbling. The Vs of geese honking from here to there. The groups of women on horses following ribbons tied here and there to tree branches. The lone woman on a horse, now and then. The great weight of horses. The strangers I encountered now and then who said Good Morning with their mouths and eyes. Watching my son exclaim over the bridge, the spiderwebs on the bridge, the stairs leading up from the bridge to the trails. His eagerness to stop every few steps to examine another rock and decide whether it would be a good rock to pocket, as he has a fondness for pocketing rocks. My partner moving steadily beside, ahead, or behind me, her face against the light, her love for the river there, though we didn't speak of it. The silence. The stones under the water. The pebbles that looked like the pebbles I grew up with. Round and gray, soft. The smell of nature that I remember. The new smell that is a Northwestern one, of so many pine needles on top of so many more.

Also, I took a camera, and I think I will again.

River, Riverside State Park
Erin Pringle, CC license

Sunlight in Riverside State Park
Erin Pringle, CC license

My Face
Nature selfie, CC license

Five Poems on Memory: New work up in 5x5 Literary Journal

It's nearly the end of summer, and I'm about to return to writing in the mornings. My mind is having a difficult time with my body since my mind is attempting to jump forward in time so that writing can begin, while my body is stuck in clock-time. Or maybe my mind is, too, and my wishes are what are jumping forward. Regardless, it is a good time to have new work published as a sort of summoning.

Thus, I'm pleased to announce I have new pieces from my memoir project available in the new issue of 5x5 Literary Journal. You can read the pieces (for free, no less) by following this link on the technological device of your choice: https://issuu.com/5x5literarymag/docs/5x5_issue_5

You can also follow 5x5 on Facebook (click) and explore their website here: https://5x5litmag.wordpress.com/

New Review of The Whole World at Once: "Each story is beautiful in its heartbreaking simplicity and raw emotion"

Mattoon, Illinois is about a forty-minute drive from where I grew up, and its newspaper, the Journal Gazette & Times Courier covers news and views from the city and surrounding rural areas. It's close enough to where I grew up that I remember walking through its antique malls as a child with my older brothers; in my teenage years, I spent many a late night roaming the aisles of its super Walmart, and in college, I sat in the beautiful, but crumbling (at that time), train station as I waited for the train to take me to Chicago for college and later with my best friend for a trip to New Orleans.

Casey, Illinois is where I grew up, but Mattoon, Illinois is part of the landscape of my life, memories, and imagination, which is the landscape where my stories live. And so I am SO pleased to have someone from the area not only read the book but also incredibly honored that she found it worthwhile on all counts: from theme, content, to the style itself. Reviewer Elena Pruitt writes . . .

"People who grew up in rural areas will feel an eerie sense of stories they've grown up hearing or stories they've lived, a sense that this could happen or has happened here, and yet the pervasive thread of grief opens these stories up to anyone." 

Continue reading the review here. Then, share it with all of your friends, Midwestern or not. :)

"Review: Author weaves stories showing depth of human experience of grief" by Elena Pruitt, Journal Gazette & Times Courier.

Giant Nerd Books in Spokane now carries The Whole World at Once

Spokane's Giant Nerd Books on Monroe Street, now carries signed copies of The Whole World at Once. Have you been to this wonderful bookstore? Giant Nerd Books has the lure of discovery from the moment you walk in, from its mid-century reading chairs to its tall, tall ceilings--perfect for its ingredients: books, books, books, artwork, books, books, comics, and more books. (They have all the Oz books, from the early 1900s. All. The. Oz. Books.)

Giant Nerd is definitely a place to check out if you haven't, whether you're out to discover The Whole World at Once or any world between two covers. Learn more about the store and its owner, Nathan, from The Spokesman Review: http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2016/mar/23/giant-nerd-books-is-a-book-hunters-passion-project/

Thanks to all local bookstores that support our reading habits. And to community members who support our local bookstores.

*

The Whole World at Once is a collection of stories that trace rural landscapes and the surreal experiences of living, beauty, and breathing in a world after loss. A girl goes missing from the county fair, and her sister is still searching for her a year later; a soldier returns home from war only to plant landmines in the backyard; a widower tries to dig up his wife's garden in an effort to save all he has left. (2017, West Virginia University Press/Vandalia Press).