Christmas Began at 1104 South Linwood

My mother, 1939

It is holiday time, and so I'd like to re-share this Christmas interview with my mother from several years ago, about her childhood in 1940s Evansville, Indiana. Please enjoy.

Since I interviewed my mother a few years ago, hers has become the most popular post on What She Might Think. Because of this and because I won't see her this Christmas, I wanted to interview her again. 

To prepare, I searched online for images of the house where she grew up in the 1940s and '50s, and where I would spend many of my Christmases through the 1980s and '90s.  

I located the house on google maps, and stood in front of it in a virtual world. A junk car was parked outside. A destitute grocery cart was kicked up on the curb. The tree blocked most of the porch where a swing once hung and my grandmother's plants grew in heavy planters, and where I roller-skated back and forth one visit. The house like a gravestone, a wind-block for someone else's faded flowers.

Built in 1915, only a few years after my grandmother was born, my grandparents' house was first my great-grandfather's, Great-Grandpa Steffee. Evidently, when my great-grandmother died of tuberculosis, my grandmother decided that, as my mother says, great-grandfather "couldn't boil water", and so she insisted that she, her husband (my grandfather) and their young family move in with him. 

Q. Often, I feel like many of my Christmas memories take place in Evansville, and I don't know if that's because we went to visit your parents every Christmas or because I would imagine Evansville when you told me stories of your life. Do you have a similar experience in that you have memories of Christmases that your mother would tell you about? What were Grandmother's Christmases like, as far as you know? Do you remember her telling any stories about them? What about your father?

My mother, her father, her grandmother

A.  . . . Mother. . . We did not talk big time in the family. The most talking we did was when we were doing dishes. If we wanted to embarrass mother, we'd ask embarrassing questions. Neither parent talked much about their past. I think mother's past was like ours. The Depression started in '29 when Dad was about to graduate high school, but I think things were already bad. No, Dad didn't talk about that anymore than he talked about World War II.

I remember you talking fondly of your childhood Christmases. I remember you saying you would get an orange in your stocking every year, and I think you also got candy. It seems that one year you got a doll but weren't very impressed with her: I think you'd wanted something else. Can you describe your Christmases more? 

Probably the expectation of everything-Christmas was as wonderful, if not more so, than the actual opening of gifts.  According to Mother, my dad started our tradition of opening our gifts on Christmas Eve. Then, while we slept that night, Mother filled the stockings with the above fruit, candy, and tiny gifts wrapped in the previously used wrapping paper from Christmas Eve.  I'm sure we went to Grandma Ryan's house on Christmas Eve (before the late-night worship 
service at church) or Christmas Day.

Part of the preparation was going to Dalton's grocery store a block away--before supermarkets were 'invented'--to choose a scrawny, short-needled pine tree for our Christmas tree.  Each tree was set in a block of wood (also prior to tree stands) and usually had one side with branches fuller than the other side--the one we put against the window so we wouldn't have to look at it! Mother also managed to buy or gather additional greenery to...

Pushcart Prize Nomination: The Wandering House

Good news! Awst Press has nominated my story, The Wandering House, for a Pushcart Prize. This will be my fourth nomination, and the third story in my forthcoming collection to receive the honor of nomination.

Thanks to Awst for their continued support and hard work! You can purchase the story as a standalone chapbook from Awst for $6.50 (including S&H). Link here: http://awst-press.com/shop/erin-pringle-toungate/print 

Pre-order now available for The Whole World at Once

My newest collection of stories, The Whole World at Once, is now available for pre-order through the publisher's website (West Virginia Press/Vandalia Press). 

Summary

Set within a backdrop of small towns and hard-working communities in middle America, The Whole World at Once is a collection of intense stories about the experience of loss. Pringle weaves together spellbinding tales amidst shadowed and foreboding physical and emotional landscapes where each of the characters is in motion against her surroundings, and each is as likely as the next to be traveling with a ghost. A soldier returns home from multiple tours only to begin planting landmines in the field behind his house; kids chase a ghost story up country roads only to become one themselves; one girl copes with the anniversary of her sister’s disappearance during the agricultural fair, while another girl searches for understanding after seeing the picture of a small boy washed onto a beach.

In language that is at once both stark and rich, we enter the lives of the characters deliberately, in slow scenes—time enough for a bird to sing as a man and a girl, strangers, fall to their knees—that are inevitable yet laced with the unpredictable. Dark, strange beauties, all of the stories in The Whole World at Once follow the lives of people grappling with what it means to live in a world with death.

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Here is the link: http://wvupressonline.com/node/668#1  

You can also read reviews, the table of contents, and more. 

Pioneertown Publishes Oblong, IL Poems

Postcard  of Oblong, Illinois
from Penny Postcards from Illinois

pioneertown. has published a selection from my memoir that revolves around Oblong, Illinois, the village where my father grew up in the 1940s, many years before my arrival in the 1980s.

You can read the pieces here or copy/paste this link into your browser:
http://www.pioneertownlit.com/oblong-illinois

The pieces are from my memoir, tentatively entitled The Girl's Made of Bone. 

Compassion, Writing, and Running--Not in That Order

Photograph by Erin Pringle-Toungate.
CC license, please attribute accordingly

The fine people over at Howlarium recently asked writers about meditation, compassion, and writing as part of their series in which writers respond to, in my experience, complicated thoughts. As I've begun training for a half-marathon, having never been a serious runner, and as I'm experiencing the feelings that come with having a toddler who, quite often, finds my advice not simply incorrect but mildly reprehensible, this was my response:

http://www.howlarium.com/

The Whole World at Once

I'm pleased to announce that my next book, The Whole World at Once, a collection of stories, will be published by West Virginia University Press/Vandalia Press in Spring 2017. 

When Words Lead to Words, An Interview by Awst

For the past several weeks, my fiction has been featured at Awst Press.  Today, the feature closes with an interview about my chapbook, The Wandering House, which is now available to purchase through Awst.  Some additional topics in the interview: grief, folktales, and the rural Midwest. In other words, what I write about.  The interview was done by Liz Blood.

Artwork by Christa Blackwood; cover design by LK James for Awst

Up in the high mountains live the Nortang Bears

My flash fiction/very short story, "The Nortang Bears," is being featured at Awst Press today.  "The Nortang Bears" was originally published in the publication, Sand Journal in Berlin, located in Germany.

Awst has been featuring my work for the past two weeks. The feature will end tomorrow with an interview with me, as well as the release of my chapbook, The Wandering House. You can read more of my stories here: Awst Feature.

Follow Awst on Twitter: @AwstPress

Find Awst on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AwstPress/?fref=ts

When grief becomes your mother

A Home, Copyright Erin Pringle-Toungate

My story "And Yet" is the feature today over at Awst Press.  "And Yet" revolves around a dying boy who is trying to pick the right moment to tell his mother that he's ready to go home. The story appears in my collection The Floating Order.

Awst Press is an independent publisher in Austin, TX that's up to good.  Please explore their site as well as other works of mine that they have featured over these two weeks: Awst.

Follow Awst on Twitter: @AwstPress

Find Awst on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AwstPress/?fref=ts

A man ate a rabbit

"Wild Rabbit" by William Andrus, used under CC license

My feature over at Awst Press continues through this week. Today's story is "The Rabbit," which was originally published in one of my very favorite magazines, Big Pulp.

Other stories of mine on Big Pulp:

• Every Good Girl Does Fine
• Palestine, IL

Follow Awst on Twitter: @AwstPress

Find Awst on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AwstPress/?fref=ts