Contemporary Authors

• The Whole World at Once ( short stories) Vandalia Press (Morgantown , WV), 2017

1. The whole world at once : stories LCCN 2017007866 Type of material Book Personal name Pringle-Toungate, Erin, author. Uniform title Short stories. Selections Main title The whole world at once : stories / Erin Pringle. Edition First edition. Published/Produced Morgantown : Vandalia Press, an imprint of West Virginia University Press, 2017. ©2017 Description 243 pages ; 22 cm ISBN 9781943665570 paperback 1943665575 paperback EPUB EPUB electronic book CALL NUMBER Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms

• The Floating Order - 2009 Two Ravens Press Ltd, Ullapool

• Erin Pringle - http://www.erinpringle.com/p/about-her.html

  About Her

  Erin Pringle
  Erin Pringle

  Books
  Erin is the author of two short story collections, The Whole World at Once (West Virginia University Press/Vandalia Press 2017) and The Floating Order (Two Ravens Press, 2009). She has written three chapbooks: "How The Sun Burns Among Hills of Rock and Pebble" (The Head and The Hand Press, Philadelphia/2015); "The Lightning Tree" (Underground Voices, 2015); and "The Wandering House" (Awst Press, Austin/2016).

  Awards
  Her work has been four-times nominated for a Pushcart Prize (2007, 2013, 2014, 2016), selected as a Best American Notable Non-Required Reading (2007), shortlisted for the Charles Pick Fellowship (2007), and a finalist for contests such as the Austin Chronicle Short Story Contest and the Kore Press Short Fiction Award (2012). She's a recipient of a Washington State Artist Trust fellowship (2012).

  Education
  Erin studied literature and creative writing at Indiana State University (2003) and then received her MFA in Fiction from Texas State University-San Marcos (2006).

  At The Moment
  She is at work on a number of projects, including a series of micro non-fictions tentatively titled The Girl's Made of Bone, After All. To read a selection of her fiction and non-fiction, please see Writing. Originally from a small town in Illinois, she now lives in Washington State with her partner, Heather, and son, Henry.

  Interviews with Erin
  An Interview with Erin Pringle by Michael Noll, Read to Write Stories (2017)
  Awst Press (with Liz Blood), 2016
  An Interview with Erin Pringle-Toungate by Michael Noll (2013)
  Open Poetry Program, KYRS (2011)
  Fear and an Enchanting Talk by Misty Pagel (2011)
  Two Ravens Press (2009)
  The Short Review (2009)
  The Austin Chronicle (2009)
  Romancing-the-Book (2009)
  The Indiana Statesman (2009)
  So There I Was, KYRS radio (April 2017), before the release of The Whole World at Once
  So There I Was, KYRS radio (August 2017), after the book tour for The Whole World at Once
  So There I Was, KYRS radio (October 2017), on Halloween, scares, and fears
  So There I Was, KYRS radio (December 2017), on Fuse Book Club, Book Your Stocking, and books I've been reading

  Erin Interviews Others, Mainly Her Mother
  Erin Interviews Her Mother (2009)
  Erin Interviews Her Mother, Christmas Edition (2011)
  Erin writes the life-story of her dog, Isla, on a postcard

  Email This
  BlogThis!
  Share to Twitter
  Share to Facebook
  Share to Pinterest

• Read To Write Stories - https://readtowritestories.com/2017/10/12/an-interview-with-erin-pringle/

  Quoted in Sidelights" "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. ... Not that the stories are only about death and mourning. They’re about beauty and identity and hope and worry and poverty and memory and time. But, all within the landscape of loss. Loss is the vanishing point."

  "My resistance to naming comes from the way naming hurts people in small towns. "Names become not only individual histories but family histories, and a child with a name connected to a family history, especially a family history that is not revered by the town, is harnessed with an unbearable and invisible weight that he or she deals with daily." An Interview with Erin Pringle
  12
  OCT

  Erin Pringle is the author of two story collections, most recently The Whole World at Once.

  Erin is the author of two short story collections, The Whole World at Once, and The Floating Order. She has written three chapbooks: “How The Sun Burns Among Hills of Rock and Pebble”; “The Lightning Tree”; and “The Wandering House”. Her work has been four-times nominated for a Pushcart Prize, selected as a Best American Notable Non-Required Reading, shortlisted for the Charles Pick Fellowship, and a finalist for contests such as the Austin Chronicle Short Story Contest and the Kore Press Short Fiction Award. She’s a recipient of a Washington State Artist Trust fellowship. Originally from a small town in Illinois, she now lives in Washington State with her partner, Heather, and son, Henry.

  To read an excerpt from The Whole World at Once and an exercise on connecting character and setting, click here.

  In this interview, Pringle discusses finding narrative where none seems to exist, not naming characters, and writing about the Midwest.

  Michael Noll

  Early on in “How the Sun Burns Among Hills of Rock and Pebble,” there’s a description of small-town teenagers returning home from a carnival: They “drag themselves back to a garage and sit in lawn chairs and pick seeds from dry leaves before filling the pipe and passing it on. They want to talk about the fair but say nothing because it’s the same goddamned thing as last year, which they do say.” Their predicament–nothing to do but the same thing they’ve always done–is something that the characters in all of the stories in the collection encounter. It even describes the plots of their stories to some extent. While some dramatic things happen, the actual happening tends to be in the past or in the near future. How do you approach a story where the dramatic fireworks happen off the page? In a scene or generally, what is the thing that’s drawing you through the story–and what are you using to draw the reader through it?

  Erin Pringle

  Well, I always viewed my existence as the predicament of arriving into the world after everything wonderful had happened. I was a late-in-life surprise child for my parents, so all of my siblings were a couple of decades older than me, which meant all of their stories were, too. Life had also stopped in some ways because my father had been diagnosed with manic depression and could no longer work, so the economics of my family didn’t lend itself to the vacations they once had, and that I only heard about or saw in albums. All the books I read had much more exciting happenings than what I was experiencing, and turning into an adult promised some adventure, maybe, but more autonomy than anything, since all of the adults I knew lived in the same small town, and most of them had grown up there. I grew up around story-tellers, but I myself had no stories to tell. Later, when I learned that a story happens on a day unlike any other day, I was additionally perplexed because I hadn’t lived a life in which that had ever happened. Not really. I mean, when my father was diagnosed with cancer, it didn’t happen on the day of the diagnosis, the cancer had been growing for how long? Months, years. And the walk my mother took me on to tell me didn’t throw my world out of whack, it was just a revelation of fact.

  His death, my best friend’s death, my sister’s death, all the deaths in the town—in the newspaper and the graveyard my school bus daily passed, and of all of my grandparents—these deaths were stories, maybe, but the problem with a story of dying is that then there’s an expectation of somehow curing the dying, stopping the dying. And, sometimes, sure that does happen in real life. But not so much in my real life. The problem with a story that begins with a death is the expectation of figuring out how it happened, who did it, why, the story of the lives connected to the life. It automatically creates a story form that is resistant to how I experience life. The problem with mystery, for me, is that then the story becomes plot-driven, a problem-solution equation, and that then requires complications of happenings, instead of the complications of beauty and language and on-living—the going-on with living that happens despite the death (the day-unlike-any-other).

  For a long time, I was drawn to words and not happenings because, like I said, I had no happenings to report. So, I was pretty much headed to the non-narrative, to poetry, to forms that privileged examining over happening. Or the examining of a happening instead of the unraveling of one. Also, I loved visual art, and assumed I’d do something with painting. Painter, then poet. So, again, the examining, the creation of one scene and the light of one. My struggle, then, you can imagine, is and has been creating narrative. In short, I’ve figured out how to create motion. So, my stories are an arrangement of paintings, or panels of a very large painting. My medium is words instead of watercolor, but my process is exactly like painting watercolor. I create, first, the basic painting and wash over it again and again, adding layers and subtracting. Shifting the light. Words are like watercolors but with the agility of oil paint in their ability to be maneuvered over long periods of time before they dry. So, I create motion through the movement of visual panes, or panels, that shift in time in a way that make time (the accumulation of memory), the way we learn about the people within the boundaries of the first and last page.

  Michael Noll

  Most of the characters in these stories are unnamed (an observation I felt pretty proud about until I saw it mentioned in the discussion questions at the back of the book!). Based on that question, it’s clear there’s some thematic stuff going on, but I’m curious about the process of writing the story. Were these characters named in your head? I ask in part because I’m terrible at remembering names in real life, and I think a lot of writers struggle with finding names that fit the characters they’ve created. Do names seem superfluous as you write? Of course, one character does get a name, and it’s the dead sister in the first story, which is probably no accident.

  Erin Pringle

  The stories in Erin Pringle’s new collection, The Whole World At Once, reveal “how many strange shapes grief can take and how universal a human experience it is,” according to a Kirkus review.

  Well, I had to write the questions at the end of the book, and I felt like if you got to the questions, you’d already realized the non-naming. So, maybe it makes you feel better that I knew they weren’t named and I wrote the questions, too? But on naming. No, I don’t name the characters in my head. My resistance to naming comes from the way naming hurts people in small towns. Names become not only individual histories but family histories, and a child with a name connected to a family history, especially a family history that is not revered by the town, is harnessed with an unbearable and invisible weight that he or she deals with daily. For example, let’s say The Hendersons have always been poor, always struggled, have, frankly, been caught in the cycle and culture of poverty for over a century. Now, little Denny Henderson is born, and eventually goes to school. All of his teachers know about The Hendersons. They went to school with a Henderson or two. So, when Denny Henderson has a hard time with math, it’s not just because of the way he’s being taught math, or his development at the time of his learning, it’s that he’s A Henderson and Hendersons have always been slow (read: poor, read: had to drop out of school to try to support each other). This snowballs over his years of school until he either drops out because school’s not for him, but then again, school’s never been good to the Hendersons, right? Or, he makes it to high-school, let’s say, but the high-school counselor in the small town is more likely to show Denny or Tricia Henderson pamphlets to the military or advise R.N. work-study, than show Denny or Tricia Henderson the steps to go to college. College isn’t necessarily the end-all, be-all, but it helps, and would certainly help Denny and Tricia see themselves in the larger context of their history and the larger history and the world. College is the way out of the small town, though not necessarily poverty. A better poverty, maybe? I don’t know.

  I hated the way people’s names hurt them. The people with rich names were always the popular ones and the middle-class ones. I don’t think it was a coincidence. I’ve seen and know how a name, or your association with a name, can make you be opposed to someone with the same name, and I really don’t have the ability to cure my readers of the associations they have with names. Easier to remove the names. Easier for me to avoid trapping my characters into histories (and the genre of a story loves to blame a character’s life on the character’s history). Easier to focus on their thoughts, their lives, their memories—and to honor these instead of blame them or poke fun at them. In death, of course, all that’s left is the name. The name is what points back to the life. And, technically, it’s easier to write two female characters if one has a name because the “her” pronouns get tricky and an unnecessary impediment.

  Michael Noll

  One of the things you and I heard in grad school was that writers find a theme or subject or kind of story they’re drawn to and write versions of it over and over. I’m not sure I completely buy that, but in your collection, there is certainly a lot of death and grief. In most of the stories, there’s no real closure for the characters and often for the readers as well. Were you aware, as you wrote them, that these stories were circling death and loss in this way? Or was each story a surprise to you as it showed up on the page?

  Erin Pringle

  Yes. The stories were written during the mourning of my best friend who died of pulmonary hypertension when she was 28 and I was 26. Then, my sister completed suicide when I was 29 and she was 45. I’d already finished my first book, which was written during the mourning of my father’s death (I was 17, he was 63). I just wasn’t able to leave the state of mourning, not that you ever do, but to leave one of the rooms within that labyrinth. 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. Grief is such a fissured prism that the light is hard to catch all at once. So, no, it wasn’t a surprise. It was just a moving prison. I would hope the next story would be about something else. But no. It couldn’t be. And that’s fine. Not that the stories are only about death and mourning. They’re about beauty and identity and hope and worry and poverty and memory and time. But, all within the landscape of loss. Loss is the vanishing point.

  Michael Noll

  All of these stories are set in the Midwest, in small towns. When I think of some of the well-known Midwestern writers that I love, like Dan Chaon, and newer writers like the memoirist Angela Palm, even though their work is set in different parts of the Midwest and pretty different in style and genre, there’s a clear sense of loss, isolation, and abandonment in all of their works. Given that so much of this book is about death and loss, do you think there’s something particularly Midwestern about the subject? I’m tempted to say that anyone who grows up in a small town and leaves has to figure out and reinvent who they are, which can create a sense of loss, but I wonder if that idea would hold up to scrutiny. Is it just coincidence that Chaon and Palm write about trying to figure out what happened to the dead and missing, as you do?

  Erin Pringle

  In a small town, the places of community are church and the diner. The aisles of the grocery store, to some extent. The football bleachers, to some extent. So, that’s where we gather, and where we gather the main things that are always discussed are the weather and who is sick, dying, or grieving. The newspaper takes care of the honoring and bragging, so the good stories are mainly told by the reporters. Whose child made honor roll, who’s having a 50th anniversary, who has been born, who gave a dazzling performance in the Spring musical. The stories I most often heard, or was very aware of, were the death stories. My grandmother lived in a large city but would send my mom clippings of obituaries of her friends or my mother’s friends. I watched my grandmother lose her friends, and now I’m watching my mother lose hers. My mother has taken on the same tradition of passing deaths along to me via postal mail.

  When a girl I grew up with lost her pre-teen son quite suddenly in a four-wheeler accident, I learned immediately. And though I haven’t spoken to her in nearly twenty years, I think of her grief often, of her often, of how she is. After my sister died, I was back home in the grocery, and I saw that same girl. She hadn’t had her grief yet, and we didn’t speak, but we saw each other and I knew she knew of my sister’s death. I think collective grief is how we take care of each other in the small town. Rural death is collective grief, I guess. Religion is used to mediate it, maybe. To give everyone a set of traditions to follow. I’m more generous about it now that I’m an atheist. Also, in a rural town, the cemeteries are not beyond the physical boundary of everyday living. Whenever I’ve lived in large towns or cities, I have a hard time finding the graveyards. They aren’t on the way to the grocery, or to school. And when something is not tangible, it’s also not on one’s mind in the same way. I’d imagine death becomes more dramatic (unreal), the more isolated and away-from people it becomes. Which worries me, really. Because death is a necessary part of our identities and our relationships to each other. I don’t believe I’ll see my loved ones and neighbors in the afterlife so I want to make sure I act in ways that honor and support their lives while they’re alive. Maybe I’m wrong, here, but I feel like my awareness and belief in death as a fact is what helps me better care for the living. And maybe it’s not a coincidence that a small town is more aware of death and dying and, simultaneously, has more of a use for religion. So that’s what we small towners gravitate to, and small town writers are, at the seed of self, small-town people. These are the stories that rural people tell each other, and I’m writing for other rural people. Probably the stories seem strange(r) to the urban-made. That’s my guess, anyway.

  October 2017

  Michael Noll Michael Noll is the Editor of Read to Write Stories.

  Advertisements

• Awst Press - https://awst-press.com/news/erin-pringle-toungate/interview

  HOME LIBRARY AUTHORS SHOP ABOUT
  INTERVIEW WITH ERIN PRINGLE-TOUNGATE
  MARCH 04, 2016
  By Liz Blood

  Liz chatted with Erin Pringle-Toungate recently to discuss her stories, her inclination to focus on death, her choice of place, and a wedding dress.

  LB: Tell me a little about the inspiration for “The Wandering House,” the chapbook we’ve just published.

  EP: It came about several years ago. I had written a novella called “Midwest in Memoriam” and it was about children riding their bikes on country roads, but I had never published it. When the Awst feature came up, you needed original work. I went back to “Midwest” as a possibility and I saw a lot of major problems. I thought I’d just work those out. I didn’t have anything new. But, that didn’t work.

  The wandering house was something I first heard about over a decade ago when I was teaching a writing class at Texas State University. We were exploring folklore. I was looking for new-to-me folk stories from Illinois, where I’d grown up, to give my students an idea about urban legends and folk stories. One of the stories was the “vanishing” or “wandering house.” So, the folk tale is the same in my story: it’s a house that has been rumored to appear at different times over the past few centuries, no one goes into it, and then it disappears. There are other folk stories like that—they’re very patterned—like the vanishing hitchhiker, or the vanishing Jesus, if you’re in Utah. Anyway the story captured my imagination and I threaded it through the novella.

  When Awst called me, I started reshaping it. The story needed a conflict and so I thought, why would the house be wandering?

  LB: Meth plays a large role in the story. Why meth?

  EP: Meth didn’t come on the radar in Illinois until I was a teenager, and not to the degree that it’s talked about now. Now, there’s almost total awareness of it. Several people from the town that I grew up in went missing due to it. There was a body that was found, there’s a billboard listing people that went missing—drug deals gone bad. It was one of those strange things that go on in real life that you’re not aware of it. Because the Illinois landscape and how things have changed there were on my mind, so was meth.

  LB: What are the kids in the story out looking for?

  EP: When I was growing up in this very very small town, you’d go country cruising. That’s just what you did, as soon as you knew someone with a car. It’s a teenager tradition to drive the country roads. And you’d drive out to “troll bridge,” or the old slave cabins, or out to where there used to be an insane asylum. So kids drive around for hours trying to avoid whatever it is they’re trying to avoid at home and talk about that scary stuff.

  LB: How does Illinois, the place or the landscape inspire your writing?

  EP: Sometimes I’ll be in Spokane, WA, and something will be interesting to me and so I’ll start a story in Spokane and then think, “hmmm, no, let me do this in Illinois because I know that.” So, I’ll shift the landscape and use what I know from there.

  I don’t want to accidentally lie. I’ve only lived in Spokane for five years and it’s easier to accidentally lie or use narratives that already exist about a place that you don’t understand. You might use those for a story and say something that you wouldn’t think is true if you knew the place, like knew it, knew it. I really feel like I know where I grew up. I was in the same town for 18 years. I know when I’m not lying about what it is to want to get the hell out of there and all of the dark stuff that went on. And the inequality — it’s here, too, and in San Marcos when I lived there, and in Chicago, but I understand the Illinois landscape better, so I can be more honest with my characters. I understand them better when they’re there.

  LB: You told me your dad died when you were 17, your best friend when you were 27, and your sister when you were 29. Does death show up in your writing?

  EP: All of my stories deal with it. I think even the one or two that don’t, still deal with dark things. My daily experience is that no one really talks about death and a lot of things I read also aren’t very aware of death — there’s not a real focus on what it is to experience someone dying or to have those thoughts or to know that you’re going to die. Sometimes I think people must think “why is she still writing about that?” or I worry that they think there must be something wrong with someone who writes about death so much.

  LB: Are you familiar with “memento mori?” It means to remember that you must die, or will die, and has been used in art to remind people that life is transitory, but they’re alive now.

  EP: That’s perfect. I love that idea. I think the Day of the Dead is fantastic. I’m not trying to say hold every moment precious, but I do think there’s such an absence of death in our culture and knowing how to talk about it. That it really comes to light when it’s happening and it’s your person who has died—you see that no one knows what to say. They know the script, the ritual, but it feels so hollow.

  My interest in stories and in living is to explore what it means to be alive and to explore your identity when death is present. In some way, I’m writing to my former self—the one before she experienced such loss—to show the reality of it because it is i think it’s so ignored. It’s like death doesn’t exist, so when you finally experience it, it’s a total mind fuck. You have no idea how to deal. I’m not trying to romanticize it, but to show the complexity of it, and I can’t think of anything more important to write about. I want to write about what it means to be a creature who dies and loses people and what love means within that context and what God means within that context. I have a hard time writing about things that don’t gravitate towards that.

  LB: Tell me about your story, “Digging.”

  EP: I wrote that when I lived in Texas and that was relatively close to 9/11, maybe a few years after but still pretty recent. War was very much on my mind. I would be walking through San Marcos and imagine buildings exploding since that was what was happening in Iraq, or I’d be at a traffic light imagining I was all of a sudden dead because that’s what was happening there. I needed to write a story for a workshop I was in and I’d recently been watching crime TV. There was a story where a family member had been killed and buried in a barn and the person who discovered it said he went into the barn and thought, someone’s been digging. That line captured my imagination. I was also in a children’s lit course and was reading a lot of fairy tales, so I combined Hansel and Gretel with that line and with war.

  LB: I noticed a lot of the dead people in your stories were buried or dying within a landscape—like a field, a stream, the woods.

  EP: My parents were 42 and 46 when they had me. There is 16 years between my sister and I and 22 years between my brothers and me. When I was very young, my brothers would show me horror movies. I don’t know how old I was when I saw “Psycho.” Pretty young. Being generous, I’d say I was seven. I saw “It” when I was 9. So, I remember watching “Psycho” when I was a kid and I remember the effect it had on me. Our house was split-level and when you went down the second flight of stairs there was the basement. I would imagine that there would be bodies buried in that room, behind the door, because in “Psycho 2” and “3” that happened. I remember swinging in my tire swing and thinking the dirt beneath had bodies buried in it. My school bus drove past a cemetery twice a day. So I was very aware of that, too. When I see a ground I think, what is buried there? What has someone covered up?

  LB: What writers feed your writing?

  EP: Poetry. I read poetry. I like Jack Gilbert. I picked up Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. That was fantastic. I read a lot of essays on disability and also children’s literature, like old fairy tales and Shaun Tan. He’s doing some really cool stuff. I’m not a very avid reader, which I know I’m not supposed to say. The right answer is read, read, read, but I don’t have that much time. I look at a lot of photography. My dad was an amateur photographer so I subscribe to a magazine now and check in on Lens Culture. That’s very fulfilling. That calms and inspires me. Paintings, too. My dad was always showing me paintings.

  LB: What about Awst appealed to you?

  EP: Awst suddenly appeared in my life and now I have a brand new story that I really love and wouldn’t have if Awst hadn’t showed up. I’ve taken time off from teaching full-time and so I’ve been writing full-time for the first time since, well, a long time. I’ve been in my head about it. It’s hard to do. I don’t have deadlines and it’s kind of lonely, not like i can’t handle solitude, but it can kill the confidence. It’s been a new experience in lacking confidence in my writing. So, when Awst showed up, it was like ahh, ok, good, thank you. It’s a great boost and it reminded me why I’m doing this. If I could marry a press, it would be Awst. I have my dress planned.

  Go here to see more of Erin's info and stories at Awst. Also, stay connected with Erin via her website or via social media at Facebook or Twitter. Order her new chapbook below.

• Read To Write Stories - https://readtowritestories.com/2013/10/03/an-interview-with-erin-pringle-toungate/

  An Interview with Erin Pringle-Toungate
  3
  OCT
  Erin Pringle's story "The Midwife" appeared in Glint Literary Journal and will be included in Pringle's next collection How the Sun Burns.
  Erin Pringle’s first collection The Floating Order was called “poetic, lush, gripping” and “rather disturbing.” She recently finished her new collection, How the Sun Burns.

  Erin Pringle-Tuongate’s first collection of stories, The Floating Order, has been called “dense, experimental, thick with dread and the dead.” The stories are full of inventive language and powerfully weird images. They’re also gripping reads, similar to the work of cross-genre horror writers like Brian Evenson and John Burnside.

  Pringle-Toungate currently lives and teaches in Washington, where she was awarded an Artist Trust fellowship. One of her stories was a finalist in the Kore Press Short Fiction Chapbook Award (2012). Her work has been twice-nominated for a Pushcart Prize, selected as a Best American Notable Non-Required Reading, and shortlisted for the Charles Pick Fellowship. She recently completed her second story collection, How the Sun Burns.

  In this interview, Pringle-Toungate discusses the challenge of moving through time in fiction, the structural requirements of writing in present tense, and the difference between the sentences “A man walks into a bar” and “A man walks into Hooters.”

  (To read Pringle-Toungate’s story “The Midwife” and an exercise based on the story’s movement between the main character’s past and present, click here.)

  Michael Noll

  “The Midwife” switches between the past and present, a structure that can pose difficult questions: How often do you switch? How long do you stay in one time period? Your answer is to switch as often as every sentence. The result is that you sort of avoid those questions about block structure. Because past and present are so closely intertwined you can decide to stick with one thread for as long or briefly as you want. Did you experiment with different ways of mixing past and present, or did you know how you’d handle it even in early drafts?

  Erin Pringle-Toungate

  It took me about two years to get to this draft of the story. I wrote multiple versions, and many of those were attempts to deal with time and to avoid the problems caused by a previous version, such as staying in the past for so long that the present conflict seemed to lack energy, or staying so long in the present that the past began to belong to one character instead of all of them. The midwife’s age changed several times before I realized she needed to be expert now—the younger she was, the more the delivery became about sex and all sorts of junk that got in the way of the story I wanted to tell. Maybe as soon as a character has a history that is important to the present, time becomes an issue to be dealt with.

  Michael Noll

  I’ve read quite a few stories lately that explain the entire premise in the first paragraph(s) and then explore the consequences of the premise. But “The Midwife” withholds a basic piece of information about the premise until the end. It makes for an effective story–I wanted to know the secret. I wonder if you always structure stories this way (it’s not unlike the structure of a detective novel, except we’re the detectives). How do you know what to withhold and what to disclose?

  Erin Pringle-Toungate

  My stories are typically structured like this, or something like this—in which a key bit of information that is guiding the story is withheld. For example, in “The Only Child,” the main character is with her imaginary friend in a morgue, but I let these two facts remain unstated and what drive the suspense aspect of the story. This sort of structure is mainly due to my tendency to write in present tense. Because of that, it would seem contrived to begin with a recounting of a story that hasn’t occurred yet—and suspense can’t work quite in the same way. So, withholding is how I attempt to create suspense.

  What I withhold is based on what is most obvious and familiar to the character because what is most obvious and familiar to the character is what he or she wouldn’t think to say to anyone. In “The Floating Order,” a woman has drowned her children, but she uses the terminology of floating her children and thinks she has saved them so that’s the language she uses, so it takes a while for readers to realize what she has done. This gives me time to make them learn about her. I think to make readers allow themselves to think about difficult issues, the writer has to figure out how to strip those issues of any familiarity so that they can be thought about. In my story “How the Sun Burns Among Hills of Rock and Pebble,” a girl is struggling to understand why anyone could let her sister disappear and die, but never does she say that or talk about it—until the end, when she’s begging a carnival worker to pretend to have seen the sister disappear. In “The Midwife,” she knows where she is going, so I let her walk—just like you know why you’re going to the grocery so you don’t bother to tell anyone why. But if someone saw you walking down the street at night, they may think they you’re going to do something else entirely. Whatever is most on the character’s mind, I delay revealing. It may help that I’m not sure what leads to the man’s death myself—it’s not only the woman, it’s not only the illness, it’s not only the whole decaying town, it’s not only. . . and so this also helps me, as there’s never any one thing in any story that has caused, or led from, any one event.

  Michael Noll

  “The Midwife” is quite long, about 8500 words. You’ve also written some stories (like this one) that fit within a paragraph. This ability, to write both long and short stories, is unusual. Many writers have a particular length that they’re comfortable with. What’s your mindset when you first begin a story? Have you written it already in your head? Or is there some process of discovery that happens on the page that tells you how long the story will be?

  Erin Pringle-Toungate

  The stories in The Floating Order are short mainly because I was teaching myself how to write. I was teaching myself how to use language—what its limits were, what its possibilities were, besides that the perspectives and ideas allowed a shorter form where the language had to work much harder than it has to work in long form. So the stories were somewhat like unbuilding houses in order to build the smallest, habitable house possible in order to understand what a house didn’t need in order to stand—and to understand whether or not a house had to stand in order to work.

  All the stories in my next collection, How the Sun Burns, are longer stories. My characters are older and so the causes of their behaviors, or the background of their lives, or their thoughts, are more complicated. I think children’s lives are equally complicated, but typically most adults wouldn’t agree with me, so my characters are somewhat older (at least in this story) so as to avoid issues of verisimilitude. And I have to explain the complications so as to avoid readers assuming they know why the characters do what they do. The recent cultural tradition of leaving comments on newspaper articles has terrified me about what readers can think, and so the stories are longer in some ways probably so as to avoid myself imagining the comments readers might leave. I hope that tradition ends soon.

  Michael Noll

  Erin Pringle-Toungate's debut collection The Floating Order has been called.
  Erin Pringle-Toungate’s debut collection The Floating Order tells stories that resemble the nightmares of children.

  The Short Review called your first collection, The Floating Order, “a contemporary Brothers Grimm for adults.” Like fairy tales, many of your stories are set in a kind of everyworld. This seems true of the “The Midwife” even though it mentions strip malls, the 1980s, and a “heavy-hipped Midwestern woman in beige pants and a striped pastel shirt.” Maybe it’s because it’s about a barber performing deliveries, an activity that seems from another time. I’m curious how you think about place in your writing. Are you, in fact, writing fairy tales?

  Erin Pringle-Toungate

  I’ve found that if you don’t use names and don’t use advertising, every story sounds like a folktale. It’s a sort of sad situation that one of the ways our time is marked is by having characters sit at Starbucks instead of at a coffee shop. What’s the difference? Well, the focus, for one. Readers will probably always feel, these days, that they understand something more if they recognize a brand; this is not to say that readers are stupid but that all of us have been trained to feel that we understand someone more if he or she shops at the same store that we do—it’s knee-jerk. But if I’m writing a story, I don’t want readers to feel like they understand something about my characters just because they’re at Starbucks. Plenty of books demonstrate the depravity of living in a world of brand names. I don’t have anything to say about it, I’m not interested in it, so I’m not going to bring up details that make the conversation change its focus. A man walks into a bar. Good. A man walks into Hooters. What a stupid difference it makes. Now the man is no longer the focus. His life, his movement, his death—gone, erased. Now it’s all glaring orange and white T-shirts and opposing arguments about breasts and chicken wings and coupons and kitsch problems. Bring up that detail, and a writer has to work five times as hard to convince the reader that the man isn’t a chauvinist, that the man is—well, whatever he actually is.

  October 2013

  Profile pic

  Michael Noll is the editor of Read to Write Stories.

  Advertisements

• Amazon - https://www.amazon.com/Erin-Pringle/e/B0031HQK6W/ref=dp_byline_cont_book_1

  Erin Pringle grew up in the Midwest and now lives Northwest. She's a recipient of a 2012 Artist Trust Fellowship, and the author of two story collections, The Floating Order (Two Ravens Press, 2009) and The Whole World at Once (West Virginia UP/Vandalia Press, 2017). She lives in Spokane with her partner, Heather, and son, Henry.

  To learn more about Erin, please visit www.erinpringle.com

• Poets & Writers - https://www.pw.org/content/erin_pringle

  Erin Pringle
  Printable Version

  Log in to Send

  Log in to Save

  Twitter logo

  Facebook logo

  Tumblr logo

  Spokane, WA
  Website:
  www.erinpringle.com
  AUTHOR'S BIO
  Originally from rural Illinois, Pringle is the author of two story collections: The Whole World at Once (West Virginia UP 2017) and The Floating Order (Two Ravens Press (2009). Three stories have come out as chapbooks: "How the Sun Burns Among Hills of Rock and Pebble" (The Head & The Hand Press 2015); "The Wandering House" (Awst 2016); "The Lightning Tree" (Underground Voices 2016). Her novella Water Under a Different Sky is forthcoming from Awst in 2018. She lives in the Inland Northwest with her partner Heather, and their son Henry.
  PUBLICATIONS AND PRIZES
  Books:
  The Floating Order (Two Ravens Press , 2009), The Whole World at Once (West Virginia University Press, 2017), Water Under a Different Sky (The Head & The Hand Press, 2017)
  Anthologies:
  Box of Delights (Aeon Press, 2012), Box of Delights (Aeon Press, 2011), Not Normal, IL (Indiana University Press, 2009), The Lightning Tree (Underground Voices, 2015)
  Journals:
  5X5, Adirondack Review, Barrelhouse, Big Pulp, Bonfire, Dark Recesses Press, Dogzplot, Downstate Story Magazine, Electric Velocipede, Emrys Journal, Etchings, Girls with Insurance, Glint Literary Journal, kadar koli, Lake Effect, New York Tyrant, Pacific Review, Pagitica in Toronto, Porcupine Literary Arts Magazine, Quarter After Eight, Quay: A Journal of the Arts , Red Mountain Review, SAND, Snow*vigate, SUB-LIT, The Minnesota Review, The Project for a New Mythology, Ugly Accent, War, Literature and the Arts, Whistling Shade
  Chapbook:
  How The Sun Burns Among Hills of Rock and Pebble (The Head & The Hand Press, 2015), The Lightning Tree (Underground Voices, 2015)
  Prizes Won:
  Pushcart Prize Nomination (2007, 2012, 2013); recipient of Artist Trust Fellowship (2012); finalist in Kore Press Short Fiction Contest (2012); shortlisted for Charles Pick Fellowship (2007); named a Best American Notable Non-Required Reading (2007); second place in Austin Chronicle Short Fiction Contest (2008); winner of Pagitica in Toronto Short Fiction Contest (2003); recipient of Rose Fellowship (2003-06, Texas State University).
  REVIEWS, RECORDINGS, AND INTERVIEWS
  Follow on Twitter (@WhatSheMight)
  Review of The Floating Order (The Short Review)
  Review of The Floating Order (John Kenny)
  I Wouldn't Explain (The Reading Experience)
  The Floating Order at goodreads (goodreads)
  MORE INFORMATION
  Listed as:
  Fiction Writer
  Gives readings:
  Yes
  Travels for readings:
  Yes
  Identifies as:
  Caucasian
  Prefers to work with:
  Any
  Fluent in:
  English
  Born in:
  Terre Haute, IN
  Raised in:
  Casey, IL
  Please note: All information in the Directory is provided by the listed writers or their representatives.
  Last updated: Nov 20, 2017

• Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erin_Pringle

  Erin Pringle
  From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  Erin Pringle-Toungate (born 1981 in Terre Haute, Indiana) is a United States fiction writer. She grew up in Casey, Illinois and has her bachelor's degree from Indiana State University and her Master of Fine Arts from Texas State University.

  Pringle is the author of two collections of stories, three chapbooks, and over fifty stories. Her short fiction has been nominated four times for the Pushcart Prize, named a notable Best American Nonrequired Reading (2007), and in 2012, she was awarded a Washington State Artist Trust Fellowship.[1]

  Her sister, Jennifer Rardin, was an American urban fantasy author of the Jaz Parks series.[2][3] Pringle lives in Spokane, WA with her partner Heather and son, Henry.

  Published books[edit]
  (2017) The Whole World at Once, West Virginia University Press (ISBN 1943665575)
  (2009) The Floating Order, Two Ravens Press (ISBN 1906120420)

Quoted in Sidelights: The stories don't feel repetitious: they remind the reader instead of how many strange shapes grief can take and how universal a human experience it is," "have a dreamlike intensity heightened by Pringle's lyrical voice."
1/27/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1517115320631 1/1
Print Marked Items
Pringle, Erin: THE WHOLE WORLD AT
ONCE
Kirkus Reviews.
(Mar. 1, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Pringle, Erin THE WHOLE WORLD AT ONCE Vandalia Press/West Virginia Univ. (Adult Fiction) $16.99
5, 1 ISBN: 978-1-943665-58-7
Pringle (The Floating Order, 2009) works nine variations on the theme of grief in the wrenching stories of
her second collection.Her protagonists, often children and often unnamed, live lonely days in the small
towns or isolated farmhouses of the upper Midwest, flattened by heat in the summer and risking death from
exposure in the winter. Shell-shocked by loss, haunted by ghosts and the eerie birds that reappear in all the
stories, they make choices that send them deeper into danger. One girl, whose sister ended up dead in a
pond after last year's agricultural fair, roams country roads alone at night picking up aluminum cans and
finds a wounded carnie. Another girl dodges the mines planted in their backyard by a brother damaged by
the war in the Middle East, and another deals in her own way with a mother who has just died from a brain
aneurysm. A boy, who nearly dies in a drainage ditch when he goes out of the house in the morning before
his parents are awake, finds himself haunted by his own ghost; a man whose wife has just suffered a
miscarriage finds an eerie collection of jars of dead aquarium fish in the house from which his grandfather
is moving to a retirement community. The characters dream intensely, waking in terror, and the stories
themselves have a dreamlike intensity heightened by Pringle's lyrical voice. Though the theme of all the
stories is the same, and many of the characters have a family resemblance, the stories don't feel repetitious:
they remind the reader instead of how many strange shapes grief can take and how universal a human
experience it is. Readers willing to immerse themselves in sorrow, and sometimes in narratives that twist
and shimmer before taking definite shape, will find reflected in these stories the unsteady path of coming
back to life--or not--after loss.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Pringle, Erin: THE WHOLE WORLD AT ONCE." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Mar. 2017. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A482911727/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=1b9ed8cf.
Accessed 27 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A482911727

"Pringle, Erin: THE WHOLE WORLD AT ONCE." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Mar. 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A482911727/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 27 Jan. 2018.

• Journal Gazette & Times-Courier
  http://jg-tc.com/entertainment/books-and-literature/review-author-weaves-stories-showing-depth-of-human-experience-of/article_cd9baaac-5c15-5c58-adad-1ff995e6072b.html
  Word count: 792

  Quoted in Sidelights: "richly crafted series of stories completely unlike anything I've ever read." The stories, she noted, lead readers "to the realization that perhaps the experience of grief is actually the most 'normal' thing in life, as we all might experience it differently but will all experience it nonetheless." She added: "Pringle's language is stark but poetic, and each story is beautiful in its heartbreaking simplicity and raw emotion."
  REVIEW: Author weaves stories showing depth of human experience of grief
  ELENA PRUITT elena.pruitt@lee.net Aug 12, 2017 0
  Facebook
  Twitter
  Email
  Facebook
  Twitter
  Email
  Print
  Save
  Former Casey resident Erin Pringle has released a collection of short stories, titled "The Whole World At Once" and published in May. The book is nine stories, each completely unrelated and unconnected except that they explore grief, mourning, and the toll such extreme emotions can take on the human psyche. Pringle wrote the book while working through her own periods of mourning, and has said of writing these tales, "I struggled a lot understanding a world that did not follow the rules it's supposed to in fiction."

  Perhaps it is this struggle that led to such a richly crafted series of stories completely unlike anything I've ever read. Pringle's characters and their grief do not follow the expectations of fiction literature, which may be why the stories feel so incredibly real.

  In every tale in this book, there has been a death or a brush with death. The characters vary in age, gender, and background, and often aren't even named or described. We instead view their lives through this filter of grief -- and none of them express that grief in the same way, and yet are all easy to understand and identify. The settings are nameless as well, and could easily be any small Midwestern town. 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.

  There is a sense that by reading these stories, we are encroaching on someone's private moments and seeing them at their most vulnerable. And yet, those moments touch deep into our hearts with their profound longing for some semblance of normal life, opening our eyes to the realization that perhaps the experience of grief is actually the most "normal" thing in life, as we all might experience it differently but will all experience it nonetheless.

  Pringle's language is stark but poetic, and each story is beautiful in its heartbreaking simplicity and raw emotion. Random bursts of fragmented sentences mirror the fragmented lives we are witnessing, and the often staccato rhythm is jarring but forces the reader to truly focus on the emotions underlying the words. The style does not allow for skimming or trying to follow a narrative flow, but instead makes the reader pay attention to each thought, each image, and visualize or even feel what's left out -- drawing the reader into the grief and pain and confusion and making them see the things that aren't there in writing.

  The lack of any use of quotation marks, even in the few stories that seem to follow a more traditional narrative, left me feeling as though I wasn't seeing these conversations taking place between characters, but rather that I was seeing their memory of conversations from long ago or dreams of conversations not yet happened. This interesting trick, I felt, made it less a process of reading a story and more as though I were floating through the characters' subconscious.

  The experience of reading this book can be exhausting mentally and emotionally, and I found it impossible to read more than one story at a time without taking a long break to clear my mind after each one. Still, it's been over a week since I finished this book, and I'm also finding it impossible to forget. Each of the stories has, in its own way, stuck with me. Readers will, of course, identify with some stories more than others, but it will be hard not to connect with each and every one on some level.

  The human experience isn't always pleasant, but it is always beautiful in some way. These stories remind us of that, and connect us to that thread of humanity that we all know but often shy away from. Because of that, "The Whole World At Once" isn't an easy read, but is definitely worth it.

  Subscribe to the JG-TC

Word Count