ERIN PRINGLE
About Erin Pringle
Originally from the Midwest, Erin Pringle has an MFA in Creative Writing from Texas State University. Erin’s work has been widely anthologised. Her fiction has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, named a ‘Best American Notable Non-required Reading of 2007’, and was short-listed for the 2007 Charles Pick Fellowship.
See Erin's blog at http://erinpringle.blogspot.com/ and website at http://www.erinpringle.com
For an article about Erin in Terre Haute Living, click here.
Praise for Erin Pringle
'There are no easy answers in The Floating Order, only a sense of disturbance and dread, offset by flashes of beauty. In this way, the book traps life in the 21st century and displays it in all its awful radiance.' Southwestern American Literature
'The stories in Erin Pringle’s The Floating Order focus on images and ideas frequently linked in Western literature—fairy tales and reality, madness and imagination, death and children. Stories such as "All I Have Left" and "Digging", with the repetition of the title phrase in the former and, in both, systematic, but vivid and mythic plots, echo the way confessional poets Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath dealt with what then seemed disparate connections between the madness inherent in fairy tales and childhood experience ... But what makes stories like “Sanctuary” and “And Yet” more compelling is not just the tension inherent in combining poetic devices and language with the third person point of view. Each of these stories focuses on questions that remain baffling to most readers, questions involving the effectiveness of God and prayer, what to feel about deaths that go unnoticed, what happens to make us capable of seeing humor in the most unrelievedly horrifying of circumstances, the death of a child? This last question is beautifully handled in “And Yet,” when a child sees his own dying as a comic incarnation of the quintessential childhood question, “Are we there yet?!"
What is most compelling, in the end, about Pringle’s collection is her use of language, point of view, and in the end, that most basic of storytelling devices, plot, to create stories that go beyond an “edgy” but very familiar fixation on death, madness, and imagination, to becoming ones that are worthy of reflection and remembering.'
Texas Books in Review
'Erin Pringle’s stories are true wonders – a beautiful mix of intimate feeling, thick syntax, and dangerous language.' Michael Kimball
Erin Pringle’s prose scoots from sentence to sentence, invokes an aphoristic, non sequitur hopscotch composition strategy of familiar defamiliarization. It is no mean achievement to sustain such a story-like lyricism over the long haul of a book-length collection. This is a remarkable debut. A keeper that keeps keeping on.' Michael Martone
The stories in Erin Pringle’s first collection possess the charm of fairy tales, the wisdom of poems, the hope of prayers, the weight of eulogies, and the intimacy of letters home. There’s an old soul at the center of this book, an old soul with a passionate, lyrical, exhilarating new voice.' Tom Noyes
'A collection of rather disturbing short stories. "Enjoyed" really wouldn't be the right word. "Impressed" would be nearer the mark.'
Scott Pack, The Friday Project
'This collection contains nineteen stories of childhood, which are full of dark, dangerous and deadly events that return to haunt you long after reading. There are no safe, saccharine fairy tale endings. This is contemporary Brothers Grimm for adults... These stories capture the intensities of experiences, both fleeting insignificant moments in a life and momentous catastrophes... Several months after reading I find that these stories have stuck in the sediment of my mind, only to bubble up to the surface when the silt is disturbed... In the title story, Erin Pringle writes "I save my babies in the morning. The sky very blue that morning. Like tiny hands smearing rivers down walls." This is what words can do. They can be as very blue as the sky and, like tiny hands, smear rivers down walls. "I will say that words are babies, you must correct their sins or the evil takes over and they float away." Only you can save the words in the morning. Smell the pages. Read them too.'
Pauline Masurel, The Short Review.
An interview with Erin Pringle
When did you first begin writing, and what inspired you to do so? Have any specific books/authors served as inspiration for you?
Before I could read or write, I would “write” stories and my mother would then, below my scribbles, transcribe what I said the scribbles “said”—I think most of these stories she included in her weekly letters to her mother. But I was pretty much always drawing and all my drawings were sequence stories, and I’d invent epic soap operas with my Barbie dolls. In first grade, I won a ribbon for a story I wrote about a poor church mouse.
I’m more fulfilled by examining visual art (film, painting, photography) than reading fiction. For example, Bergman makes me think, and I want to respond to him. Not necessarily with a story, but to continue the thought he pulled out of me. And all the time and energy he spent in conveying the thought to me makes me know that writing does have the purpose I think it does, and since I value what he has given me, then I know that my thoughts can also be valuable to someone.
I would like to say something about writing being hard and that it has to be hard and something has gone wrong when it isn’t (which happens frequently because a story can transfix the writer as much as it can the reader). Bergman’s films (or any good artist’s work) remind me—keep my toes to the line.
Can you tell us something about the inspiration behind this work in particular?
Because the stories span seven years of my life—e.g. I wrote “Losing, I Think” when I was 19 and “And Yet” at age 26—it’s hard to say that anything in particular inspired the entire book—since every story has its own reason for existing; however, once I wrote “The Floating Order” which came about in the same few months that “Digging”, “Rabbits”, and “The Only Child” did, I started to see more clearly how I could make a book.
How do you go about creating your voice on the page?
While writing, I think only about the story--how best to tell the story that needs told, what the story needs. When editing, I think only about if I've done this, and if the reader will understand—not in one fell swoop, of course, but that I have arranged enough signposts in the right places that will lead to conveying my idea(s) to the reader while leaving the reader with room to feel unchained, that is, there’s room for meditation. My voice is simply not the point.
How and when do you write?
I mostly handwrite. I’ll handwrite the entire first draft of a story then type it in then print it out, edit on the page, then handwrite the story, then type it in, print it out, repeat, repeat, repeat.
I write
when I can, on holiday breaks—summer, Christmas—because I teach,
and I can’t juggle writing and teaching and do both well, so I don’t
try anymore. If I do anything writing-wise during the semester, I’ll
edit stories, but I don’t write new stories because a new story requires
an incredible amount of concentration and many hours in a row.
What do you enjoy reading? What are you reading that you can recommend at the moment?
I like children’s books, poetry, and contemporary plays (Albee, Shepard, Williams, Norman). Probably most of my reading time is spent reading my students’ essays, which I enjoy. Right now I’m reading Anne Sexton’s letters and just finished Just After Sunset by Stephen King. I’d recommend Stephen King’s Lisey’s Story and Anne Carson’s Glass, Irony and God.
