In this column I once named Spokane writer Erin Pringle’s story collection The Whole World at Once (Vandalia Press) a favorite read of 2018, and it’s a sure bet that her debut novel, Hezada! I Miss You (Awst Press), will be on my “Best of 2020” list, as well. The novel—set in a rural Midwestern village and featuring a circus-in-decline—stunned me with its intelligent, lyrical, visceral examination of growing up in a small town, and of the bottomless, wild grief that follows a loved one’s suicide.

Pringle was kind enough to email with me about her new novel and its inspirations.

Sharma Shields: Let’s start with your novel’s title, Hezada! I Miss You. What inspired it? 

Pringle: My best friend and former husband Jeremy brought me the title on a scrap of paper. He’d written it down from bathroom graffiti. He’s a writer too, and we bring each other words like birds for nests. He knew I would do something with it. I saw it and knew it was the title of the circus novel I’d been working on for years. 

 S: What nudged you to give two very different characters, one younger and one older, the name Hezada?

P: One of the important aspects of life in a small town and life in the circus is that both are generational. I thought it was important to show that lineage through names, both that Hezada is a role that women in a circus family have been raised into performing (literally), and to show the connection between Heza the child in the town who is split between both a family in the town and the circus, since her conception is because of the relationship between her mother and a Summer Boy working at the circus. I use first-names as a way to show the town and circus’s matrilineal history.

S: As a reader I felt the complex emotions about this place, the nostalgia for it, the suffocating chokehold of it. Did you start writing the town first, or the circus, and how did other themes (such as class, sexuality) fall into place as you wrote?

P: It’s hard to say. I’m always writing the town, writing inside my memory of growing up. The circus was always set here in the writing. Class is similarly inseparable in my view of my childhood and town, as is my identity and understanding of my memories which I’m now interpreting through my queer present. I spent more energy in the writing (so much time) trying to figure out the time and its vanishing point within the story.

S: At an event at Auntie’s recently, I heard you speak eloquently about causality. Can you discuss causality’s problematic nature and how you approached writing suicide in this more honest way, without the usual attempt to explain or justify it somehow?

P: My sister died by suicide, and that’s the moment I couldn’t believe any stories about people who died that way in order to maintain the complex understanding I had of her as a person—of our relationship—of her death. I know that there’s basic causality. That a tightening against our necks will collapse our ability to breathe, that after enough time without oxygen, our bodies can’t go on. But I also know that any “reason” for her death is simplistic. Her death is the accumulation of her life. It has no vanishing point—no fixed moment that provides perspective for everything else. It’s not solely because of our father, or her shyness, or her marriage, or our family’s history of depression, or because of an argument she had that morning. It is easy to imagine that strangers who die by suicide did it because they gave up, or were depressed, or were weak, or were super sad, or weren’t thinking clearly, or were unable to imagine the future, or were selfish, or didn’t listen well enough about suicide and hell. But when it happened to my sister, this kind of death, all those easy stories could not hold her or me or the world as I was being remade to understand it. 

 S: This novel is a masterclass in pacing. I was breathless in one particular scene, told in smaller scraps of chapters, the trim words surrounded by blank white space.

P: Where you were breathless is where I cannot spend time. Where I hurt the most. Where language has no hold on reality but must hold it, nonetheless. It is the center of my sorrow, that place. It is me telling you a story while running away at a sprint.

S: Were there particular books you thought of as you wrote Hezada?

P: It took fifteen years to arrive at the end of the novel, but when writing or thinking of the book, I thought of Ingmar Bergman’s films and the cinematography by Sven Nykvist, and the pacing of the way one tells and shows stories and the light and shadows within them—the silences, the emptiness, and how those function, too, in the spaces of my memories.

S: What books would you recommend to Inland Northwest readers?

P: “The Life of Towns” by Anne Carson (in her book Plainwater), The Death and Life of Aida Hernandez by Aaron Bobrow-Strain, Don’t Call Us Dead by Danez Smith, Citizen by Claudia Rankine.

Interview edited slightly for word length. Pick up Erin Pringle’s new novel, Hezada, I Miss You! from one of our local indie booksellers, Auntie’s Bookstore or Wishing Tree Books.