Ron Sylvester: Erin Pringle’s ‘Unexpected Weather Events’ has simple surprises

In real life, unexpected weather events are a sense of stress, wonder and, sometimes, a struggle to survive.

Erin Pringle takes us on a similar literary journey in her collection of short stories, “Unexpected Weather Events,” through life’s journeys of stress, wonder and survival.

Whether it’s surviving the death of a loved one, wonderment in the eyes of a child or surviving life’s worst challenges, Pringle tempts readers’ senses with an easy writing style about difficult moments in life.

Pringle’s writing picks out simple moments in time, when a partner’s hair smells “of mint and sleep” and pictures capture children, “on their father’s plaid couch, staring at the TV with their bare legs lifted to their father can vacuum the rug beneath them.”

Few of the characters even have names: they’re “the girl,” “the mother,” “sister” or “father” – but Pringle gives them life and you can sense how they feel, hurt and their connections to the larger world around them.

The dialogue isn’t in quotation marks, leaving you to wonder if this is what’s said out loud or simply in their minds or imaginations. The result is a powerful form of storytelling.

The subjects are hard: death, isolation, mental illness, a war small-town America. Not a symbolic war, either, a blasting, bloody war where women and children die, and the rest of the country goes on arguing about whether it’s real. It’s a chilling comment on the way people can distance themselves from other’s pain in the name of philosophical differences.

“People began leaving town once the war proved itself to be real and present, Pringle writes. “Online, millions of people who did not live in the town were already calling the footage fake news. A scare tactic. A myth created and proliferated by some progressive thinktank. Same as climate change. Same as COVID. Same as domestic violence, Hollywood, unicorns and racism.”

Tales of ghosts of lost family members and Christmas in a pandemic are like a Hallmark movie where the surface has been peeled back to expose the scars underneath.

“Unexpected Weather Events,” has unexpected surprises, and stories that may hit a nerve or touch the heart.