This is a story about children.

Erin Pringle was little more than a child when we first met, during a summer fiction writing workshop at ISU in 1999. She was 17 at the time, still attending high school in Casey, Ill., and had decided to take a college-level fiction workshop, with her mother’s blessing.

Back then, Pringle approached the writing process with the wonder and intensity of a determined youngster. She attacked the page the way so many children face down an obstacle or a challenge — she steeled her jaw, fixed her gaze and tore into the words as if fighting to save herself from drowning. It was an awesome sight to behold. Her stories were fierce, deadly serious and always left her readers with the sense that what we were witnessing was the budding voice of a wizened old soul — who just happened to be 17.

We older students, who first saw her as an affront — a poser, a fly-by-night wannabe, a high school girl determined to undermine the sanctity of our esteemed college workshop — soon turned to her as a source of inspiration. She got writing. The way some people just get the subtleties of piano playing, or the inherent ballet of boxing, or the fluidity of sculpting. She had it when so many others did not. So we invited her in. Or, more accurately, she confidently took her place, right where she belonged, in a serious writing workshop.

But Erin Pringle is no longer a child. Now she holds an MFA in Fiction Writing from Texas State University-San Marcos. Now she teaches English at a small college down in the bowels of Texas. Now she is married. Now she is an extensively published author whose work has appeared in notable literary journals throughout the country.

And now she joins the ranks of Wabash Valley authors who have reached out to an international audience, an official member of this exclusive club. All grown up and sharing the stage with the likes of Terre Haute’s most famous writer, Theodore Dreiser.

Despite her writing’s mature and somewhat disturbing subject matter, Pringle retains her youthful vigor and child-like awe and respect of her writing craft. Readers need only turn to her latest publication, “The Floating Order” (Two Ravens Press, 2009), to see for themselves.

“The Floating Order” is an impressive debut collection of short stories. A finely nuanced and delicately rendered grouping of children’s portraits. Within its pages Pringle vacillates between the utterly disturbing (the eerie psychological exploration of a mother who drowns her children in the collection’s title story) and heartbreaking honesty (the tale of a young cancer-stricken boy who unwittingly brings joy and a moment’s reprieve to his peers in the children’s cancer ward). “The Floating Order” is all about children. Foolish children. Brilliant children. Children living and playing and learning and dying. It is about the innocence of childhood. It is about the wonderment and accomplishment of childhood. It is about the dangers and the vulnerability of childhood. In each of her stories Pringle exhibits the deepest signs of pride and love; it is apparent every one of them has been painstakingly crafted and revised. These, then, are her children. They will outlive her. They will carry on her name. They will, at turns, maker her proud and sometimes disappoint her. But she will love them as all parents love their offspring. And rightfully so.

This past summer, Erin Pringle returned to Terre Haute — fictional babies in tow — to give a reading at Coffee Grounds. In a standing-room only event, Pringle approached the mic exactly as she had first approached her first college fiction workshop: with confidence, respect, grace and palpable excitement. Her voice soared through the room, rising above the ear-splitting hiss of the cappuccino machine. The audience sat utterly enrapt — teenagers ignoring incoming texts and Facebook updates, tattoo-covered college students digesting every word, coffee shop regulars refraining from their usual conversations. She gripped the entire audience in her literary fist and shook us wildly, like a mischievous youngster shaking a can of soda to pressurize it. And when she let us go, she flung us to the wind, breathless.

In the midst of this scene sat Erin Pringle’s mother, her back straight with pride, an elegant smile on her face, silently applauding her daughter’s accomplishments. She watched from across the room as readers lined up to buy her daughter’s work. She refrained from approaching until her daughter put the flair of her autograph on the last waiting fan’s book. She stood by patiently until her daughter set her pen down and massaged her tired hands, then she patted her on the back in an understated yet meaningful gesture. A universal parent’s gesture that says, you’re all grown up now and you have made me proud; you’re a good woman; I raised you up right. A subtle gesture—that brief pause on the shoulder blade—that carries with it the weight of 27 years of being Erin Pringle’s mother: relief, excitement, wonder, curiosity, worry, joy and, ultimately, pride.

It was a short-lived visit though. Pringle had other towns to see. She was touring the country promoting her book. Wandering the country in her car and living every American child’s dream of hitting the road. From here she would go to New York and North Carolina and Michigan. To Virginia and South Carolina. Trekking across the country all by herself. A grown woman on a mission. She would take her writing to the people and hope they would accept it. The way any parent wants her child to be loved. Surely the way her own mother felt as Erin Pringle, her youngest child, packed her remaining books in the trunk with her suitcases, and drove east.

Aaron Michael Morales is an English professor at ISU. His first novel, Drowning Tucson, will be released in early 2010. www.aaronmichaelmorales.com

Other articles by Aaron Michael Morales

• Claudia of Note - March 1st, 2010
• A Master Among Us - January 1st, 2010