[Interview] with Perrin Pring

Kelp Interview with Perrin Pring

Set in a futuristic American Southwest where the United States is a shadow of its former self and mega-corporations now govern the planet, Cash and Gravity features a diverse, eclectic cast focused on a singular mission: Bring home a piece of stolen tech, one that can change the course of humanity, before it falls into the wrong hands. What follows is a cat-and-mouse across the Nevada deserts and Utah backroads with Chevy, a young, tough Marine; Dolon, a gruff former super-soldier; and Izan, the key to their success, but whose life hangs on every breath.

Kelp Journal spoke with author Perrin Pring about her debut novel, from how it got its start to how, six years later, it ended up in bookshelves.

About Dave Oei

Dave Oei is a writer, husband, father, graduate of UC Riverside’s Low-Residency MFA for Creative Writing, and advisor at his family’s veterinary hospital. He has served as co-editor of The Coachella Review’s Voice to Books column and continues to write book reviews and conduct author interviews. When he’s not crafting romances, fantasies, or science-fiction thrillers, he can be found on the soccer pitch or on sunset beach walks with his wife of over twenty-five years.

Kelp: Thank you for meeting with me.

Perrin Pring: I'm excited to be here.

Kelp: I want to dive into your debut novel, Cash and Gravity. It’s science fiction grounded in the southwest, which isn’t something I’ve seen much in the genre. But for your story, this setting becomes a critical backdrop. Why the southwest?

Perrin Pring: I'm from the west, I grew up in the Rockies, and for whatever reason I always end up writing about the place. Also I'm a park ranger, so place is really important. I think it would be very hard for me to envision writing a story in a city, even though I have lived in cities. I couldn’t do a city justice compared to their citizens who’ve lived there forever.

But when I get outside, particularly in the west, I feel that’s where I'm supposed to be. And it comes through in my writing.

Kelp: As a science fiction writer, one of the things you're trying to do is ground the reader into the reality you create. You have the Southwest, the familiar. And you have space, the unfamiliar. Do you see blending the two as something of a risk, especially with how you’re grown comfortable living and working in the Southwest, and I assume, not space?

Perrin Pring: It’s scary to write about what you haven’t mastered. And by writing about space, there will be some astronauts who might not believe what I’ve written is realistic. But a lot of us can extend our disbelief in space. I didn’t start from zero though. My dad helped build NASA fuel tanks at one point, and my brother's really smart. There's a scene where they return to Earth and he helped me tons—he was like, “Don't worry I'm going to explain orbital mechanics to you on a granular level.”

I was able to get some of that into the writing. So, I researched. But yes, it's scary writing things that you don't fully understand.

But I think that's a universal fear writers share. But if you only write what you know, you probably won’t have a great story, because stories are about conflict. They're filled with adversity. They are different types of people interacting with each other. At some point, writers have to extend themselves beyond what feels comfortable.

Kelp: Can you talk about the kernel behind Cash and Gravity?

Perrin Pring: It was 2020 and my husband and I had just gone on a trip on the Gates Lodore of the Green River. We were driving back across Nevada and this was about when Starlink was happening, and we being park rangers, did not have reliable internet in 2020.

We thought, wouldn’t it be crazy if anyone could get internet anywhere and talk to anybody anytime? That sounds silly saying now, but in 2020, we did not.

From there, we kept spit-balling. Like, what if private corporations took over and NASA fell by the wayside? Then what if mega-corporations took over the functions of government. Pretty soon we had this premise. But a premise isn't a story. I needed characters living in the big what-if question.

After more brainstorming, we came up with a marine and a super soldier. And a super analog guy like the fixer in Project Hail Mary. Those characters ultimately became Chevy, Izan, and Dolan. By that evening, the sun was setting, and I knew I could write this book.

And then I did. Then it sold in 2025. And I have no doubt the general state of the world, alongg with this premise, helped it sell.

Kelp: This began as a collaboration?

Perrin Pring: More like a conversation over a long road trip that could have been a throwaway except, for whatever reason, I wrote it. And there’s Chevy, the Marine character. I worked with a lot of Marine Corps vets and I asked one for feedback to make the story realistic. He had the lived-in experience. He would read a chapter and then assign me movies and YouTube videos to watch and books to read.

And then he would give me a lot of feedback. But then while I was at UC Riverside Palm Desert working on my MFA, other students couldn't understand this jargon because it was too technically accurate. I had to scale it back so the average person could get what I was saying. The story went through a wild editing swing. It was edited for 5 years and the story that it started as is in no way what I ended with, that's the power of editing.

Kelp: I didn’t know began your MFA at UCR with this story in your back pocket.

Perrin Pring: Yeah, so I started with University of Riverside California Palm Desert's Low Residency MFA in September of ’21. Not a short name. But I got the idea for this the year before, I started writing around October of 2020 and I had a draft by early 2021. It was a functional draft but I wasn't successful with querying. So, I put it into a drawer.

When I got into the program, I promptly wrote a different novel. It wasn't until the spring of ‘22 when I took a class with Stephen Graham Jones and wanted to submit a work of genre. I turned in Cash and Gravity and he said he’d blurb it. For some reason, I went back to writing that other novel, which makes no sense when I tell this story now. And then my thesis adviser, Tod Goldberg, asked for the book that I gave to Stephen.

Tod said, “This will be the book you sell. This is the one we're going to work on.” And he was right.

Kelp: Do you remember what about the story stood out to them?

Perrin Pring: I did not ask that question to Stephen. Tod told me Cash was a chase-book and it moves. I think what differentiated it from other things I worked on at the time was the pacing. It had a very clear goal. It had very clear stakes and it had conflict on multiple levels.

Kelp: Along those lines, you mentioned going through years of editing. How did that process feed into the themes you explore? I don't know if they were intended, but I saw themes centered around found family and grief, for example.

Were they original aspects of the story?

Perrin Pring: From my perspective, it did not start that way at all.

Originally Chevy was male, Izan was named Hemina, and regarding the super soldier aspect, there were a lot more scenes about their culture that were cut to improve pacing. And the bonds the characters share became apparent very late in the edits.

Like, originally the story had an additional POV. But everybody who read my book said they didn’t want four POVs. Since Izan spends a lot of the book in and out of consciousness, I cut his and suddenly the reader doesn’t know his intentions—was he good or bad? Right away, the remaining main POVs, Dolan and Chevy, they saw him very differently.

Because of that, Dolan and Chevy's relationship suddenly became more father-daughter like. Chevy had a crush on Izan and Dolan didn't trust him—but without Izan’s POV, Dolan and Chery leaned into each other—their bonds grew deeper because we didn't have the ubiquitous viewpoint into everybody's mind.

Without Izan’s thoughts, found family and grief and learning to trust emerged by themselves in the story’s themes. All I did was cut his POV. Suddenly it was like seeing in stereo. All along the foundation was there, but as the writer I didn't see it until the cut.

Now, those themes are super important in the second book.

Kelp: Many writers struggle with the idea of getting a draft perfect the first time. It sounds like you would be an advocate of the opposite.

Perrin Pring: Yeah, I'm getting better at writing good stuff from the start and it saves me time on the back end. But this was a crazy journey to see where it started, what the ideas were, what got cut, and what the vision was.

I mean, Kurt Vonnegut claimed he would spend eight hours writing four sentences, but those four sentences were perfect. And good for him. I'm so far away from that. I've learned, perfection is the enemy of good; aim for perfect and I’ll never get anything done.

Kelp: Regarding your revisioning process, there is a moment near the end—no spoilers—where we understand the big picture. I was surprised, it was quite the reveal. Did you know it from the beginning or did that come later?

Perrin Pring: That was one of the last things we realized about the story. My agent Jud read it and gave me that note. I was like, "That totally changes everything." But it was a great idea. And so I did it. But yes, that was pretty wild with how it didn’t exist for the majority of the manuscript's lifespan.

Again, that came about because Izan’s POV got scrubbed. Suddenly there were questions about certain characters motivations and it opened up the floor to explore more conflict.

Kelp: That seems incredible, because it’s big moment that changes everything.

Perrin Pring: Crafting the book was a process of constant discovery. You’d think, I wrote this so I know everything about it. Sure, I made up these characters, but they’re always surprising me. And it’s weird because they all came out of my brain. I guess that's the alchemy of writing.

Kelp: Speaking of hidden aspects, I wanted to talk about your characters. You have a diverse cast. Dolan’s a 60-year-old man, more or less. You have Chevy, who's a big woman from the South, a tough Marine. And there’s Izan, a beautiful effeminate man.

Do you find aspects of yourself in each of them even though on the surface they're nothing like you?

Perrin Pring: Probably. Dolan's desire to shut off the world, I think I share that with him. And Chevy's desire just to run toward every problem, I probably share that to a degree. Izan though is more mysterious to me.

Being small but being technically proficient at something was always something I wanted to embody but he became a different character from where he started.

And unlike Chevy, I am not kicking down doors every day. But I really appreciate how her answer at times is to punch somebody in the face, and then she goes on with her day.

Kelp: What about your antagonists, like The Crane?

Perrin Pring: I think writing characters who are doing something you don't get to do is very fun. In other stories some of my favorite characters are the ones that are always a mess. The Crane isn't really a mess, he's more methodical and driven and he's pretty cold.

So, he was not my favorite character to write, but it is nice to have a character who doesn't have boundaries.

Kelp: So Cash began as a conversation with your husband in 2000 and now it’s out in bookstores. What were the most pivotal moments that got you here?

Perrin Pring: Graduate school—the MFA—was huge.

I was struggling to stay happy with my job and I had to find something else to invest my passion. I always wanted to go to grad school, but I did not understand the writing industry and was never successful querying.

Finding how the University of California Riverside Palm Desert’s MFA focused not only on craft but how the industry works was huge. And I didn’t have to quit my job to go to grad school. I was able to improve my writing and learn how the industry operates. I also made connections—other writers, agents, editors—and that was after a decade and a half of feeling unsuccessful.

Kelp: And that's how we met.

Perrin Pring: Which was great.

Kelp: Last question. Your story centers around a fight among mega-corporations. I wonder if that’s a statement on the world today?

Perrin Pring: In my career, I’ve learned when people get together and start making decisions on behalf of a broader spectrum of people, themes arise.

So in Cash, the American government's crumbled and we've entered a new phase of governance where everybody signs up with a corporation and subscribes to their benefit program. To me, that’s a government. It doesn't matter if they're a private government or public government—governments are governments. In the book, Launch Tech cares about their subscribers. They provide healthcare and education. It's a corporation, but it’s a government. Are they doing good? Are they doing bad? Probably both.