For the past few Tuesdays, Erin Slaughter has introduced reputable writers for The Jerome Stern Reading Series (JSRS). Now, it’s her turn to be presented. Not only is Erin a co-host for The JSRS, she is also a Florida State University Ph.D. candidate and creative writing instructor, the co-founder of The Hunger and the graduate faculty advisor for The Kudzu Review. Underneath all her outside roles, she is an author at heart.
Recently, Erin revealed two anticipated releases: her second book of poetry titled The Sorrow Festival set to be released on Jun. 7, and her debut short fiction collection, A MANUAL FOR HOW TO LOVE US, set to be released in March 2023. When asked about her upcoming works, she responded like this.
Her Campus (HC): Congratulations on your forthcoming debut prose collection and for being published by Harper Perennial! What aspect of your upcoming releases are you anticipating the most?
Erin Slaughter (ES): It’s beyond my wildest dreams to have a book sold to a large publishing house like HarperCollins at this stage in my career. I got very lucky to have the right things align at the right time. I’m also thrilled that my second poetry collection, The Sorrow Festival, landed at CLASH Books. They’re a super cool indie press that seems to get more successful with every book they publish, and they have been wonderful to work with so far.
I’m looking forward to traveling again to do readings for both books. My first book came out a few months before COVID hit, so I was lucky enough to do some events for it. Many of the bigger plans I had got cut short by lockdown (as was the case for so many people). As for the books themselves, The Sorrow Festival represents the intensity of my first two years living in Florida, as well as the height of my productivity as a poet. After primarily being known as a poet during my four years in the FSU Ph.D. program, I’m excited for people to read my prose in A Manual for How to Love Us.
As a striving writer and lover of books, I always wanted to be able to walk into any old Barnes and Noble and see my book there. That actually will happen with the short story collection, which is wild to imagine.
HC: What differences in themes, format or otherwise do these new works possess compared to your previous collections? Furthermore, what were your main inspirations behind them?
ES: One complication with publishing books is that it often takes years after you finish writing a book to find a publisher. It then takes a year or two after that to be published. By the time the book is out, you’ve likely evolved as a writer and may not feel that work best represents you anymore. That was definitely true of my first poetry collection. I’m excited for The Sorrow Festival to come out because it represents me as a writer and contains my best poetry to date. There are ways in which it doesn’t quite represent me on a personal level anymore; the period when I wrote it was whatever the emotional equivalent is to trudging barefoot through burning coal mines. But, I’m grateful to find myself on the other side of those experiences now and to have recorded what it was like.
On the other hand, while some stories in A Manual for How to Love Us are older, much of it was written during the first year of the pandemic. Even the old stories are being reimagined anew as I work with my editor on revisions. So, I do feel like it accurately represents my writing style, the themes I care about and what I can do craft-wise at this point.
To answer your question about inspirations, there is some overlap between the two books: both are interested in exploring family trauma, memory, grief and sexuality. They’re also both heavily focused on gender dynamics and womanhood: each story in A Manual for How to Love Us has a female narrator, and The Sorrow Festival is rooted in experiences of gendered violence. Both have also been influenced by my time living in Tallahassee and being in constant awe of the Florida landscape. The contrast of Florida’s surreal beauty and its visceral underbelly plays a central role in The Sorrow Festival, but it snuck into a few stories in A Manual for How to Love Us as well.
In general, I’m interested in writing about queer women, working-class women, emotionally messy women, the South and Appalachia and the literary blended with the speculative. I want to give readers the feeling that there’s an existential or spiritual mystery to solve. I write for people who desperately want to believe that magic exists and spend their lives looking for signs that it does, no matter how much their rational brain disagrees.
HC: Which published piece have you written, either poetry or prose, that you wish more readers gave attention to and why? Where can readers find it?
ES: That’s a great question. I don’t assume anyone is reading my work, especially when it comes to poetry, and just having my writing out in the world is a gift.
One piece I’m proudest of right now is my short story, “Nest,” which was published in CRAFT earlier this past year, and will appear in my forthcoming short story collection. It’s weird, sad, funny and has an unreliable narrator, which are all my favorite things in fiction.
To keep up to date with Erin and her future endeavors, visit https://erin-slaughter.com/. Preorder The Sorrow Festival here.
Read my first interview with Erin here.
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