Madhouse Author Interview: The Sorrow Festival by Erin Slaughter

Good Morning Friends and Fiends--

Today in The Madhouse I'm thrilled to be hosting Erin Slaughter, author of the poetry collection The Sorrow Festival, which not to sound dramatic, is probably one of my new favorite books and definitely one I plan on incorporating into my classes soon. There is so much meat to this book, and while I tend to read poetry that focuses on grief and trauma quite frequently, this one hit like others haven't, and we're going to talk a little bit about why that is in the interview below.

Before we get to our chat though, I want to take a moment to say that I definitely plan on picking up more of Erin's work, too, and I hope that you'll consider adding her work to your TBR lists and shopping carts soon, as well. You can find her whole catalog here and her short fiction collection, A Manual for How to Love Us is available for preorder now. She's definitely a voice to listen to and learn from and I'm looking forward to a long, beautiful writing career from her.

Cheers to beautiful words, 

Stephanie M. Wytovich

SMW: Hi Erin! Welcome to The Madhouse. Since this is your first time joining us here, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and what drew you to poetry in the first place?

ES: Hi! I’m a multi-genre writer of fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and hybrid work, but poetry has always held a special place in my reading heart and in my writing practice. At the root of everything for me is an obsession with language, especially strange, guttural, fragmented language that attempts to translate some human impulse or experience that lies beyond traditional explanation; poetry to me is the ultimate distillation of language’s power, a space to break and remake words to communicate something we have not been given words for.

SMW: What was the writing process like during The Sorrow Festival? Did it differ from any of your other projects, or did you find your routine consistent with this one?

ES: I’m not a very structured writer, so unless I’m on a deadline I rarely keep a consistent routine. For me, the work tends to fall together in long stretches of procrastination followed by bursts of hyper-productivity. With poetry, I often jot down lines as they come to me, then at some point every week or two I sit down and Frankenstein the lines together, filling in the connective tissue to create a cohesive poem. I find myself writing more frequently when traveling to a new place or spending time with other people. When I wrote The Sorrow Festival, these factors lined up in just the right way: I had just moved to Florida to start a PhD program, and the landscape here is profoundly different than anywhere I’ve ever lived, so I immediately became obsessed with the trees and Spanish moss and bright flowers blooming up everywhere. In Florida, I also fell into a large group of writer friends who were compelling human beings to spend time around, plus we were constantly talking about poetics and inhabiting that space of inspiration and generation together. So, I ended up writing the full manuscript in my first 7 or 8 months in Florida, because the world around me and inside me was constantly sparking with things to write about.

SMW: Writing about pain feels intrinsic to poets, and I think that we capture it in a way that fiction or even nonfiction doesn’t. To me, it’s always felt heavier, more potent, like we can describe something that you shouldn’t be able to describe. When I read your book, I was beautifully swept away by all the ways you placed that feeling of sadness and sorrow on the page. For instance, let’s look at this line from “How We Reckon:” “this/is how we fed: on the ambulance/of sorrow strobing beneath the skin.” Can you talk a little bit about how you tapped into sorrow while writing? Did it even overtake you, and if so, how did you protect yourself mentally while writing?

ES: First, thank you for your kind words about my book! More than anything, I think writers hope the emotion behind their work will be felt by readers just as poignantly as they felt it in the writing process, and it’s always meaningful to hear that a reader connected with it in that way.

To answer your question, I really did not protect myself mentally while writing this book, or while living the things I was writing through and about. The rawness of the sorrow and ecstasy that drives the book shows up there for that very reason. I’m sure there are talented writers who can manufacture emotional weight while keeping a healthy distance from the more traumatic subjects, but that’s not how poetry works for me—if there’s a noticeable distance between the raw feeling I’m trying to infuse into the poem and my internal state as I write it, the language comes out flat. I can fake my way into that space, and I can conjure up words that sound pretty when you string them together, but there’s a palpable hollowness in what’s produced. The Sorrow Festival is in many ways a record of me experiencing and processing the most visceral depths of my emotional range in real-time, bleeding out onto the page and then crafting it and shaping it up later. I’m not advocating that anyone has to dive headfirst into their trauma in order to write well, I’ve just personally never had a strategy for protecting myself when writing.

SMW: There are some notes on motherhood, creation, and birth within the book that spoke to me, especially as a new mother. Again, in the poem “How We Reckon,” you write: “& I promise to write more odes/to my uterus/it used to bring me dead things/like the neighborhood cat/laid a splayed cardinal at the foot/of my bed.” And then later on in “Hurricane Fragments”, you write: “men are not taught/in the same way to cultivate/the lingered gardens of their sorrow.” As a writer—and more specifically as a poet—what is your relationship to the word mother, and do you think there is a specific type of pain that mothers (or women) themselves have to carry? Does this differ from how men carry pain?

ES: It’s so interesting that you picked up on that theme—I didn’t set out to write about motherhood, but it kept presenting itself over and over in my examinations of grief. Looking back, I can identify a few reasons for that: in many of these poems, especially the earliest ones, I was writing about my own mother. I thought it was about examining her relationship history as a lens through which I could understand my own, but it inevitably became about how daughters internalize a performance of womanhood through their mothers, and how that extends to other types of love and caretaking—particularly a clinging, memory-hoarding, self-sacrificial strain of love that I related to immensely at the time.

My sister also comes up a lot in this collection, and in the poem you mentioned, “How We Reckon,” I was processing the news of her pregnancy in light of the complicated relationship we have as sisters, as well as my own complicated feelings about literal and metaphorical life-making. I have PCOS, and I’ve been told it could be difficult for me to become pregnant, so in the background, there’s this potential infertility that could be seen as a failure of my body, but at the same time, I’m very ambivalent about the idea of having children, and there’s a societal and familial pressure attached to becoming a mother that can also make me feel like a failure for choosing not to be one. This poem is also reckoning with a relationship that was in no way stable or conductive to any kind of permanence, especially not the kind that leads to family-making. So tied to fertility in the poem is this feeling of loss and failure coming from all angles: feeling guilt that I am not a mother and have not prioritized becoming one, feeling loss over my strained relationship with my sister as she prepares to have a child, and feeling a grief about not being able to have that experience—of pregnancy, of the whole ‘happily ever after’ women are taught to seek—even if I wanted it, while grieving the lack of possibility in this stunted romantic/sexual relationship.

Outside of the poems themselves, I’ve also spent a lot of time mentally reckoning with the political griefs attached to motherhood—it feels like I barely have a choice in deciding whether I want to be a mother, because motherhood in this country is not just about birthing and raising children: it also means signing up to be judged as if your body and life are public property, in many cases being forced to abandon your work to be the default caregiver, with very little emotional or financial support, pressure to give up your independence, autonomy, and personal identity outside of the family, and (in a heterosexual partnership) potentially putting yourself in a position of dependence on a male partner who innately wields more power. Not to mention the (now more expansive) barriers to safe abortion access that erase a person’s right to choose whether or not to give birth in the first place.

That’s a very long explanation of where I’m coming from around the topic of pregnancy and motherhood, which is definitely not to discount anyone else’s experiences of, or desires for, parenthood—these are just some of the ways in which motherhood feels complex and grief-ridden to me personally. But to answer your actual question: I do think women’s pain is exacerbated by social norms of silence that belittle them by calling them “hysterical” or “overly-sensitive” or whatever if they dare to openly express hurt and anger. I also think the way women are socially conditioned to be hyperaware of their bodies as sites to be acted upon creates an internalized pain that men don’t have to contend with (which is not to say men and people of other genders aren’t burdened by pain in equally harmful ways; patriarchy is a cult of repression, and that’s ultimately bad for everyone).

SMW: The collection is broken up into five sections: (1) Digging Teeth Out of the Garden, (2) River, (3) Land of the Rootfisted, (4) Gulf Epistolary, and (5) Sun Come Antlered. Can you talk about how you chose those title markers and what they mean/t to you thematically?

ES: My first poetry collection, I Will Tell This Story to the Sun Until You Remember That You Are the Sun, was sectioned by seasons, beginning with summer and ending with spring, and there’s something about the seasonal arc that lives in this book too: beginning with burning, diving into the depths of cold bleakness, and then clawing toward hope and renewal alongside the external world. This collection takes a slightly different journey, although the natural world is often reflected in the narrative shifts between sections.

The first section is titled after a line in the final poem of that section, “Holding the Loose Bones Close,” which uses the image of burying a child’s baby teeth in the garden as a metaphor for gracefully accepting the passage of time. But in the poem, I compare myself to my mother, saying I would end up digging the teeth up and hoarding them, the way we both hoard memories and cling to idealized notions. This first section was trying to set up the themes of gender-based violence and inheritances. “River” and “Gulf Epistolary,” the second and fourth sections, are different in that they’re both self-contained pieces, interruptions between the sections of arranged poems. They both swirl around the story of my father’s murder, but take different angles, using different styles and forms. Though all these poems are very much rooted in the natural landscape of Florida, “Land of the Rootfisted” holds the poems that are more explicitly so, intimately tying the emotional core to the destruction of hurricanes, lush blooms, feral rodents, and festering loam. “Sun Come Antlered,” the final section, is the “spring” section, to go back to the arc of seasons. It’s moving toward empowerment, connection, renewal, and allowing in a fresh tenderness, but as the title suggests, it’s not an uncomplicated awakening to sunlight and happiness; it’s still thorny and carrying that old grief but starting to navigate how to repurpose it.

SMW: In your poem “The Cool Girl Façade Begets Its Own Layer of Animal Grief” you write: “If I’m going to pretend there’s ever been a time when wandering/the grounds of a public graveyard isn’t where I felt safest/.” Now, I don’t know if it’s the poet in me, or the forever-goth, but I connected with this as someone who likes to walk in cemeteries, has a slight obsession with Victorian mourning jewelry, and who just generally appreciates the stillness and quiet I feel around graveyards. Can you talk about your relationship with this “animal grief” you reference in the title? Do you find yourself finding solace in places that typically beget grief, i.e., walking in cemeteries, watching horror films, etc. (I certainly do!).

ES: When it comes to horror movies, I’m a huge baby—one good jump-scare and I’ll be scared of the dark for weeks—but I do LOVE a good cemetery. Since I was a teenager, I’ve always hung out in graveyards, partly for the beauty and meditative solitude, and partly out of some writerly sensibility to imagine the people buried there, wondering who they were and what their lives were like, these full and vibrant people reduced down to a few faded lines on a gravestone. And of course, there’s a selfish impulse there too: I want to believe when I’m dead and I’m just another of those faceless gravestones, someone will try to remember me.

When we seek out ghost stories and horror films, I think some part of it is coming from a place of anxiety—exposing ourselves to the most grotesque, extreme outcomes of death to desensitize ourselves to it or get more comfortable with it, in order to prepare for the inevitable deaths of ourselves and our loved ones. And just as my book views sorrow as the necessary underbelly of joy, and vice versa, there is no horror without the preexistence of empathy. We might on a surface level recognize harm as unfortunate, but our love for and identification with the victim of the harm is what generates horror. Grief is in so many ways an uncontrollable heightening of love, a love expanding to terrifying proportions in an attempt to fill the vacuum where the loved subject used to be. 

SMW: There is phrase in your poem “I Hope My Salt Lamp Is a Weeping Deity” that made me smile: “Everyone has agreed/ the audience is tired of hearing about the body.” Now this made me smile because I feel like the body is something that has been under the microscope for, well forever, honestly (and especially now, *deep sigh*), and it’s so highly scrutinized that yes, I think we could say there is this collective cry for an end surrounding its constant criticization, but in the same breath, that focus on the body is the only thing advocating for it: for its equality, its freedom, its choice. This line is so perfect because it conveys all of that while working with the themes of identity, personal landscape, intimacy, and beauty that you’ve presented in your poems. So with that said, how do you think The Sorrow Festival tackles the theme of the body and why do you feel it’s important to continue highlighting it in your work?

ES: This is one of those lines that felt like a bit of a bitter joke when I wrote it, because poets I’ve workshopped with will sometimes make light of how often the word “body” or bodily imagery appears in my poetry, and in contemporary poetry in general—it’s one of those digs that rings true and that I often make light of about myself and my own work. At the same time, scrutiny not just about the body as a subject but about the impulse to write about the body seems to come from, in my experience, a position of privilege: those whose bodies are considered “the norm,” whose bodies are not legislated as government property, whose bodies are not objectified and measured as a matter of public discourse, whose bodies have been historically valued in medical and scientific study—those people may find it frivolous or cliché to write about the body because they do not have to spend a lot of time thinking about their bodies. I’m coming to this from my own experience as a white, queer, plus-size cis woman, but this idea obviously extends far beyond my own experience (and beyond simply an experience of gender) to apply to trans bodies, disabled bodies, the bodies of people of color, and anyone whose bodies have been abused, negated, or define them socially.

From a more craft-focused angle, for me the body is where language originates—although I don’t always feel in tune with my body, and have at times been quite dissociated from my body, my experience of existing and moving through the world is first felt internally and physically, so that’s where my writing begins, too.

SMW: In your poem “At the Locust Fork of the Black Warrior River” you end the poem with: “ballerinas stumbling in the rust-/stained mud/&with blood/comes a sadness:/How free I remain.” First off—absolutely beautiful. I love how you’ve taken this book and conjured this immense, sweeping healing with it even while/when talking about topics that focus on death, grief, loss, etc. That’s not easy to do. Can you talk a bit about how poetry can be used as a vehicle for healing, how it can help us process individual or collective trauma?

ES: Thank you! It’s beautiful to hear you enjoyed that poem. I teach college creative writing classes, and when I teach poetry, either as a workshop or as a literature course, I often begin the semester with an excerpt from Gregory Orr’s book Poetry as Survival, which is, among other things, about how claiming an “I” through the lyric tradition can allow us to reshape the narrative of our trauma in order to survive it. Orr writes: “One of story’s primary purposes is to lay claim to experience, to assert the significance of one’s life.” Poetry can be a way to claim an unspoken truth and present your story on your own terms, which is especially powerful for those who have spent their lives being told in implicit and explicit ways that who they are and what has happened to them is unimportant.

The drive to process trauma or self-actualize has created some of our most impactful and lasting art, but the idea of personal healing as integral to the writing process is often criticized; there’s this fallacy that if you don’t claim some erudite distance between the poet and the speaker of the poem, it’s just “writing about your feelings” and can’t be considered as an intentionally crafted literary artifact. In Poetry as Survival, Orr also advocates for “honor[ing] the poet’s authentic survival project first and his or her intended effect on an audience second,” which is completely oppositional to the philosophy of most poetry workshops, at least in academic settings. I think writing as a method to examine trauma or find healing through telling one’s story, putting aside any concern for craft technique or publication, is a legitimate and valuable use of writing; I also think writers can craft a piece of writing with skill, technique, and the intent to publish, in which the mission of the piece is personal growth and cathartic expression, and that is equally valuable and legitimate.

SMW: In the fourth section of the collection, you’re writing these gorgeous letters, baring honesty and crossing out lines, which adds a certain rawness to the page. These pieces can be read as letters or as prose poems and I’m curious about what your connection is to the prose poem and how you know when a piece would be better suited for that format over another.

ES: As I mentioned, I often focus on generating material first and play around with form and shape afterward, but the series of poems you mentioned came out initially as prose blocks. Part of that is because they’re epistolary, which is a prose-based tradition, so I wanted them to retain some of that prosaic quality. Prose poems have a particular pacing and momentum that make the reader take the information in at a certain speed with a certain tone of voice, giving them a clear path to follow from the outset. That allows the writer freedom to experiment in ways that readers might be more receptive to because the form is straightforward and familiar. The same is true of other poems with line breaks and stanza groupings: those forms set the tone, momentum, and lay out the information in a certain order, creating pauses and surprises, or challenging the reader’s expectations.

SMW: What poets are you currently reading? Are there any collections you’re looking forward to adding to your TBR list?

ES: I tend to read books that are in the same vein as what I’m working on or preparing to work on, and right now for me that’s a lot of fiction, so I haven’t been as plugged into poetry lately. But this summer I’m teaching an Intro to Poetry literature class, and it has been a great excuse to go back and revisit the poets I most adore and want to share with my students. I am always floored anew by Morgan Parker’s work each time I revisit it. Franny Choi has a new collection coming out later this year that I’m looking forward to, because I loved her last book, Soft Science. When I was studying for my doctoral exams, I bought the collected works of Alice Notley, and every once in a while I’ll dip into that for a quick shot of poetry, and end up getting sucked in longer than I expected. This last one feels obvious because it’s been so widely praised already, but Kaveh Akbar’s Pilgrim Bell is the last book of poetry I can remember being deeply moved by—like, openly crying in a coffee shop, seeing the world differently for the rest of the day after I finished it. I think right now, as the world continues to reveal itself to be more precarious than we previously believed, a lot of us are reconsidering our relationships to spirituality, and that book taps into that space of spiritual seeking. It collages tragedy with wonder, unimaginable pain with unimaginable beauty, and I think that’s ultimately what life is: a collage of horrible and wonderful contradictions, and language is futile in the face of most of it, but language is the only real tool we have, so all we can do is employ it to record and reveal as best we’re able.

SMW: What’s next for your readers?

ES: In March 2023, my debut short story collection A Manual for How to Love Us is coming out from Harper Perennial, and I couldn’t be more ridiculously thrilled about it. My whole life for the past year has been spent reworking the book with my editor, and I really hope it finds readers who connect with it. The stories all focus on feral, sort of fucked-up women in the American South trying to cope in the aftermath of different kinds of grief, failing and loving and clawing toward hope and burning it all down. It has a bent toward strangeness and magical realism, and the visceral and bodily, so there’s some crossover with The Sorrow Festival in the themes and emotionally driven language.

Bio:

Erin Slaughter is the author of two poetry collections: The Sorrow Festival (CLASH Books, 2022) and I Will Tell This Story to the Sun Until You Remember That You Are the Sun (New Rivers Press, 2019). Her debut book of short fiction, A Manual for How to Love Us, is forthcoming from Harper Perennial in March 2023. She is editor and co-founder of The Hunger, and her writing has appeared in Black Warrior Review, Cincinnati Review, The Rumpus, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. Originally from Texas, she lives in Tallahassee, Florida, where she is a Ph.D. candidate and Kingsbury Fellow at Florida State University.

Social media:

Twitter: @erinslaughter23
Instagram: @erin_slaughter23

Book description for The Sorrow Festival:

Rooted in the beauty and violence of Florida’s landscape, these poems are an exploration of love, sex, martyrdom, home, and what we bring with us when we choose poetry to record the intimacies of a life.