Just One Thing with Erin Slaughter

Erin Slaughter is this month's featured poet, and we are absolutely in love with her poem, "Notes on Un-Apology." (We are also in love with her cat, Amelia, because obviously.) Here, she shares with us just one thing about how her poem came to be:

“Notes on Un-Apology” was written during my first weekend at a writers’ and artists’ residency in Woodstock, New York, on the summer solstice, in a thunderstorm, in an ancient gorgeous eerie wooden mansion, after re-reading Maggie Woodward’s incredible chapbook, found footage. That day, it was sixty degrees in June; I grew up in Texas and did not actually know this was possible. My best friend’s sister was in labor with her first child, and she’d left the residency to drive to Pennsylvania for the birth. The line, “sometimes / I worry I’m not looking for love, that I’m looking / for a religion to have sex with” is one of the most frighteningly honest things I’ve ever written, and might be why the document is saved on my computer as “sorry.”