Under the Cover: “A Species of Apprenticeship”: Why It Took 10 Years to Publish The Stag Head Spoke

Back in April, at the official launch of Erina Harris’s debut collection, The Stag Head Spoke, editor Paul Vermeersch told the somewhat amusing story of hounding Harris for nearly a decade to send him a manuscript. Having heard her read in 1997, Paul was immediately taken with Erina’s work – so much so that she was one of the first poets he asked for a manuscript when he became poetry editor at Insomniac Press in 2001. As he tells it, “She always had a reason to put it off – she needed more time, she wanted to wait until she finished her Master’s, she wanted to do some teaching, she was pursuing a PhD…” Eventually, the two lost touch.

Then, in late 2011, when Paul joined Wolsak and Wynn as Senior Editor, serendipity struck. There, in the slush pile, plain and unassuming, sat Erina’s manuscript. His first thought? “Well, it’s about time!” 

About time, indeed. While there’s no arguing with the results – The Stag Head Spoke is a highly polished debut, with a sophistication of form and language rarely seen in a first collection – even Erina admits that a decade is “an especially long gestation period in the current publishing culture.”

So what took so long?

According to Erina, the delay “can be attributed to a kind of perfectionism, definitely, but only in part.” Mostly, she felt that she “owed poetry a certain debt of competence.” So, she embarked on what she calls “a species of apprenticeship,” quite literally “following poetry all over the world.” Seeking out residencies in Austria, Italy, and even Slovenia, where she wrote in a little cottage with chickens at her ankles, Erina honed the manuscript she affectionately nicknamed “The Beast” (a name it shared, incidentally, with the suitcase it travelled in). After a particularly generative residency in Banff, Erina “made the uncomfortable but necessary decision” to leave the security of a full-time job and familiar city to study in the U.S. As she puts it, “I remember that this felt as if I were taking long-awaited rites.”

Throughout her travels and her academic pursuits, Erina “continually subjected the manuscript to new questions and influences.” For example, the second “book” in the collection is “an experimental elegy-play” that arose from her grief at the suicide of a close friend. Erina writes:

       In writing this, traditional elegiac forms failed me: these were
       generally linear, solipsistic, and posited “nature” as a passive
       metaphor for human grieving. I strived to present an empathetic
       and relevant version of elegy: with human community as opposed
       to a single narrator in isolation, and as irreducible to linear time
       and comprehension. Could I engage “nature” in a more ethical and
       accurate way: as an accompaniment that is unmasterable? I asked
       myself.

As another example, the first poem in the collection is written in rhyming couplets, but this form has been so central in the history of poetry, that Erina found it “unsatisfactory…to not invigorate and challenge this traditional form in some way.” And so, she rewrote the poem using slant rhyme, which to her had “a music more suggestive of complexity and dissonance,” thereby more appropriate to the poem’s narrative of an ostracized, self-divided child.

In the end, Erina attributes the delay in publication to her changed relationship with publishing. After publishing frenetically in her twenties, “with a youthful fearlessness and urgency,” she came to a point at which she no longer viewed publishing alone as the mark of a poet. Rather, she began to think of publication as participation in larger conversations, conversations outside of the self, and as such, she felt her work required a certain readiness to enter the dialogue.

Having finally succeeded in creating such work, to much critical acclaim, Erina is not content to rest on her laurels. She is now hard at work on a new project, a reanimation and adaptation of the Demeter and Persephone myth. Despite having already spent nearly four years on research and describing the creative process as “ouchingly arduous,” Erina says she does not intend to take ten years this time. But even if she did, you can be sure it’d be worth the wait.

*****

Big thanks to the Wolsak & Wynn staffers, especially Emily, for sharing this "under the cover" look at The Stag Head Spoke.