All My People Are Elegies: Essays, Prose Poems and Other Epistolary Oddities

Poetry. In the spirit of Michael Martone's "contributor note" essays, Sean Thomas Dougherty has created a book of responses written to his rejection letters. After a furious series of rejections from dozens of literary magazines, Dougherty had enough. He decided to fight back. Sean improvised in real time a series of epistolary public responses on Facebook over a six-month period that began Dear Editor. The edited result is this collection. But this book is less about the literary arts than it is about Dougherty's life, his family, friends, and the world of people struggling to live in the working-class cities and towns along Lake Erie. This book writes back against the world that says shut up, you are less than, you do not matter, you are poor, you are different. You are damaged. These pieces hope to connect across our shared failures. Editing is a tough job. We are all in some ways both submitters and gatekeepers as artists, even if only inside ourselves. In the end we are all failures. We are all witnesses for each other.