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

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 All My People Are Elegies. 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. Dougherty offers stories of working-class bars, streets, neighborhoods, insights into his work as a medical technician and caregiver for the brain-injured, and essays that touch on disability rights, his years working in a pool hall, and his autistic daughter. This book is full of people real, and some imagined. He offers us a poignant ode to a coworker taken by gun violence, and unflinching lyrical responses to the illness and alcoholism that has scarred his own family. Dougherty writes, "Too often in American culture we are taught to accept rejection without retort. Like it's rude or presumptuous to speak back. What does it mean to be rejected? 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."