TBR [to be read] is a semi-regular, invitation-only interview series with authors of newly released/forthcoming, interesting books who will tell us about their new work as well as offer tips on writing, stories about the publishing biz, and from time to time, a recipe!
We don’t expect an elevator
pitch from a poet, but can you tell us about your work in 2-3 sentences?
After a furious series of rejections from dozens of literary
magazines, I spontaneously decided to write back to them. I improvised in real time epistolary public
responses on Facebook over a six-month period that began Dear Editor. But this
book is less about the literary arts than it is about how we use language to
separate or join us, it invites the reader in to participate in my life and my
family, in my work as a caregiver, about alcoholism, working class bars,
neighborhoods, gun violence, and the world of people struggling to live in the
cities and towns along Lake Erie and then some.
What boundaries did you break
in the writing of this book? Where does that sort of courage come from?
Honestly this was my favorite
book I ever wrote because the writing itself was a kind of performance in real
time witnessed by a live audience over months.
I drafted each of these in the little Facebook box. Has anyone written a book that way? I mean Patricia Lockwood wrote her poems on Twitter. Someone must have written a
book on Facebook. As a former
performance poet, I loved this sort of anticipatory live audience. Once I
started the project, my friends on Facebook urged me on. They were incredible. People also started to participate by posting
their own rejections and tagging me. The
project created a sort of community of failure where we all shared and by doing
so kept writing and going forward.
Social media can be so negative and back-biting, but for someone like me
who lives far from any big literary center, it is a way to participate and make
positive communities. The book crisscrosses
various prose genres of the essay, letter, and prose poem, sometimes in the
same piece.
What’s your favorite piece of
writing advice?
Cheryl Strayed: “Write like a
motherfucker.”
My favorite writing advice is
“write until something surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of
this book?
Honestly, that anybody thought
these pieces were anything at first. I
was just performing. I was
clowning. But often in writing, when we
are wearing masks or engaging in a kind of maquillage, it gives us the distance
and temperament and then permission to open and dive into our deepest
wounds. For me the Dear Editor, the
epistolary letter quality of responding to editors real and imagined, created
in me a tone part priestly confessional, part therapy, part Al-Anon group
meeting. To speak to and for and back to
this authority figure took me places I never thought I would write or imagine, particularly
the pieces about my own family or about the murder of my friend young Jose Rosario.
How did you find the title of
your book?
It may have been Al Maginnes, it
was someone on Facebook—more evidence of the collaborative nature of this
project, who pointed out the line to me in one of the pieces one night as a
good title . The title I think speaks to
so many of us who are working folks, who deal with issues of health and
aging. Eventually you reach a point
later in life where the elegies outnumber the odes. Where
your dead friends outnumber your living ones.
What’s something about your
book that you want readers to know?
I want them to know they aren’t
alone as writers, as people. We are all
out there struggling everyday to live decent lives of hope and honor, we fail
everyday together. And that is
something, something to hold on to, and lean on each other, as citizens, as
artists, as people. My readers are my
people.
Inquiring foodies and hungry
book clubs want to know: Any food/s associated with your book?
Pierogi are the preferred
food. This book deals a lot with
alcoholism. Ironically a good bourbon or
Vodka is probably best to appreciate it.
Pour a little out for our brothers and sisters gone before you read it.
*****
READ MORE ABOUT THIS AUTHOR:
www.seanthomasdoughertypoet.com
READ MORE ABOUT THIS BOOK:
https://books.nyq.org/title/all-my-people-are-elegies
ORDER THIS BOOK FOR YOUR OWN TBR
PILE: https://books.nyq.org/title/all-my-people-are-elegies
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