Please buy directly from Finishing Line Press and support small publishers: click here and place your order.
The story of how 10048 came to be is a real roller coaster. I recount the lessons I learned in “In Praise of Rejection,” which was featured in Parhelion Literary Magazine in 2022. Some initial notes date from the fall of 2001, but I set out to work on it in earnest years later. It was a project fueled by a sense of moral duty and hope but also by doubt. In 2005, I committed myself to doing what I could to write about 9/11, arguably the defining event in our lifetime. But I kept putting the poems aside because they always felt inadequate to the event; plus, the “event” continued. New facts and stories kept revealing themselves.
Even early on, I knew that the title was going to be the zip code for the Twin Towers; somehow locating it like that felt right, even if seeing those numbers, 10048, doesn’t convey much info. In fact, every time I tried to create a “clearer” title, each one limited what the book’s about. Anything that pinned it down to a 9/11 book leaves out how much more vast these themes are. Here’s part of the first section of the first poem:
this goes into the bedrock of an island
and before the blueskies morning of September
[…]
this goes way back and deep into the bedrock of a nation
I found myself returning to the stories, the significant moment, the individual person. I found myself trying to “scale it to the human being,” to quote the architect of the Twin Towers, Minoru Yamasaki. Every title other than the zip code, where letters and bills and all kinds of mail passed through, failed to catch that personal element.
I only started sending this manuscript to publishers in August 2011. In the last seven years, it was rejected more than 40 times and more than 10 additional publishers were queried but expressed no interest. All writers face rejection, and a project like this, which is politically charged, requires even more persistence. What’s strange is 10048 was actually accepted for publication. Twice. Once in 2013 and again more recently. Despite being elated that an editor wanted to get behind the book, I knew it needed the right publisher. This collection and the stories it tells deserve to be done right. I needed to be patient as well as persistent, and I needed to remain ambitious while being humble before the material.
The lessons I learned from riding this roller coaster are expressed in my essay, “In Praise of Rejection,” featured in Parhelion Literary Magazine.
Would you help the book find it’s readers?
Share the link (https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/10048-by-edward-a-dougherty/) on social media and via email. Also, there’s space on Finishing Line’s book page for reviews and blurbs. If anyone has any trouble ordering online, FLP accepts checks and money orders at:
PO Box 1626
Georgetown, KY 40324
Please send $19.99 + $2.99 shipping (per copy) By mail only: If ordering multiple copies, shipping is $2.99 for the first copy and $1.99 for each additional copy.
Edward A. Dougherty 