Cap Doffers

Chapter 23

On Saturday March 18th at Visible Voice bookstore, I struck up an hour long performance. I read a chapter of my in-progress private fabulist fiction, “Cap Doffers,” to a crowd of about twenty.

I’ve got real superstitions about luck and my own ability sometimes, especially when it comes to situations where warming up and other prep steps aren’t really an option. I had a goofy hunch that I would be fine reading thirteen full pages of narration and dialogue and I didn’t want to blow that hunch by thinking about it.

I proofread chapter 23 one last time before printing it out and took mental note of where to isolate sentences to make information pop more and where to make sure sentences didn’t stop coming so longer descriptions could vocally build and resolve. Still though, at the moment the reading started, it had been hours since I’d done that. But the event had been advertised as starting at seven and there was no other course of action but to shut up and jam.

“Cap Doffers,” still struts the way it did back in 2018 when I first started writing it. The audience laughed, gasped and cheered along with the words. Fun, private observations and reactions were shared at individual tables. There even had to be a full pause for laughter after a one-sentence description of a mustache. The room was in the story. I’m always having a ball when that happens, but the best feelings happen afterward when someone talks to me to tell me what they personally liked. I got wonderful pieces of feedback from Cleveland’s grooviest people, but my favorite reaction to the chapter has to be the following, taken from an email sent by my friend Jake Shilling:

“It is a full serving, almost stuffed with description. While not prose, the language is fitting to the thing itself: obtuse words and French vernacular intermix easily within. The dated setting and the characters using such language aids the immersion instead of making the reader feel awkward and stupid. Actually, it makes the reader feel inadequate, but in a way as if one were pursuing a love interest: the reader wants to rise to the level, or at least fake it until made whole somehow.”

I’m proud to still be working on this thing as hard I can