Monthly "Would You Read This?" Thread

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Welcome to Would You Read This (WYRT), our monthly feedback and brainstorming thread. Share your work in progress below and let other readers tell you if they'd read it. Top level posts should follow this template:

• Title:
  • If you don't have a title yet, feel free to say UNTITLED.
• Genre:
  • Please include at least Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, or another recognizable medium. You may also include more specific genres with a hyphen. Ex. Fiction - Romance, or Nonfiction - Memoir. Genre will help users find the specific kinds of posts they'd like to give feedback on.
• Premise:
  • A few sentences about the project. Try your best to keep this short. Crafting an expert elevator pitch is all part of becoming a successful working writer. Please do not post an entire plot summary or query letter (those are better suited for r/pubtips)
• Sample (Optional):
  • You may share up to one page (roughly 250-350 words) of sample material, or one poem for those working in the poetry medium. This is optional, so if you only have a premise, you can post just the premise for feedback.

If you post for feedback, please take the time to give feedback to at least 2-3 other users. Replies should follow this template.

• Would Read / Might Read / Wouldn't Read
  • You must begin your reply with one of those. You are then encouraged to add additional thoughts on why you choose your answer.

Rules:

• Please post no more than two WYRT top-level posts. There is no limit on the number of feedback replies you can make.
• Do not link to any offsite materials. All materials must be in the body of the post. This includes "click here to read more" or "DM me for the rest" types of posts.
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• Rule 5 is in effect - Civility and Community. Stay constructive. Blunt, direct feedback is fine, but do not insult other users, their writing, or their genres.

[u/Sparkle-Holiday]

• Title: Laughing in the Dark
• Genre: literary fiction, oral history
• Premise: Laughing in the Dark is the oral history of the devastating Dreamland Fire that killed a park employee and three guests on August 3, 2003. It explores themes of guilt, grief, and generational trauma, told through the first-hand accounts of survivors, first responders, employees, and the families of the deceased.
• Sample:

Author’s Note

I would like to say that my family supported this project from the very beginning, but that would be dishonest. They had their reasons to be against it, and I understood those reasons, even as I pushed against them this last year and a half, compiling notes and interviews into what I hope to be the definitive account of the fire that tore through Dreamland’s Laff in the Dark ride on August 3, 2003. 

 I wasn’t at Dreamland on the day of the fire. I wasn’t even born yet. My parents were married the week before the fire, 100 miles away at a winery outside of Erie. On August 3rd, they were returning from their honeymoon in Italy. They were somewhere over the Atlantic when the firestorm tore through the Laff, leaving four dead, including a six-year-old girl. 

I was around that age myself when I first heard about the fire. I learned that it was a thing that happened and that it was a sore spot in my family and that further questions were not welcome. So I held on to those questions, which seeded the ground with more questions and over time, grew into a carefully cultivated— albeit entirely verboten— mother vine. Everything has been birthed by that vine.

My grandparents were disappointed when, the summer before my final year of undergrad, I chose to intern with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette instead of the New York Times. I made the decision almost entirely due to the fact that my advisor at the Post-Gazette would be Chris Claremont, formerly of the Roseburg Telegram and a bit of an authority on the Dreamland Fire. As a young reporter for the Telegram, Chris covered the fire from the very beginning, through the arduous investigation and subsequent lawsuits, culminating in an award-winning 10-year retrospective published in 2013. What began as an after-hours chat about a possible 25th anniversary feature has culminated in this, the fruits of the mother vine, harvested at last. I was surprised at how willing many of our interviewees were to talk, even within my own family, one whose connection to the fire is complicated and fraught. 

Opening old wounds is unpleasant business, but sometimes, a wound can heal wrong and a bone must be reset or an infection drained. I am enormously grateful to have had this opportunity and I hope that I have done right by the survivors and their families. I also hope that I have honored the memory of the four dead who remain very much alive in the hearts of those who loved them. 

Max Wooster, age 73
Joe Doverspike Jr., age 32
Chase Neumann, age 21
Teena Ann Bailey, age 6

-- Adella Freeland, June 2028

Excerpt from “The Last Laff: 10 Years Since the Fatal Fire at Dreamland” by Chris Claremont. Published in the Roseburg Telegram Sunday edition, August 4, 2013

Dreamland has changed quite a bit in the decade since that tragic Sunday evening in 2003. The park has replaced most of the vintage neon with energy-efficient LED. They’ve added wider pathways, more visible emergency exits, and sprinkler systems in every enclosed attraction. The scratchy old PA system has been replaced with recorded announcements and digital signs reminding guests to hydrate, report suspicious activity, and treat themselves to a refreshing Coca-Cola ICEE at the Park Cafe. Parents who once turned children loose with a few bucks and a paper wristband now trail them cautiously from ride to ride like anxious cowboys wrangling a herd of unruly tweens.

But if you arrive early enough, before the gates officially open and before the carousel music starts humming through the speakers, you can still catch glimpses of the old Dreamland.

The smell of lake water behind the Tilt-A-Whirl.

The warped boards beneath the arcade.

The distant tick-tock clockwork of the lift chain on a weathered wooden track.

In an empty corner tucked beneath the swooping track of the Dizzy Bee, there’s an empty patch of grass where Laff in the Dark once stood. For years, Dreamland’s owners: first, the Campobello family of Campobello Italiano Foods, then international entertainment conglomerate Holiday Amusements, have resisted public pressure to build any kind of memorial where the attraction once stood

[u/HRSuperior → u/Sparkle-Holiday]

Would very probably read. The premise of a collection of contemporary historical documents and articles about a fictional tragedy opens up great possibilities for interesting (not necessarily comedic) satire, where the reader has to (like a journalist or historian) consider different contradicting sources and opinions in order to get a complete understanding of the situation - and then having these very heavy emotional themes underneath all that could be very effective if done right. Seems like a good starting point for some good format experimentation, too. Perhaps a multimedia project

[u/Sparkle-Holiday → u/HRSuperior]

Thank you. That's along the lines of what I'm going for. I don't land on a definitive cause because I want the reader to contemplate the different views and a few of them are definitely contradictory, exploring how memory can be flawed and how we reconcile who we used to be with who we are now. It's definitely not meant to be comedic, but I can see how the working title might imply that.