Every Story Has a Prelude. Today, Hers Begins. (Part 3 of 3)
After the Reading: Boundaries, Becoming, and a Pen that Makes it Official
Capri Art Café & Gallery — August 30, 2025.
By the last half hour, the room had the soft hum of a place that has done the hard listening. The poems were behind us, the laughter had loosened, and the questions turned toward the bruise and the future: What comes after a debut that names an ache so precisely? Who do you become when a book lets you lay it down?
“No Sequel to Pain”
The next question was playful on its face—Is there a sequel?—but the room understood what it carried. Sequel to the love that nearly was? Sequel to being chosen second? Marjorie smiled, then set a boundary as clean as a closing line.
“I don’t want to have a sequel, so to speak,” she said. “I don’t want to be a prelude to somebody else’s story anymore.”
There will be more work—just not a reprise of the wound. She’s drafting another poetry collection that looks outward, toward the social texture and its fractures.
“The horrors of society,” she called it, half-joking and fully serious—and a novel that she hopes to finish.
She asked the room for what every working writer needs: patience, and the promise that they won’t tire of supporting her. “For now,” she teased, “you’re the only ones who support me.”
The point stood. This debut closes a chapter—no sequels to pain; only new forms.
What Happens if “They” Call
From the floor, the author’s former colleague, Edgyn, asked the blunt question that rides home with any book that touches real life: What if the people who inspired these poems reach out?
Would she let them back in?
Her answer was startling only for its steadiness. She would not. “I think I’ve already given them enough,” she said—tears, time, sadness, rage. “So, this time, sorry, you’re no longer part of my life… Don’t reach out.”
It wasn’t cruelty; it was a decision about stewardship of self, a boundary set after the book found the language to hold it.
Why Write at All
If you draw a hard line, you owe a soft reason, and Marjorie offered it next. Art, she said, helps us express and connect with other people.
She wants to be known as a writer who is unapologetically herself—courageous when every small thing is judged, honest even when the truth is uncomfortable. It wasn’t an author’s pose; it felt like a standard she was binding to her future work.
“I want you to know me as me,” she said. “I want to be known as a writer who has courage. Who beats the odds. Somebody people can believe, somebody who shares her passion… an honest writer who is not afraid to share her truth.”
The Family Section
Then came a tender detour, the kind that only happens when a launch doubles as a reunion. Two family members—Jennifer, her cousin, and Adriana, her sister—took the mic, shy and bright.
Their presence pulled another story forward: the book’s dedication to Charles, the author’s late brother. “He’s Charles. I dedicated the book to him,” Marjorie said, voice steadying around the name. The author had tried to be “a mother who is turbulent… straight… who gets scolded,” a tongue-in-cheek way of describing the accountability that comes with love.
“How you were raised… it affects you,” she said. “I’m not their mother, yes, but that’s how it affects me.” Pride and expectation braided in the air; when asked what she wanted them to feel, her answer was simple: inspired to pursue their own dreams.
It’s easy to mistake a poetry launch for a private event, but moments like this reveal a different architecture. The book is personal, yes—but it’s also communal. A room full of witnesses helps a writer say aloud what the page has already decided.
What We Carry Out of the Room
With the formal Q&A closed, the host steered the crowd toward the signing table and the little choreography that makes encounters smooth: pens for the queue. If you had a copy, bring it up. If you needed one, the stack waited at the side. It was all logistics and kindness, the way good launches are.
But before ink met title page, there was a small rite. From HRBN (Haribon) Publishing, we handed the author a Parker pen engraved with her name—“the pen she will use to sign the book that you will buy today from that stand.” Someone asked the practical question of the age—Can I use GCash?—and the room laughed when the answer came: Yes. Community, but make it checkout-friendly.
The Meaning of a Signature
A signature at a book launch looks ceremonial—and it is—but it also does something ordinary and profound.
Lines become possession, then inscription, then memory.
The author signs; the reader leaves with proof that the voice existed in the same room. That mark also moves the book from hers to ours. It is a handoff, not a stamp.
Watching Marjorie sign that first stack, you could see the trip the poems had taken—through drafts and doubt, through the days when the novel stalled and the job listings didn’t write back, through the decision to stop asking life for a different ending and to write the one she had.
The title that once felt like a sentence—Prelude Girl—now reads like a declaration: this was the before of a writer who chose the after for herself.
No Epilogue, Only Next
What does “after” look like? Not an epilogue stitched to the same narrative. New work: poems that take on society’s sharper corners, a novel that trades lyric concision for the long engine of story. “I hope I can make it. I hope I can finish it,” she said. It didn’t sound like uncertainty; it sounded like a contract with time.
And when future readers—some of them in this room, some of them finding the book later by accident—ask what kind of writer she is, they’ll have a clean answer because she gave it to them: courageous, unfiltered, honest. The kind who doesn’t write a sequel to hurt, but writes past it so others can, too.
The Room After the Room
By the time the signing line thinned, the café had shifted into that gentle after-state: cups gathered, group photos attempted, relatives comparing schedules, friends promising to message the links.
Marjorie Gavan looked both humbled and amused—the two expressions that come standard with a first launch—and thanked people with the specificity of someone who knows how long a favor takes. The night did what it came to do: it let a book enter the world, and it let a person enter a new name she already owned.
On the way out, HRBN (Haribon) Publishing read aloud the simplest benediction: Don’t wait for permission to write. Just write your thoughts, even when your prose falters. It had been said from the mic earlier, tucked inside the host’s sign-off, but it echoed truer in the doorway.
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Thank you, Capri Art Café & Gallery—for the space, the patience, and the room where a prelude became a beginning.