Anti-Sentimentic
When I read submissions for Willow Springs, certain words and phrases kill off my interest in the narrative entirely, dismissing the prose as sentimental drivel: cancer, realize, hospital, grandmother, English major, “I felt”, shimmering, and so on (okay, English major doesn’t denote sentimentality, necessarily, but oftentimes in a story/essay, after a grandmother dies of cancer in the hospital, the narrator realizes that she needs to major in English and write shimmering prose that makes her feel…[insert digressive cliche here]); it’s like using the phrase, “In today’s society” – people know better, but they do it anyway. I was in Hutchinson, Kansas, this past weekend among 18 immediate and extended family members – the largest family reunion I remember being a part of, thanks to nieces and nephews and once-removed cousins born in the last few years – to see my grandfather. Prior to arriving, I had set out to “interview” my grandfather: to listen to some old stories, how he met my grandma, what he did in WWII, and so on, and somehow turn it into a “progressive” grandfather essay, but it was difficult to find a good time to sit down and talk with him. My grandfather is not only 94, he’s Satsangi and awakens at 2:00 AM every morning to meditate, takes a long time and a sturdy cane to do anything mobile, and while he loves having his family around, he gets exhausted by 8:00 PM, when the sun is still up. Furthermore, there were 17 others either doting after him, whacking his fragile knees with Matchbox cars, offering to walk him to places that he doesn’t particularly want to go, and his great-grandchildren are far more fun, stealing the spotlight for everyone. Besides, other members of my family have been saying and doing far more interesting things than my grandfather, bless his heart. The majority of my not-discreet-at-all note-taking includes things like my Uncle saying, “Nice beards,” a little too loudly in front of a group of Mennonites at some family restaurant, my 70 year-old dad threatening to whack his great-nieces/nephews with a heavy, wooden high chair at a fancy country club, or my four year-old niece proudly declaring that she swam the length of the pool “all by [my]self,” while her practical dad, (my brother) who helped her the entire way, replied, “Actually, honey, you didn’t swim across the pool by yourself at all.” Decontextualized, these observations are hardly funny, though, and the thought of giving my family the context they deserve sounds exhausting for several reasons: they say you “write what you know,” but when you’ve constantly been around what you know, you don’t want to write about it. I don’t know if any of you have ever kept a journal, detailing every day of the year: once June rolls around, entries look something like, “Got up, showered, watched TV, met Dylan, drank a beer on the patio, went to Best Buy, bought Cure CD, went home, ate dinner, sat around, wrote this, Zzzz.” When you finish the entry, you just naturally assume that you’ll remember what happened that day: “Oh, of course I’ll remember this as the Patio-Head on the Door afternoon.” But six years later, and I don’t remember this shit. Before I get too far off track, the other problem concerning writing about extended family/grandfather is dodging sentimentality. I made the mistake of telling my parents my intentions of talking with my grandfather and getting some essay material, and they said something like, “Oh, that’s so sweet – he’ll really appreciate that.” Great. Whether or not I actually write about this experience, somewhere in the back of my head will be my grandfather. Don’t get me wrong, he’s a wonderful man, but it’s bad enough when we have our internal editors, and once Grandfather joins the fray, and, by extension, the rest of the family, because he’ll want to show it off, no matter what the quality, I can’t talk about how I wanted to go back to my hotel room, drape my extended family mask over the towel rack, watch E!, and drink beer in my underwear. I can’t say anything that would hurt or offend family members, because I’ve got such a specific, socially conservative audience to keep in mind. Now, that said, I suppose I’m still in my family bubble, in that once I’m far enough removed from this reunion, I could give a crap less what my extended family thinks of what I write. The problem is, I want to write an essay for my grandfather, and I do want him to see it. And let’s face it – old people are sentimental. The problem is, I don’t know what will be more difficult: swallowing my pride and compromising my voice/integrity to please a great man in the final fractions of his life, or to write an essay that’s about how fucked up it is that we all have to lie to ourselves and each other at family reunions and basically illustrate to a 94 year-old child that “everything is okay; we’re all happy,” when we’re depressed, insomniac, gay, alcoholic, HIV positive, racist, lonely, out of our fucking minds, or whatever each family member has to deal with every day. I suppose therein lies the tip of a conceivable essay’s aboutness, which I was complaining about last week (though probably not anymore, since I just called attention to it), but there’s got to be a way to convey this in such a way that will please the old fella, rather than send him off in tears. How have you managed to approach sentimentality, wrestle with it, maul it, eat it, and spit its fat, hairy pellet of bones into the river? Was the final product worth it?
Tags: family reunions, lies, roles, sentimental writing
Why not see your grandfather as a person, an actual, three-dimensional person – a man with his own problems, who maybe cheated on your grandmother, hates half his grandkids and would love nothing more than drink beer in his underwear and go for a walk (and a piss) by himself. YOU are sentimentalizing him. Get to know the guy. Write about HIM not your fucked up family. That’d be an essay he’d appreciate.
[...] Sam Edmonds contemplates sentimentality in his nonfiction over at Bark [...]
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Sam, I get nervous when readers start flagging words in submissions. I feel that any kind of rubric a reader (even the most talented reader) can set up is doomed to overlook fantastic work. I realize it is a cancer that plagues most literary magazines, and we need to take this issue to the shimmering English major hospital. Shit…grandmother. Let’s get a beer sometime.