The Family Business

by Jessie St. Amand

I guess the answer to the Writer question, “What do you write?”, is scary because I don’t know yet. My mom, who is probably just as supportive today as she was when I was writing Hanna Barbera fanfiction, seems to be sure in her answer that I will write “the next Harry Potter – the thing that will get all the kids reading again.” I thought she would probably be less excited to see the things I do spend my time writing – like paragraphs-long refutations of my great-uncle’s racist Facebook statuses – but she was supportive of that, too, despite it fulfilling Phyllis Schlafly’s prophecies that English Majors like me are the worst, most godless, the most leftist, and the most elder-insultingly-cheeky of the disciplines.

I think what I, as a senior English Major, can contribute to this discussion about being a writer is the realization that my ability is propped up by outside sources so much more than I think – that confidence, this golden beacon of rightness emanating from within, is not as important to me as support – other people’s misguided, blindly encouraging faith that I am smarter and more capable and just better than I appear to be. I have to admit to myself that I have a lot of exterior support that other people – people with more or less the same level of bootstrappy interior shininess as me – lack. My family, for example wanted a lot of things for me that I do not want, and wanted me to be a lot of things that I am not, but in other ways, they are my greatest source of support.

I noticed this when was at Grandma’s house this summer eating handfuls of the mixed nut trail mix she buys with the chocolate chips and the dried cranberries in it. My Aunt Mary was there for movie night with the kids, and my brother Tom was out at the Redbox picking out something G-rated, and Uncle Mark showed up with his seven-year-old daughter, Gabby, who has red hair like him and is really small and adorable.

The kid-friendly movie, I would find out later, would be “Letters to God” (2010), a heartwarming tale of how a small-town child dying of cancer inspires his alcoholic mailman to get right with the Lord (and with the kid’s mom). I suspect that Tom, bless his Campus Crusade for Christ-filled heart, picks out these movies (as opposed to, say, Harry Potter) more because he wants me to be a Christian again than because he really enjoys watching them, which is kind of sweet in its own way. It’s probably what Jesus would do. But mostly the kid-cancer movie made me wonder if there were any of the bad kinds of preservatives in the trail mix and whether I could pull off the shaved-head look.

But anyway, Gabby was there now, so Aunt Mary made her a snack and told me that Gabby is a writer too, just like her cousin Jessie, and would I like to see the story she wrote? This filled me with a glowing, unwarranted pride and fear because I personally am too scared to call myself a writer yet. The label with which I openly identify is “English Major”, because that’s what I am, and because that is way less likely to get the response “What do you write?” – very scary – and more likely to get “What are you going to do with that after you graduate?” The other reason I have this stupid misplaced pride is because these two – my aunt and my elementary-school cousin – must have been talking about me as, like, a possible role model, like, as a person who does things that you should do, also, which is weird.

It also made me think of my late grandpa, who by all rights should have been there with us if he had not dropped dead of a heart attack in 2007. Grandpa Frank was the first person from our family to go to college, working his way through to found the family and the very house, and whose absence I especially missed on a night when he should have been talking through the boring movie and reciting funny poetry at us. Grandpa had once worked two of the same jobs I had now – well, sort of the same. He had supported himself as a butcher, while I cut deli meat in a big box grocery store (despite my vegetarian and capitalist scruples). In college, he had taken money for writing richer students’ essays in addition to his own work, and seemed nothing but proud when recalling this fact. Even though I have an ethical, professional job in my university’s writing center, where I consult other students’ papers and use what I know to try to make them better writers, I still feel a swell of pride when I think about how Grandpa would make the connection between our jobs and be proud of me, too.

Gabby pulled a printout from behind a fridge magnet and read us the story she had typed out. In it, Scooby and the gang solve a mystery of a ghost who turns out to be a man in a costume. There was lots of dialogue, a chase scene, a mean gypsy woman, Velma loses her glasses, etc. It was great. Aunt Mary kept widening her eyes and nodding significantly at me during the reading. When we all congratulated Gabby and she got shy and ran away to go harass the dog, we all talked about how smart she was, how important it is that she has the ability to make stuff up.

I have been trained by my studies to dissect things like Scooby Doo and “Letters to God” and discuss what exactly makes them boring and unimaginative (or, in the mystery of the Mean Gypsy Woman or the alcoholic mailman: ethnocentric or heteronormative), but that ability to make stuff up – something that captivates and speaks to people like my brother or my cousin or my aunt – is probably something more elusive, that you were born with, but have to dredge out of yourself – or get help dredging – after years of not considering it important. When I am a writer, I want to be true to myself, my beliefs, and my studies. But, in some way, I want whatever I end up writing to also be for my family.