The sentimentality tightrope
from Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within by Natalie Goldberg: “A responsibility of literature is to make people awake, present, alive. If the writer wanders, then the reader, too, will wander. The fly on the table might be part of the whole description of a restaurant. It might be appropriate to tell precisely the sandwich that it just walked over, but there is a fine line between precision and self-indulgence. “Stay on the side of precision; know your …