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Books

About that book I’m working on …

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[UPDATE July 27, 2021: I briefly called it “The Split-Second Forever” but the title has gone back to being The Stones of le Santucce.” Just so you know.–ct] I’ve been working on The Stones of le Santucce nearly four years. People are starting to wonder. I saw Professor Alpini this morning, standing near the gate to our little walled garden, talking in the driveway with a...

Praise for the Finishing School book

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“A must for every writer and artist of any kind, Finishing School belongs on the bookshelf right next to Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird and Stephen King’s On Writing. I can’t wait to tell every writer I know to buy it.”—Cole Kazdin, four-time Emmy-winning television news producer, writer, and performer “Cary Tennis and Danelle Morton accomplish something remarkable in Finishing School—an actually...

How’s the book coming?

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This morning at Caffe la Posta in Castiglion Fiorentino, as I was trying to read the Italian newspaper, I ran into professor Giuseppe Alpini. He asked me how the book is coming. Oh, you didn’t know I’m writing a book? The idea for the book came in the early morning darkness in June 2015, when I awoke  at the Residence Le Santucce in Castiglion Fiorentino after a very vivid dream. I...

I hate giving gifts. But …

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Here is the thing. Our book Finishing School: The Happy Ending to That Writing Project You Can’t Seem to Get Done makes a great gift. I propose it as the solution to all gift-giving problems. And I have somewhat reliable proof, based on real people saying real things without prompting or cash prizes. When we talked about this idea, Danelle and I, when we wrote the proposal and showed it to...

I, too, dislike “craft”

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I just read this Alif Batuman piece in n+1 from a few years back in which I found a kinship reading of “craft.” So let me get something off my chest, counterproductive and humiliating as it may be: Craft is awful. I hate craft!Instead of standing out there in the hot sun polishing and polishing your doomed anachronistic prose beauty why not instead, today! unleash the wild craftless being within...

Letter from Italy

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I have this image in my mind of saying goodbye to someone on a river, maybe on the Arno in Florence, on a bridge, maybe the Santa Trinita Bridge, that would do, that would be a good bridge, and I can see the sky, a bluish color, you’ve seen a sky at dusk when it’s bluish,  you know how good it looks. I’m not sure why the image of saying goodbye to someone comes up. Maybe because I feel I have...

What part of the autofiction is fiction?

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Is it appropriate, in a work of autofiction, to ask, Which part is the fiction? I think it is. Because of how people read. The great thing about fiction is it frees the author of the ethical considerations of autobiography and memoir. When people read something that’s about something that actually happened they read one way. When they read about something that’s not supposed to have...

I used to love … What?

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So here is another thing. Seth Myers is interviewing Joe Hill and I am watching from my perch high and far away on my mysterious island of emotional distance and contempt  and it is as if the older I get the more godlike I am because there is nothing that surprises me and I cannot be seduced by the son of Stephen King and I am charmed by nothing; I have attained the weary omniscience of a god ...

Thank you for rejecting me. I feel a whole lot better now

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I sent a piece to “Fence” and they said it wasn’t for them. “Thanks. OK. That’s cool. I can handle it. It’s not a big deal. It’s not like I’m going to go out and cut myself or anything.” A meditation on submission and rejection ——– Original Message ——– Subject: RE: [Fence] Wading in Shallow Water with Architects From:...

Three recent occasions upon which I should have tweeted and could have tweeted but did not in fact tweet

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It was at one time understood that to be noble one must not draw unseemly attention to oneself or glorify oneself or make oneself seem, in a crowd, to be the most important person, or to seek glory only for oneself at the expense of others, nor to seek to draw the fame of others toward oneself for one’s own gain. But today, all good citizens must tweet and tweet widely. One must take...

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