I’m available to a limited number of clients for editing, coaching and advising on long writing projects. Contact me at cary@carytennis.com if you have a project you are working on and would like to talk about it. What I do: It might be nothing more than a couple of hours talking through a project. Or I might follow a long writing project, reading rough drafts as they are completed and...
The Amherst Writers and Artists Method: Sites, Videos, Practitioners
Hello everybody, I have been leading Amherst Writers and Artists workshops since 2007. Doing so has changed my creative life in profound and lasting ways. I hope this compendium of links will help you find an Amherst Writers and Artists workshop in your area or online. Maybe after you’ve done it for a while and discovered its benefits, you will decide to lead workshops yourself. The Method...
Increase your creativity. Retrieve rich memories. Write with greater ease. Meet awesome people.
Come to Castiglion Fiorentino May 12-22, 2022 for TEN! days of writing, thinking, eating, drinking, walking, talking, relaxing, exploring! I’ll be there at beautiful Residence Le Santucce offering daily Amherst Writers and Artists workshops in this charming and ancient Tuscan hill town. Why Italy? Why Le Santucce? My wife, Norma, and I looked long and hard before settling on Residence Le...
I should have been a writer!
Dear Cary, I remember an afternoon, during my senior year of college, in a tiny hamlet in upstate New York, sitting at my desk, and writing a paper for one of my classes. I do not remember the class, or the subject of the paper. I do remember tip-tap-typing away, focused, with open books lying about on the desk and floor, passages marked with pencil, fluorescent sticky notes protruding from pages...
A literary agent asks, “But what’s the payoff?”
After two and a half years working on The Stones of Le Santucce, about the rebuilding of a bombed medieval Tuscan convent into the Residence Le Santucce, the Tanganelli family, the town of Castiglion Fiorentino (and our reasons for leaving America, and the tragic bombing of December 1943, and Napoleon’s suppression of the church, and Garibaldi’s visit in 1849, and the rise of Fascism...
Making the Manuscript of “The Split-Second Forever”: An Infinity of Fascinations
Dear reader, Enjoy with me if you will the humor of this, from my notes on the writing of The Split-Second Forever: Soon after I began living in this little town in Tuscany, I told everyone I was writing a book about it—about Le Santucce, about the history, about medieval building techniques, about Tuscan convents, about this beautiful place the Alfeo Tanganelli built from the bombed-out ruin of...
About that book I’m working on …
[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...
People Also Ask (A quest story)
In my Amherst Writers and Artists-style workshops sometimes we write using only one-syllable words. It’s really really fun! So I’m thinking up prompts for this “Writing is Delicious” workshop we’re having in October and thinking about using one-syllable words only to describe food, and … We can’t say the word for how we can just have one of them, because it has...
The Craft of Food Writing in Virginia Woolf
Each piece in the Stories from the Kitchen collection has something interesting to offer about craft. Take for instance the Virginia Woolf piece, the dinner scene from To The Lighthouse. It makes you think about the craft, the way she does things, the way she has her narrator move from inside one person to the next around the table, and how deftly and interestingly she does it, even at one point...
Food and Writing/Literature and Gastronomy
When Norma and I decided to do it, we had just had a really great meal. We were in that heightened state. We saw endless possibilities. I think that’s why it happened. As to the meal, it could have been at Muzzicone, or at Regiro, or Gallo Nero, or la Sfizieria, or Ristorante Rogi, or Il Passaggio, or Antica Pieve or La Piana or Pietro or Buon Gustaio or Il Ristoro di Via Dante or Le Bindi...