Finishing School: The story behind the workshops … and the book

[Note: This is pretty much a literal transcription of the podcast.]–ct

Good morning, or evening, this is Cary Tennis, it’s Thursday, April 29, 2021, and today I’m going to do things slightly differently because this is the story behind the workshops and the book, that is, the Finishing School workshops. So how it really began is like this: In 2004 I was finishing up an article for Salon.com about George W. Bush and the upcoming presidential election, when I thought I was having a heart attack. I hit “send” and then I dialed 911. I called my wife from the ambulance. I spent the night in the hospital and the next day dialed into the Tuesday editorial meeting from my hospital bed. All the tests showed I was not having a heart attack. I was having a panic attack, and that whole episode got me thinking, maybe I was a little too stressed out. I had the heart-pounding, teeth-grinding, palm-sweating habit of high-pressure, deadline-driven daily journalism and it had literally landed me in the hospital. And it was a warning sign. I needed to find a more humane approach to creativity, that would stress community. So I read Pat Schneider’s book Writing Alone and With Others. By 2007 I was leading Amherst Writers and Artists style workshops, using the method describe in her book. And that kind of saved me.

But I was no saint.

I was still driven to write for publication and that meant finishing big projects, and putting pressure on myself. My workshops were attracting bright, creative, courageous writers but we weren’t turning out work for publication, and this mystified me, because I was driven to finish work, even though I myself was having trouble finishing work. So I came up with a workshop style that was a twist on the AWA method, and also borrowed from something I’d had experience with called Artists Anonymous, which was a 12 step knockoff. This workshop I created kept a humane foundation but it focused not on creating work in the present but focused on finishing writing projects and for that matter finishing all kinds of projects. Some people came into the workshop with legal issues or economic issues or house cleaning/decluttering issues … one person came in with what she thought was a film script and it turned out she actually wanted to create a film festival. It was an amazing process of discovery even though it was intended as a way of finishing a project, and the reason that would happen I think is that once we focus on the tangible items that we need to create in order to finish a project, we sometimes find we have no taste for what we were trying to do, and we’re called in different directions. But anyway, this method I created, I called it Finishing School. And it got results.  (Apologies to my old friend Leslie, from whom without realizing it I apparently took the name.) Finishing School was born in 2013 in the living room of our house at 1966 48th Avenue in San Francisco out by the ocean. By 2015 the writer Danelle Morton and I had a deal with Tarcher/Perigee/Penguin to write the Finishing School book.

Then suddenly, Norma and I moved to Italy!

Still, Danelle and I used the  Finishing School method to finish the Finishing School book, which launched in January 2017. During that time Norma and I rented an apartment above Piazza del Municipio in Castiglion Fiorentino and I would sit in the apartment on the dusty old couches–it was a furnished apartment–and look out at the sbandiatori, the drummers and buglers and the bands and the elaborate costumes of all the Renaissance ceremonies that our town puts on every year. And I would work on the book, and Danelle and I used the Finishing School method, sharing drafts with each other and conferring over the telephone, and it launched in January 2017. But here’s the thing about moving to Italy.

I naively thought we’d move to Italy and continue just as we had in San Francisco, only we’d be closer to the site of our writers retreats. And this was not true! This was a shock. Now I look around me and I have to slap my forehead and go, “This is really Italy.” I mean it’s really Italian! Things work differently here. The people are different. The culture is different. The assumptions are different. The pace of life is different. So I started online Finishing School a couple of times but for one reason or another couldn’t keep it going.

But this time I am committed, I am dedicated to keeping it going, to starting it, to putting up the infrastructure, to maintaining it, and just keeping it going as long as … as long as I am … a functioning human!

Just like with the AWA workshops.

They’ve been going on for years. And the community that’s grown up around my one Sunday AWA workshop is incredible. The power of it! The power of one continuous weekly meeting, how it grows, and the writers just prosper in it. It’s really beautiful.

I was really stressed out in San Francisco.

And I did need a change. I’ve learned a lot and I’ve slowed down a lot. But I’m still a driven person and I still crave that structured progress that Finishing School provides. I’m still a vitally creative person who wants to finish creative projects and send them into the world. And for that I still need structure and accountability and group support of Finishing School. Actually now more than ever, because, well, I’m no longer surrounded by all the ambitious, world-beating creative types I was surrounded by in San Francisco. This is a beautiful place to be. And I love the people here. But the people here in our town, they’re not  running around creating companies. They’re not trampling all over each other to be the first to do the newest thing or eat the newest ice cream or eat at the newest restaurant. There’s no “life-hacking” here. They’re not reinventing themselves. They’re not reinventing cuisine or reinventing architecture. The old recipes, the old farming practices, the old cooking methods, the tried-and-true, the old faiths, the old beliefs, the old ways of dressing and comporting oneself, the old courtesies, the old reticence … those are the things that hold this Italian town together and make it such a marvelous, humane place to live.

But like I say, I’m still the same driven, creative person the same American, indoctrinated with individuality and striving. So I want to keep doing the Finishing School as long as I’m able, every week, online, forever, till I drop, or till I have to call in from the hospital! For that reason, I’m setting it up so that it’s affordable, because continuity is more important to me right now than cash flow. And community is more important than cash flow. I’ve never really been drawn to business, and I’m not in a quest for fame or market cap. Frankly, I’m 67 years old, I’m officially “retired,” and I don’t need the money. I have a committed group to start with this Monday, May 3, but there may be room for one or two more folks. Get in touch with me if you’d like to join this first group starting Monday.

But the main thing is …

The main thing is that Finishing School turns out to be a useful tool. It’s not going to transform your life. It’s not going to take away your pimples or give you washboard abs. It’s a useful tool. It’s a beautiful tool for certain people who are very creative but also smart enough to realize that life conditions often work against creative discipline. As well as our own natures, our own personalities often work against our creative talent. Finishing School makes modest assumptions but sometimes has staggering results. To borrow a phrase from the 12-step movement, “It works–if you work it.” That is, it’s a tool. I like to be careful not to overstate it as some kind of miracle cure for endemic laziness or sloppiness or lack of ideas. It won’t turn you into a genius. It won’t teach you how to write or what to say. In fact, we assiduously avoid commenting and critiquing. WE don’t read each other’s work. We don’t analyze each other’s projects.

We listen to each other talk

about the challenges of finding the time and sticking with the project and solving the technical and practical problems that the project itself presents. We trust that if you’re a creative person you’ll solve it, you’ll figure it out. Or you’ll abandon it. You’ll say, Now that I’ve really looked at it carefully, it’s not the direction I want to go in. And you’ll abandon it and move on. And that, I consider that a creative act in itself.

The sole emphasis is to provide creative people the opportunity to seize their own time. In fact, I like to say “acquiring time” rather than “scheduling time.” I like to think of us as getting time and using it, and scheduling feels a little constrictive to me. We acquire time, and we write in our calendars. You’re autonomous in the group, and you, like all of us, have external impediments to a happy creative life, and you can share them with us, and we support each other in overcoming these external impediments. We’re not so prideful as to think that we can help you fix your inner life. But we share the difficulties we encounter and sometimes those difficulties are internal, and that means trusting others … enough, anyway, to tell the truth about the difficulties we’re having. Not that we expect anyone to solve them, but it is helpful to just talk about the larger situation, and of our personalities and our backgrounds in relation to trying to solve creative problems.

But we don’t do critiques

and we don’t psychoanalyze each other. We focus on, “How you gonna solve that?” “What are you thinking about, what are you planning, how is it working, how are the conditions of your life working for you or against you? Are there any steps you can take to remove the external obstacles to your creative happiness?”

Seriously, in the Finishing School book we have a chapter on the problem with writers groups and how they can be perilous, and critiques, how a critique can easily devolve into a withering, soul-murdering takedown, you know? I don’t even want the possibility of that. I feel actually that we are the guardians of each other’s creative spirits. That may be stretching it for some but personally that’s how I feel about it.

And why is that?

That’s because this morning I was thinking about a phrase I always read in my Amherst Writers and Artists workshop. It’s in Pat Schneider’s Five Essential Affirmations and Practices. I always read this before every workshop to set the tone. And one of the first assertions is that

we are “all born with creative genius.”

I always hesitate a little when I read this because I don’t want it to be misunderstood. I’ve been thinking about creativity as an autonomous spirit within a person. I’m thinking that for me creativity  is an autonomous spirit within me. It is the mysterious and powerful human capacity for, in effect, making life. Making art is making life. But this assertion that we are born with creative genius troubled me a little at first and others had questioned it so I asked Pat Schneider, the founder of this method, once, when she was still around, we lost her last year, but I asked her what she meant by that creative genius bit, I mean, we can all agree that as babies we’re not all little Michelangelos or Leonardo DaVincis. What Pat Schneider meant was that infants do not just passively become humans. They must construct for themselves a world, a working model of reality. And to do this requires some trial and error, some hypothesis and experimentation, as children must experiment with gravity, and with the physical properties of objects, such as the difference between a rubber ball and a glass bottle if you subject it to the forces of gravity and the sidewalk. And the nature of our own bodies. We are creating and experimenting and testing hypotheses about the nature of reality from the moment we are born. The courage and cheerfulness with which children go about creating that reality and learning about the external reality beyond them, that’s a powerful model for us as adults, as creative people, to contemplate. Children do not shrink from the problem of discovery. They are driven to discover. They must discover. They do not assume they know everything. They do not pretend to know what’s what. They’re endlessly improvising, experimenting, trying out scripts, imagining stories to explain what they experience. So we could learn a lot from children. That’s what Pat Schneider meant about “We are all born with creative genius.”

And also in that phrase for her there’s a hint of the belief in the divinity of children, and the divinity of the creative spirit. I also feel that! I also feel the divinity of the creative spirit, and thus the obligation to protect it, as one would protect a child. A child who must experiment, and who is thus going to make mistakes. Not out of mischief or ill will but because

every child is a scientist as well as an artist.

I think every person’s creative spirit retains that childlike quality of both the scientist and the artist. To our peril, as adults, we abandon that spirit. We are enlivened, emboldened by protecting that spirit. I mean the minute we feel we’ve got it all figured out, we’re sunk. It’s over. The spirit of creativity is one of exploration, not manufacture.

And finally, the thing about Italy is …

Finally I just want to say a thing about Italy. The thing about Italy is, I have indeed learned a lot about life by living here. One of the big things is, Italians do not worship the almighty dollar, or the almighty euro. That’s maybe the biggest, hardest, strangest thing to get used to here, and it’s one of the first things I noticed. The motivation here is not the money. Unlike in America, and this may be one reason, Italians do not fear becoming homeless if they’re short on cash, or going bankrupt if they have a sudden illness, or getting shot in the crossfire of a routine gun battle in the street, or getting pulled over by armed police for minor infractions. You know, this period we’re going through, with black people being shot and killed by police, it’s a transformative moment in America. And Italians are aghast and mystified at this phenomenon. It’s just a different feeling. Police, they almost never pull you over here. Every now and then, they will be doing traffic stops, and they’ll be standing on the side of the road, and will wave like a big lollipop stop sign at you and check your license. But it’s not like that heart-pounding, tense scene in America when a state trooper gets on your tail, and pulls you over …

But that’s just an aside I guess. The main thing is, I wanted to talk about the Finishing School workshops. So I guess that’s it for now. I have a ton of things more I wanted to say but I wanted to focus this week on the workshops. So I’ll talk to you soon. And next week … who knows? Every week is a mystery. Every week is a surprise for me.

OK. That’s it for now.

Ciao.