Cary Tennis

I do realize now that writing the column has been an aesthetic and spiritual practice. But a spiritual practice must be supported. It was kept in balance by the salary. When we adopt certain practices if they are not supported they lead us to imbalance. That is what I am struggling with now. If I continue to spend four to six hours a day doing this aesthetic and spiritual practice, my life will...

I love you, O person who is unknown to me. That is what I send to you. I send my love. This is a rare thing to be able to do. I am not being paid for this but still I am sending my love. When I was being paid, in the many times in my life where what I was writing was a product purchased by a company, such as all writing is when we are paid for it, I still saw my job as one of sending love out...

The advice column has a quality to it that is of a person speaking directly to another person. That quality flows out of the form of it, that it is epistolary in form. What I can do, even if I am not writing the column is I can still speak directly to you. What I can do is to speak directly to you, the person who is seeing this. I may not be able to untangle entire lives in the time I have to...

What a radically dangerous pledge it is, to pledge oneself to writing. You must be willing to let everything else slide.  (Or must you?) If I decide that today I am answering a letter from a person who is suffering, that might be all I do today. If I put limits on it, if I say that because I am not being paid then I can only spend one hour on it, that may cheapen it. What I need to say may...

At times I feel that if I am a person of great faith and serenity I can simply continue what I was doing and everything will fall into place. Because I practice the 12 steps and am deeply connected to a community of faith and recovery I am sometimes in that state of mind where everything will be fine. But also I am in that place where I am not the only person living in this house. If the house...

There is an editor’s letter in the current Poets and Writers Magazine in which the editor takes issue with the idea that it makes a difference whether you write for money. He seems to think that there is such a thing as writing for writing’s sake. I know what he means but I wonder.  I wonder if he realizes that the reason he can afford to entertain the notion of not writing for money...

I used to write a column five days a week for a salary from Salon. In this column I practiced a particular kind of literary art whose purpose was to affirm the dignity of individual suffering. This required a particular kind of writing, one that could sustain and encompass an individual’s dramatic situation. That dramatic situation included both personality and social forces. My aim was to...

What is it about bullet points? I thought I should write everything in bullet points because I was worried about Internet attention spans Also just having fun Then I decided bullet points were stupid because they debase language they are very very boring they don’t tell a story they are just a summary a summary is like an obituary sitting in a corporate meeting is like going to a funeral...