[button link=”mailto:[email protected]” newwindow=”yes”] Write for Advice[/button] Dear Cary, Thank you for deciding to keep your column alive. I am writing to you from Italy, a country you must have a special spot for since you even organize your workshops/retreats here. I am not Italian but it has little to do with my story. I grew up in a troubled family. My father...
Over the six years Cary’s been leading writing retreats and workshops, we have gotten to know an impressive number of people working on some truly intriguing projects. Many of these projects are creative, some just simply improve life on this planet. This wonderful community has grown so large that we’ve decided to feature a person each week to highlight their creative or other...
[button link=”mailto:[email protected]” newwindow=”yes”] Write for Advice[/button] Dear Cary, I need your help before I really mess things up for myself. I’m a single woman in my early 50s, I enjoy my job, nice people, understanding boss, etc. Earlier this year I spoke to my boss about a promotion/raise. She felt it was worthwhile to pursue and said...
[button link=”mailto:[email protected]” newwindow=”yes”] Write for Advice[/button] Dear Cary, How do you tell your vegan girlfriend that she smells like spoiled cabbage, and sometimes the smell “down there” is revolting? Hopefully you can pull this out of the archives, I hate to see people work for free. Signed, Let’s Come Together for a Better...
[button link=”mailto:[email protected]” newwindow=”yes”] Write for Advice[/button] Hi Cary, I’m in my 50s with a career in my chosen field. The pay isn’t great — never is in this field — but I love what I do. I consider myself very lucky to have found this job. However, the recession and continuing economic mess have not been good to my...
I found out how truly unsystematic I am by setting a schedule for myself and not following it. That happened because I invented Finishing School. I invented Finishing School because I wanted to finish things I start. I wanted to finish things I start because I feel crummy when I don’t. Crummy is a polite word. Also I’m too hard on myself. I had two therapists in one day tell me that...
Dear Cary, A friend just posted an old family pic on Facebook of her and her mother on a swing in the woods. My friend’s legs were wrapped around her mother’s waist, and her mom’s hair was flying like a black silk cape on the downswing, the look on her face the essence of motherly adoration. They were fully engaged in life and love. I commented, “They say it’s never...
Hi, my new advice column will debut here on Friday, Oct 18, 2013. See you then.–Cary T.
Dear Friends, I have left Salon.com after 14 years. My unique advice column, which ran on Salon.com as Since You Asked from October 17, 2001 to Sept. 30, 2013, just shy of 12 years, will now run on my own site, carytennis.com. For now, it doesn’t have a new name. I am open to suggestions. Once I get started (letters are already coming in) it will run weekly but if I find a way to make it...
Please join me at Idlewylde Community Hall, 6301 Sherwood Road in Baltimore, Md (See on Google map), Saturday Oct. 12 and Sunday Oct. 13, 2013, for two special morning Amherst Writers and Artists-style writing workshops, 9 a.m. to noon each day. The program is being put on in conjunction with a local effort to bring the Amherst Writers and Artists method to military veterans and survivors of...
Even from as far away as Australia, I could feel the relaxed, open atmosphere he created among us and found it surprisingly easy to get writing. — Alice Allan, Melbourne, Australia I was writing descriptions without events, like jokes without punch-lines. The workshops led me to try more active, engaging and complex storytelling. I gave up some fixed ideas about what kinds of writing I do and...
Here are some of the links I mentioned in the 2013 Santa Barbara Novel Mentor workshop, about dialog, pitches, queries and beginnings of novels. dialog Writing Dialog by Tom Chiarella. I lent this book to somebody and have to get it back. It’s a good book. Useful. Interesting. 12 Exercises for improving dialog by John Hewitt. Some of these are pretty good. You can’t go wrong trying...
The June 2012 issue of The Sun features a generous excerpt of Citizens of the Dream, my book about creativity. It runs after a fascinating interview with painter Ran Ortner and a lovely poem by Alison Luterman, and right before a poem by Tony Hoagland! What humbling and awe-inspiring company! It says quite a lot that The Sun saw fit to showcase the book. After you read the excerpt, I suggest you...
I do not remember exactly how I developed this huge attitude about Michael Chabon. I think it was the book Cavalier and Clay that sort of sealed it. We did not like the “innovative” language. But I have felt guilty about this for many reasons. Not only is Michael Chabon sort of local, and we should be nice to locals, but he is a brilliant writer in his way and also a father and...
I find it hard not to work. It’s a Sunday afternoon, Norma and I did brunch at Zuni with Karen, then hung out at Green Arcade Books, enjoying the poetry and the cool local books and talking with Dave about labor history and how the minute there’s a museum about your movement you know you’re in trouble (“Fossilized Bongos in the Haight!”) and about the business of...
Reading a story in the New Yorker and fighting thoughts of jealousy and class resentment, thinking, how did I end up doing the workshops and getaways and publishing the books in addition to writing the column and thinking, if I had enough money, would I be preparing for the workshop–vacuuming the floor and straightening the furniture and getting ready for folks to come into the living room...
Rooming with Sy Safransky. We got to talk under the stars Friday night about this and that. Talking with Sy it’s never about this and that but it’s always kinda about this and that which makes it akin to the lightly ordered musings you find in the magazine. Writers giving workshops included poet Chris Burks, whose performances and performance-art-type gifts — a stone, a bell...