This Nora Ephron story is about potatoes but the potatoes are about love, and so the Nora Ephron story is about love and at times it is about sex, and if you have a dirty mind you can imagine things that are not in the story but seem to be on the left side of the writer’s mind as she is writing it, and if you imagine that the writer is clever and aware of what she is doing it adds to the pleasure...
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...
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...
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...
Break barriers and find fresh insights in a safe, relaxed setting Unlock powerful creative ideas and unleash deep emotions in a weekly online workshop led by acclaimed columnist, author and teacher Cary Tennis Every Sunday online at these times (I will send you the link): USA West Coast 09:00 am USA Mountain Time 10:00 am USA Central Time 11:00 AM USA East Coast Time 12:00 noon London Time...
“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...
I wrote this in 2013 and didn’t do much with it because at the time it felt a tad unpatriotic, insufficiently optimistic, kind of alarmist. Now it just feels like, duh.
I wrote this in 2013 and didn’t do much with it because at the time it felt a tad unpatriotic, insufficiently optimistic, kind of alarmist. Now it just feels like, duh.
Standing in the living room of the house we’d just renovated at considerable expense, the magnitude of what I’d done, debt-wise, was crashing in and I just thought, This is a beautiful space! People ought to come in here and create in this space! Then began this life-changing endeavor, the workshops. The thing is, it was a dream, it was a gesture of solidarity with other writers, and...
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...
In our little town in Italy there is a cool little theater like something out of a Wes Anderson movie called Teatro Mario Spina and since I was a boy I always wanted to have a box seat in a theater and whereas you’d have to be a Getty or a Blum to have one in San Francisco here in Castiglion Fiorentino we just had to go chat up Paolo at the edicola, wading through the Italian jazz magazines...
No kidding, people are different here. Everything’s got a story and often it’s a long story. We’re glad we got out of San Francisco when we did but the real Tuscany is both much more amazing and much more about regular daily life than the brand “Tuscany” co-opted by sellers of “Tuscan-brown sofas surrounded by Tuscan-yellow walls,” etcetera. That’s...
NOTE: First posted June 4, 2018 (Upon reading “Fear of Freedom” by Carlo Levi) It was necessary to get out of America because America had become a monster, an unrecognizable foe, a fascist seedling sprouting on the fringe of consciousness. It was necessary to go someplace far away from America to sit and contemplate, to try to regain the self. I’m going to read this piece at the...
A classic column from TUESDAY, SEP 27, 2005 It’s political, it’s personal — I just wanna clobber the people in charge! Dear Cary, I have an emotional problem. I walk around with a rage inside me that I don’t know how to address. I fantasize about things that, were I to describe them to you, I would be visited by black-suited men at my apartment one night and, if not taken away, at least...
(I performed this on Wednesday night, January 3, 2018, at the Tasso Hostel open mic in Florence.–Cary T.) Johnny Favors was a junkie sax player in the Tenderloin playing punky jazzy avant-garde new wave bebop when he got so strung out he couldn’t hit the high notes opening for Blondie and backstage Debbie Harry wouldn’t give him one of her last three Marlboros so he called her an airheaded...
“I’m still alive!” is something you shout from the crevasse to the rescuers whose pick axes remind you because you are still a poet although stuck in the ice of cartoon implements from TV in Florida and this is how you hope to go one day but not yet because the medicine was good and you are still here a bit of a miracle but as they with their chisels chip and hammer at the ice that preserves you...
It is a job to get all the social media accounts up to date so I can tell everyone to buy the Finishing School book as a gift this gift-giving season and hopefully some will do as I command, I being master of the universe in my own head. But wow. So I go to Linked-In, which I hate, or at least have hated up to now, and I think, I have to get the info on this awful thing up to date just in case a...
Having left America two years ago for Italy, having used the money from selling our house in San Francisco to buy a smaller less expensive house in Italy and live here for a while, maybe for a long while, having fled, as it were, as if the place were on fire, having felt tremors like an earthquake in the social strata, having seen our city, once a refuge, turn against us, having felt suddenly and...
#NetNeutrality is an issue that will affect every single person here. It is not a partisan issue. We will never go back to a free internet.
— Kumail Nanjiani (@kumailn) November 21, 2017
From the prompt, “A child falling through the air” November 5, 2017 The thing about seeing a child falling through the air is that you can only see it in a dream or in slow motion in a movie. Picture a child falling through the air and reflect upon how we are all children falling through the air. We are all in motion, a motion not of our making, we are all being pulled toward something we do not...
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 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...
I want to quickly share one simple response to the shock, fear and heartbreak my friends are feeling in the U.S. as a result of the recent election. I should be working on the novel, or the Finishing School book, but this is important to me. In my personal quest to let go of attachment, that means all attachment. I must let go of the illusion of power, the lust for control over people and...
Cary’s classic column from WEDNESDAY, JUL 7, 2004 I’m a healthy 26-year-old man and I’ve never had sex. Should I tell my girlfriend? Dear Cary, I’m a healthy 26-year-old male, normal in most ways physiologically and mentally. As far as I can tell, I’m a funny, bright guy people tend to gravitate toward, and I’m as sociable and interactive as anyone. I’ve never been especially big on the so-called...
Cary’s classic column from WEDNESDAY, MAR 25, 2009 The groom said my husband is dead to him. The bride refused my package. Dear Cary, A good friend of mine invited my husband and me to her destination wedding. We were thrilled to be invited as she was a bridesmaid in our wedding, however, when we saw the price for four days we realized we couldn’t go. At her bridal shower, a mutual friend had...
Here is how to make a magic book appear in someone’s hands. I write in a sometimes unstructured and intuitive way. I tend to hear the words I write. I don’t think it all out ahead of time. So I end up with events that happen in the novel but without explaining how and why they happened. For instance, I imagined a book, a fake book, a book not actually written by Mesopotamians five...
I have rewritten a certain scene several times. As a result, I now have several overlapping texts, texts that repeat other texts or portray the same events in different colors. Luckily, using Scrivener, I can go through this 3,000-word morass of visionary … OK, that’s the other problem: This scene combined the visible world, i.e. a woman who is sleepwalking, with the interior world...
One of the counter-intuitive aspects of finishing a novel turns out to be the desperate struggle not to have any new ideas. Or only new ideas in the service of problem-solving. Finishing is a closing-down, a limiting effort, bent on discarding, not on expanding. Yet sometimes, to finish a scene or section, one can be helped by a new idea. So here is an example of how the problem-solving aspect of...
I was having so much fun reading over my fictional interview with Wolf Blitzer about how we don’t really know for certain that Phoenicians and Mesopotamians didn’t settle the Sacramento Delta, do we, Wolf? I dunno, it might sound stupid, but my character uses all those specious arguments you see idiots use on other idiots on political talk shows and for me it was really funny. So that...
Hi. So here it is Day 3 of my 49-day project to finish this novel using the Finishing School method and talk about it as I do so. Today, what I am editing is a long solo performance by the main character in which she gives a rambling monologue that makes her sound faintly deranged, and then dumps the contents of two bags on stage, one an expensive Gucci bag and the other a cheap Safeway bag, and...
I’m not going to go into why. I’m just going to share the day-by-day problem-solving of a guy who’s been working on the same novel since 1995 and is going to finish it, absolutely, using the techniques in the book Finishing School: The Happy Ending to That Writing Project You Can’t Seem to Get Done. Danelle Morton and I wrote the book on finishing. Now we have to prove...
Cary’s classic column from TUESDAY, APR 24, 2007 I’m crazy in love with my two sisters’ five kids. I feel like helping to raise them would give my life meaning. Dear Cary, My younger sisters each recently had two babies apiece — two boys on one side, two girls on the other side. There’s also a fantastic 7-year-old in the mix. I have, quite frankly, fallen in love with these children. I am not a...
Cary’s classic column from FRIDAY, MAR 4, 2005 I’m a middle child, abandoned by my eldest brother. Did I marry just for security? Dear Cary, I am the third of five children. My oldest brother, by six years, ran away from home repeatedly during his teenage years. When he finally reached adulthood he flew the coop for good. As far as I know, my parents weren’t abusive, irresponsible or neglectful...
Cary’s classic column from Monday, Apr 16, 2012 We’re 4,000 miles apart. He wants me to join him but I don’t want to sit around the house Dear Cary, I got married about three months ago to a man I truly love and respect. We are both doctorates in the same field in the sciences. We’ve always been long distance — we met in undergrad, seven years ago, but started dating only three years ago...
WEDNESDAY, AUG 1, 2007 Men in their 40s keep breaking up with me because they want to have a baby. How selfish. Dear Cary, The third relationship in a row has ended because the man I was dating suddenly decided he wants children of his own. I’m 47 and the men were about my age. All said at the start they wanted a serious, long-term relationship, then Boom! They love me but I’m too old. I’m not...