From the fertile mind and rich voice of “Since You Asked” writer Cary Tennis come works of fiction, memoir, poetry and song.
“The Traveler, or, Meditations of a Company Man” illuminates the inner life of an assassin trained since childhood in the art of murder and employed by a shadowy company whose national allegiances are cloaked in mystery.
“The Stones of Le Santucce” is the true tale of two beautiful Italian twin sisters whose trip by train from Orvieto to Milan in 1952 starts a cascade of events that transform a family, a town and a medieval convent. A memoir of fate, coincidence and snap decisions that shape people’s lives for generations.
“Famous Actress Disappears” is a novel about a teenage runaway who becomes America’s biggest sitcom star.
Dear Reader, As I did when writing the column for Salon.com, when I had a freedom to write what I wanted which was unthinkable and nearly limitless, when I would try to reach you by a bridge of words, by a rhythm of speech, by speech that was not just words but sound and music, as I did when I tried to reach a magical moment of consonance between us, unraveling the terror of an orphan on the...
The giant Ferris wheel stopped and the car at the very top containing the man and the woman swung slightly back and forth. Then the first pink bunny came flying out of the car. You could see them way up at the top of the Ferris wheel, the woman and the man, stopped up there, just sitting, swinging gently back and forth in their seat, and every so often one of the pink bunnies comes flying out and...
We didn’t know for sure what their lives were like before they came to our town. We watched them from afar, from high buildings, from shadowy cafes across the street. We watched them in the rain as they lined up for their buses, with their backpacks and their sensible shoes, their skinniness, their soft hands, their way of walking which was arrogant in its sloppiness, as if they could barely...
It wasn’t supposed to be dangerous. I was not assigned to kill anyone. I was just supposed to meet a fellow agent and receive a little gift, a slip of paper with a number on it, and a key to a locker. And then a whole series of unexpected things happened and I was hanging from a cliff by a thread, a very strong thread, one of the threads from our lab, actually, a thread based on spider silk, like...
One reason I can do this job is that I don’t need theories. I don’t need explanations. I don’t need concepts or symmetry, or a belief that it all makes sense in the end. I accept that things don’t make sense. I’m a practical man. I care how things work. For instance, I wonder, How does the Academy maintain its family-like cohesion? Is it more than Skinnerian conditioning? There must be something...
I took it slow walking along the shore. A problem was working its way through my mind, indistinct, murky. Some threads leading into a haze, a room full of voices whose words I could not make out, that kind of thing. I turned to look back at my footprints in the sand. There was someone back there, far back, like a phantom in the salty mist. His figure would emerge as I rounded a bend in the shore...
“I’m not sure I remember how to do this,” I said. “It’ll come back to you,” she said. And it did, in a way. We stopped on a drive over the mountains, over the sea, and I held her in my arms and we kissed, and sure enough some things came back to me from long ago, and in spite of my training, against all good sense, I told her who I was, that I was looking for a way out, that she’d come along at a...
At this moment, dear reader, I realize I am doing something the habit of which I have been trying to break. I am paying too much attention to the external, the tangible, while my purpose in writing this long and at times meandering account has been to expose my inner purpose, my inner experience, so that you might come to know me as a person like yourself, a person who has some skills and...
Dear Reader, I wrote “The Psychedelic Madness of Covid-19” for David Talbot, founder of Salon.com, and I think it’s the best piece I’ve written about my recovery from Covid-19. Read and enjoy! The podcast started out as an honest homage to David Talbot, but ended up being all about me, me, me! How I ended up working at Salon.com, how I learned everything I needed to know...
Hi Folks! Wow, was I insane! This week’s podcast dives deep into the fantastical delirium I experienced in the intensive care unit of San Donato hospital in Arezzo, Italy. I’ll be publishing a longer prose version soon and will let you know when that is available. Also, this is the January 12, 2021 Smithsonian Magazine article I mention at about 1:20 into the podcast. But for now...
There is a sign in the mess hall that says, “You are being watched.” We laugh about it because we have never known anything else, not since we were babies left alone perhaps for a few hours. I have glimpses now and then of that early me, the one before the training, before the constant surveillance, before the surrendering of all self to the company. It feels alien to recall that before I stood...
Every once in a while a curious feeling would come over me, while walking in the woods that bordered the inn, or sitting in my room doing paperwork. People don’t realize how much paperwork is involved in a job like this. They think it’s all shooting people and running through the woods with dogs chasing you, but that’s only a small part of it. We also gather intelligence, naturally...
We went up high in the mountains where it was quiet. There was an unused cabin up there, off the grid, not on Google maps, strategically hidden from the satellite scans, with no cellular footprint, having been lead-shielded from the start, no phones ever used up there, no trace of anything, just our analog trail, our knowing that it was up there, and we went up there, just a few of us, after the...
Right before we left I had to stop on the stairs to tie my shoe, and I had a spell of dizziness, and couldn’t remember how to tie my shoe, and I felt panic wash over me, the kind of panic that I used to feel as a young recruit, those first few months, barely out of the blanket, barely out of that big black limousine that had carried me away from my home, down that snowy road in winter so long ago...
When I was a boy, my father owned a hotel in the center of a medieval town in the Alps. And something happened, I still don’t know what, or if it was just a dream, but I remember that news came over the radio and my father packed us all up and told us we were going to live in the hotel for a while. He had the driver come and pick us up, and had a van packed with all our things, and he, my mom and...
October 25, 2020 Oh, gee. I’ve got these notebooks. For 25 years I have been keeping a journal. Since 1995. There were the bleak streetcar years when I rode San Francisco Muni’s N Judah, and then the L-Taraval, across the 7 miles from one side of the peninsula to the other every morning, grabbing the single seat and hunching over my notebook. Through my dark years as a minion at Chevron through...
A short podcast for this Christmas Eve. I continue to heal. My wish for you, as we all endure the shocking tragedy unfolding before us, is that you can find a way to enjoy a little holiday spirit, and remain safe and protected in the days to come.–ct
When I was a child I must have seen somewhere, maybe in a comic book or one of our many old illustrated books, maybe it was a William Blake engraving, souls rising from graves like mist in the evening. Souls rising like sleepers in white sheets, out of the old tumbledown graves of our local cemetery. And throughout my angry rationalist phase and my pretended atheism which I was just not rigorous...
There was trouble right away the first day of the Lydia Favors Beholden Riverwash Film ’n Theater Festival. Protesters ringed the town and were blocking entrance roads. Sheriff Stern was looking for David Twist and Marc Chute with a warrant to search their mobile command center trailer. Rock star PR1ckè® was threatening not to perform unless his contract rider specifying three changes of...
Dear Reader, Yesterday I texted an old friend and mentor in San Francisco, a person who has been dear to me, who has guided me through the spiritual wilderness into which I will occasionally wander in moments of loss or grief or fear. I texted him to get in touch, no big thing, it’s been a while, I’ve been living in Italy for over four years now, and the reply was, “Is this...
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...
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...
[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...
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...
(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...
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...