The Method The Amherst Writers and Artists Philosophy Workshop Events Calendar, in-person, online, worldwide Find a workshop in your area Pat Schneider, founder of AWA Pat Schneider on Wikipedia Pat Schneider bio on the Poetry Foundation website A really good poem: Pat’s “Instructions for the Journey” Pat Schneider: “We send the children of the poor to fight the children of the poor.” (In...
I’ve scheduled an event at Manny’s in the Mission District in the evening of Tuesday, October 14. The event is on EventBrite. HOW COME? Well, Norma and I had a publishing business in San Francisco. I wrote the books and we shipped them out of our garage. It worked really great. Then we moved to Italy. I put the remaining inventory in a storage locker in Daly City. That was nine years...
Hey there! Curious about the writing workshops? You can join at any time by clicking on the lovely picture of me below: [email protected] email write “Workshops” in the subject line. WhatsApp is better: +39 334 725 8715. Maybe try the U.S. number: 415 340-9108. The best time to call me from America is when you wake up in the morning. Because I live in Italy. The background: I...
I’m available to a limited number of clients for editing, coaching and advising on long writing projects. Contact me at [email protected] if you have a project you are working on and would like to talk about it. What I do: It might be nothing more than a couple of hours talking through a project. Or I might follow a long writing project, reading rough drafts as they are completed and...
Quickly sign up for one session $42 US Worldwide. Via Zoom. Scheduled Times: Sundays: 9am–11am PST–West Coast 10am-12 noon MST–Mountain 11am-1pm CST–Central 12 noon-2pm EST–Eastern 17.00-19.00 GMT–UK, Ireland 18.00-20.00 CET–Italy, Europe Powered by Or take it one month at a time at $149.00 USD Or try a drop-in session to see how you like...
I have learned a lot in the last seven years about caring for the writing self and the creative soul. Some of the things I have learned have helped other people, too. Doing the Amherst Writers and Artists method has become a way of life. Many people I have met while doing this have become dear friends whose occasional appearances are now cherished events in the week. The role of teacher is one I...
Come to Castiglion Fiorentino May 12-22, 2022 for TEN! days of writing, thinking, eating, drinking, walking, talking, relaxing, exploring! I’ll be there at beautiful Residence Le Santucce offering daily Amherst Writers and Artists workshops in this charming and ancient Tuscan hill town. Why Italy? Why Le Santucce? My wife, Norma, and I looked long and hard before settling on Residence Le...
Wouldn’t you feel great if you finally got it done? Finishing School is a way to get things done when nothing else has worked. It doesn’t matter what the thing is. Finishing isn’t about the mechanics of the task. It’s about the process, or method, of finishing. It’s very simple. It is easy to learn. If you have tried scheduling, will power, time management, getting...
This story is all in the comments below.–CT
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...
Dear Cary, I remember an afternoon, during my senior year of college, in a tiny hamlet in upstate New York, sitting at my desk, and writing a paper for one of my classes. I do not remember the class, or the subject of the paper. I do remember tip-tap-typing away, focused, with open books lying about on the desk and floor, passages marked with pencil, fluorescent sticky notes protruding from pages...
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...
Dear Cary, I’m writing a book based on my day job where I have access to all kinds of sensitive information. It is about the parallels between criminals and business people and I’ve named it, “Everything I Know About Entrepreneurs I Learned from Drug Dealers.” I’ve been privy to a lot of behind-the-scenes situations including going on ride-alongs with various federal...
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...
We will do workshops in Italy again one day, once this awful pandemic recedes! Meanwhile, this post captures some of the spirit of our Italy-based Amherst Writers and Artists method workshops.–Cary T., April 2021 Surprise! A huge chocolate festival happens during our Tuscan Writing workshop. So we’re going there! Come on along! Coincidence, coincidence. While we are having our...
[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...
As I mentioned in a post from the other day, when I decided to create an Amherst Writers and Artists-style workshop centered on food, I started reading the Stories from the Kitchen collection and then someone sent me to this interesting and helpful piece in Poets and Writers. The writer attends a class about food writing, and Corrine, the instructor, says to describe a lemon. “Look again,” said...
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...
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...
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...
As I sit here (“As I sit here”? “As I sit here”! “As I sit here” is one of the worst, most clichéd and overused beginnings in the history of first-person narrative … and yet … it is germane, as I am indeed sitting here! So …) as I was saying, as I sit here on the floor in my little room in this little medieval hill town of Castiglion...
We write and we write and we write on the Net, dispensing thoughts and advice. For what? Cary’s classic column from WEDNESDAY, FEB 4, 2009 Dear Cary, My problem is that we have a one-day cycle in our writing, in our lives. You read our problems; then people read our problems in your column. Then people read our responses, but then the sun comes up again, and all our writing goes down on the...
10) Rudely talk over her. 9) Ignore her and when she doesn’t go away keep ignoring her until nightfall. 8) Listen to her and look for possible kernels of truth in what she says. 7) Regard her with mute compassion as a split-off part of the self. 6) Get used to what she’s saying and tune her out like a bad radio. 5) Pause in your writing until she has had her full say and then continue...
Dear … I thought of you just now. I am sitting in this renovated 13th-century Italian convent between Rome and Florence, a short walk up from the train station, and your face drifted into view. There were a lot of people here for ten days but they all left on the train today. I suppose suddenly being alone was one reason I thought of you. There had been little time to really think. Now I am...
Is it the restraint of love? Is it reverence? Amid the effervescent joy of buildings that look like music; the muscular formality of a 50-foot-high gate on an ancient wall; the fleeting intoxication of wafting jasmine: Why, exactly, amid these things, do I feel the contrary impulses to stop and snap an iPhoto yet not snap an iPhoto? It’s reverence is what it is, no? Reverential surrender...