Kids are beautiful in cities. They ain’t been ground up yet. There’s harmonicas. After grueling San Francisco-Paris-Florence flight we ride the tiny Pensione Crocini elevator to the tall windows on the courtyard, wash, nap, then espresso at the cafe and luxuriating in the beautiful visual rhythm of the Italianate style, the beautiful rhythm of spring on the Arno, which is rushing past...
[button link=”mailto:[email protected]” newwindow=”yes”] Write for Advice[/button] Cary’s classic column from MONDAY, NOV 23, 2009 I’m getting sick of being “the editor’s girlfriend” Dear Cary, I’m a college student and a reporter for my university’s paper. I’m a good writer — my work has shown up in publications beyond the university, and since arriving here I’ve...
Dear Cary: I am writing to you for writing advice, more specifically, if it’s ever a good idea to write a fictional story based on an event that has happened in the author’s personal life. Let me be more specific. For the past six months, I have been the victim of cyberstalking. It began as a flirtation in an online chatroom and transformed into an obsession with me that involved the...
Cary’s classic column from TUESDAY, SEP 30, 2008 Every time I start to do my assignment, I find myself surfing the Web instead! Dear Cary, I am taking a creative nonfiction writing course, and I’m supposed to be working on a piece about what I ate for breakfast. The problem is, every time I sit down at the computer to work, I start compulsively reading the election coverage online, sometimes...
Is it appropriate, in a work of autofiction, to ask, Which part is the fiction? I think it is. Because of how people read. The great thing about fiction is it frees the author of the ethical considerations of autobiography and memoir. When people read something that’s about something that actually happened they read one way. When they read about something that’s not supposed to have...
I write from passion and desperation; my heritage is as a punk and a hippie, a fan of visionary and beat poetics, a lover of revolutionaries and rebels. I also am drawn to the severe aesthetics of writers like Nabokov and Wallace Stevens. I straddle worlds. But let’s have a little context. The Friday before the Jan. 10, 2015, Poets and Writers Live event at the Brava Theater in San...
I felt so strongly about reaching out to San Francisco writers at the Poets & Writers Live event, such a strong sense of localness that I found myself staying up late the night before writing this long screed, pouring out my heart in the matter of what it’s like to be in San Francisco today, having moved from the Mission to the Outer Sunset, having seen Salon.com move its operations to...
[button link=”mailto:[email protected]” newwindow=”yes”] Write for Advice[/button] Cary’s classic column from SUNDAY, NOV 22, 2009 I think I’m a writer, but fear paralyzes me Dear Cary, I feel paralyzed and stuck in a rut. I recently graduated from college without a clear path and a hazy focus at best; I am lost and confused and can recognize that I self-sabotage any...
So here is another thing. Seth Myers is interviewing Joe Hill and I am watching from my perch high and far away on my mysterious island of emotional distance and contempt and it is as if the older I get the more godlike I am because there is nothing that surprises me and I cannot be seduced by the son of Stephen King and I am charmed by nothing; I have attained the weary omniscience of a god ...
Dear Cary – My creative doubts have been simmering like a mild poison in my heart and mind for years and I’m starting to hate myself. I need to do something about it. Nine years ago I was living on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. By age 31 I had accidentally become a loudmouth, performance-arty, punk-rocky type person. I say accidentally because as a dull-witted, privileged...
[button link=”mailto:[email protected]” newwindow=”yes”] Write for Advice[/button] Cary’s classic column from Thursday, Aug 19, 2004 My boss uses what I write in e-mails as his own. What should I do about it? Dear Cary, I’m an in-house copywriter/creative director with a small technical company, working for a boss whose communications skills, to put it...
I sent a piece to “Fence” and they said it wasn’t for them. “Thanks. OK. That’s cool. I can handle it. It’s not a big deal. It’s not like I’m going to go out and cut myself or anything.” A meditation on submission and rejection ——– Original Message ——– Subject: RE: [Fence] Wading in Shallow Water with Architects From:...
Would you like to come to the Chateau du Pin writing retreat with a well-planned route that is easy to follow? My wife Norma is a great planner, plus she reads French, German and Italian, so she has figured it all out for you. First: Would you like to fly into Paris, or into Nantes? The advantage of flying into Paris is that it’s Paris. Paris is an amazing, life-changing city. Nothing can...
But writing in a magnificent French château surrounded by 300 acres of topiary, formal gardens, parks, woodland trails and vineyards can’t hurt. Maybe you’re perfectly content writing by yourself day after day in your kitchen on that old table, or at your cramped desk in the spare bedroom. Fine. À chacun son goût. You can find us this September at Le Château du Pin, a private French...
It was at one time understood that to be noble one must not draw unseemly attention to oneself or glorify oneself or make oneself seem, in a crowd, to be the most important person, or to seek glory only for oneself at the expense of others, nor to seek to draw the fame of others toward oneself for one’s own gain. But today, all good citizens must tweet and tweet widely. One must take...
Not to be postmodern or self-reflexive or self-conscious about the form but just to say that I’m going through a process of discovering what I love and in the process of discovering what I love I realized as I was exiting the bathroom that the reason I didn’t feel comfortable in the comments section at Salon for the whole 12 years I was writing those 2,300-odd Since You Asked advice...
I’m so awakened by Ifemelu in Americanah, her blogging, that after the doctor, whose first name was Tennessa, which I had never heard before, and which, when I mentioned it to the medical student who had amazingly white teeth, got me a blank and slightly fearful smile as if she did not know which way I was going with this simple acknowledgement that I had never heard the name Tennessa...
Come to Guest House Retreat and Conference Center in Chester, Connecticut, May 16 through 19, 2014, for four days writing, thinking, talking and exploring new inner territory in a safe and supportive environment. I’ll be there, along with Amherst Writers and Artists founder Pat Schneider, offering daily Amherst Writers and Artists workshops in the beautiful Connecticut countryside. For...
Into my awareness a few weeks ago came this strange, unbidden thought: My reading is private. I don’t really want to talk with you about the books I love. I just want to love them in my own way. I mean, I like you and you’re interesting to me, but the reading I do is mine, all mine, and I don’t even all that much want to share it. Is that bad of me? The truth is full of paradox...
Journalists are like firemen. They aren’t needed all the time. But when they’re needed, they’re needed fast and you need a lot of them. They have to do a lot of things all at once. And it helps if they know each other too, so they don’t fall all over each other and make a mess. I think the San Francisco City College closure threat makes it clear what happens when a city...
Note: Occasionally here on carytennis.com we publish raw first drafts written to prompts in our Amherst Writers and Artists workshops; they are not finished pieces, and so are not open to comment, but nevertheless are often interesting to read, and stand as evidence of the kinds of creative acts that occur more or less spontaneously, and often with tremendous energy, in the workshops. Click here...
First, I’d like to give a shout out to the other featured writers, some of whom I had the pleasure and privilege of meeting at Cary’s first Creative Getaway. It’s good to see their faces again and inspiring to witness the success they’ve achieved with their writing. Going to the Creative Getaway and meeting Cary and Norma changed my life. I knew I wanted to do more with my writing but I didn’t...
Back in 2008, I had the good fortune to be introduced to Cary Tennis. I was trying to make sense of a novel length story I had been working on for two years. I was self-conscious and insecure about what I had produced, and those insecurities were all but squeezing the life out of my creativity. I didn’t believe I qualified as a writer, but a story came to me with such compelling force that I...
Lucy Hilmer has been a regular at Cary’s writing practice table at Café La Boheme in San Francisco, for the past 2 ½ years. Lucy is a fine art photographer, documentary filmmaker and poet, who spends most of her time working alone in her home studio. But every Friday at noon, she heads to the Mission to sit with Cary’s pop up community of creative people for an hour, where she and others fast...
[button link=”mailto:[email protected]” newwindow=”yes”] Write for Advice[/button] Dear Cary, In my early twenties, I went to graduate school to study English literature. I was deeply passionate about the written word and knew from the moment that I could read that I wanted to devote my life to this pursuit. Idealistic, I felt like providence had led me to...
Happy New Year! After slowing down for the holidays, Cary and I are back working at full speed. The “Featured Person of the Week” is back, as are more columns and creative writing from Cary. A note: because many commenters have mentioned that they would like the ability to edit their comments after they post them, we’ve changed our method of posting comments. You now need to log in to our...
What our friend Brian Herrera wrote today about his experience at the Creative Getaway at Marconi spurred some thoughts of my own which I’d like to share — with people who’ve had this experience and with people who perhaps do not know about the Amherst Writers and Artists method or the creative getaways Norma and I have put on since 2008. Actually, I have a lot to say so...
We first met Brian Herrera at our first-ever Creative Getaway. An exceptionally talented and inventive writer, he amazed us all during our evening reading sessions by one moment reading us the most deeply moving piece, and the next reading something that would leave the entire room in tears of laughter. Here’s what Brian has to say about himself, the Creative Getaway, and his new project...
[button link=”mailto:[email protected]” newwindow=”yes”] Write for Advice[/button] Do not trust the voice in your head that says everyone else has a distorted perception of what day it is. Recognize that when your wife reminds you it’s Tuesday and that you said you would write a column on Tuesday, she thought you meant you would write a column on Tuesday...
Chloë Delafield has been a regular at Cary’s writing workshop for a number of years and went on to publish one of her pieces in the Sun magazine. Chloë is on the board of directors for Green Branch, a mobile children’s library dedicated to social justice and the environment. Green Branch has existed as a pop-up reading room for the past year and is now raising funds for a bookmobile...
After the Saturday workshop I settle on the couch reading The Maverick Poets, that book edited by Steve Kowit, who I was lodging next to down at the Sun Esalen thing. But the thing I love after the workshop is that feeling afterwards like we’ve all been together in this room dreaming out loud together. So then I read that poem by Bukowski about the cat, “The History of a Tough...
Books I checked out of the library and read and enjoyed in 2013: Lisa Cron’s Wired for Story. Vivian Gornick’s The Situation and the Story. Rober Olen Butler’s From Where You Dream. and Patricia Highsmith’s Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction. Kind of an end-of-the-year thing. I read lots more books than that, but these stood out. (The below is verbatim from my San...
To begin without knowing how to do it: That has been my approach, and I have agonized like a man sitting in a field with many ingredients of a house laid out before him and a panicked feeling that he has begun before he is ready. He has begun without a plan. He has no blueprint. He simply got it into his head that he could dredge up many interesting things from the well and the lake and the river...
Cary first met Michele Crockett at his Amherst Writers and Artists-style online workshop and since that time Michele has gone on to receive her own AWA certification. In May 2013 Michele was certified by the fabulous Maureen Buchanan Jones, Executive Director, AWA. Although Michele is currently working as Graduate Faculty at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, she is also working to...
Cary and I first learned about The Write On Mamas from Janine Kovac, who has been a regular attendee of Cary’s writing workshops over the past few years. In addition to being an exceptional creative talent, Janine has an amazing spirit and energy, and is one of those rare people who can bring people together and make magic happen. Here’s what Janine has to say about the Mamas: The...