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Cary Tennis graduated from the University of Miami in 1976 with a degree in literature and journalism and entered the masters program in creative writing at San Francisco State in 1978. He passed his orals (Wallace Stevens, William Faulkner and Vladimir Nabokov) and had his creative thesis approved but got distracted around 1980 and never actually got the degree. He went to work in the mailroom of Western Electric in San Francisco, worked as a bike messenger, formed a band called the Repeat Offenders (wrote, sang, played guitar), worked as a rock journalist for the SF Weekly and generally tried to live out some idiosyncratic version of the poet and fiction writer as brilliant urban scold throughout most of the 1980s, before he finally settled down in 1989 with a steady girlfriend, got married, quit the booze and tried to make a legitimate go of it.
In the late '90s he spent five years temping at Chevron, where he learned the finer points of copy editing. Salon hired him in 1999 as a copy editor; in 2001 he took over the advice column from Garrison Keillor and has been writing that ever since.
Today he lives with his wife and two poodles in the Outer Sunset district of San Francisco, where he also runs a small publishing house, organizes writing retreats and conducts weekly writing workshops.
You can reach Cary by e-mail at ctennis (at) salon (dot) com.
