Up Close With: Courtney Tenz
Meet the wonderful writers and patrons behind LWS.
While her heart lies in literary fiction, this week’s featured member is more often found in non-fiction. Courtney Tenz is an essayist with a specialty in European travel, arts and culture, and women’s rights. When you see her in writers hour, she may also be working on her narrative non-fiction book proposal about women who parent alone — yes, it’s the big topics and big questions that inspire Courtney. She “likes the idea of active inspiration” and can find full days sitting at a computer “too distracting”. What else do we need to know about Courtney? This week, she introduces herself to the community.
Courtney Tenz (she/her)
- Aged 46
- Always traveling — you’re likely to find her somewhere around Europe or the US
What do you write, in general?
I have an MFA in literary fiction and that’s where my heart lies, but most often you’ll read my essays on European travel and arts and culture, or women’s rights. I have an email newsletter, too, called the Intangibles that I hope to publish more regularly this year.
What are you working on right now?
Over the last year, I put together a book proposal for a narrative nonfiction book looking at women who parent alone — the culture and history of it and how political policy driven by class and race discrimination in Germany and the US impacts parenting choices. It’s based on this idea a German sociologist once posited that how women who parent alone are treated in a society determines how other women make their life choices, like whether to have children or divorce or whatever. (I speak here in gender binaries only because that’s how the research is formatted while knowing that reproductive decisions impact everyone).
In the US, the largest demographic of people living in poverty is children under five; in Germany, one of the largest risk factors for poverty is raising children with a single head of household. So often the choices are economic ones. I published an essay in Harper’s Bazaar that touched on some of the ideas in the book but realize that in spite of the parenting space being a wide book market, the subject is going to be a tough sell so am thinking that this year I may instead just convert all the interviews and research I’ve done into a series of magazine features instead. That would buy me more time to work on a novel I keep putting aside.
Where and when do you write?
My brain gives me about two good hours of focus a day, usually first thing in the morning, so I like to put words on the page then. But I also like to think of the time I go for walks around the nearby ponds or staring out the window at the neighbor’s horses as writing time, if only because I like the idea of active inspiration and most days find sitting at a computer too distracting to write.
How do you write?
I’m not really sure I have a process — the consequence of having been a writer for so long means that writing and reading (an integral part of the process!) is just something that’s a part of my every day. Due to other obligations, I can’t carve out a straight eight-hour workday so my process is pretty scattered, stealing writing time in snatches. I try to start my day with private/creative writing in the Salon morning hours (either UK or PST depending on where in the world I am) because that’s when my brain is freshest. I try to make sure I have at least one pitch circulating among editors at all times so one day a week, I use my LWS hours for pitching.
A big question for me in recent years has been how to find a way to separate corporate work from creative work and I’m trying to find a structure or process that allows that. At this point, I only do copywriting or content writing on topics I’m interested in and though that helps a lot, it’s hard for me to shift the brain space from feminist foreign policy or brand copy to writing fiction, so if I have a lot of client work, my creative stuff falls to the wayside. I wish it were the opposite.
If I’m feeling overwhelmed by the corporate writing I do (which is always in MS Word), I’ll go for a walk or grab a journal and brain dump by hand there. I still keep an old-fashioned pen-and-paper calendar and reserve a few pages for jotting down ideas for essays when they come to me but all of my writing — pitches, essays, reviews, whatever — is done on the computer, usually on Scrivener so I can turn the internet off to avoid distraction. I’m still learning Scrivener and want to use it to better organize my research but am perhaps the most unstructured writer and I’m not sure what I’d do once all the notecards are formatted. As a former teacher I love the idea of using outlines, but my writing brain never ever follows them.
Why do you write?
I find the act of writing a continuation of my education. I don’t feel like I learned enough in school and always find myself interested in learning more, so I often set myself the task of writing about something I know very little about. Reading and taking in others’ words is a key part of what keeps me going every day, and a big part of my process as a writer is just thinking about what others have said — a sort of processing on the page.
What inspires your creativity?
Art, especially Paul Klee’s oil painting “Hauptweg und Nebenwege” (Highway and Byways). I hang a copy of the painting near my writing desk to remember that there are many ways to the goal; though some paths may require more turns, there’s always a place to stop and change direction and still end up at the horizon.
While that painting holds a lot of personal meaning, looking at any art (like the Monet I’ve included below) serves as a reminder of how far I’ve come. As a child in rural Wisconsin, I had many teachers say not to dream too big — that we would never see Europe or appreciate art in person. Seeing Water Lilies in the Kunsthaus Zurich and writing about expressionist paintings for some of the top culture journals while living in Europe thus feels like tremendous success, even on days when my goals feel far away.
What’s your favourite book?
The History of Love, by Nicole Krauss.
What’s the best advice you’ve received about creativity?
It’s your job as the writer to tell the story and it’s the reader’s job to interpret that story; you never know what they will bring to it and so you should just write the story, not worrying about the nuances that will be created through that interaction between writer and reader.
What’s the one thing you would tell other/aspiring writers?
Just do it. “Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but most of all, endurance.” — James Baldwin
How can we discover more about you and your work?
