Essay · Winner, The Meridian Essay Award 2023
The Craft of Attention
What does it mean to truly listen — to a person, a street, a page? An essay on attention as a moral act.
About the essay
Written over a winter of early mornings, The Craft of Attention begins with a simple exercise: sitting in the same café chair every day for a month and writing down everything that happens. What emerges is part memoir, part field guide — an argument that attention is the rarest courtesy we can pay one another.
The essay moves from a grandmother's kitchen to a hospital waiting room to a noisy subway car, tracing how listening changes the listener. It asks uncomfortable questions about distraction, and offers practical rituals for writers, teachers and anyone whose work depends on noticing.
On publication it was shared more than anything I had written before — read aloud in classrooms, quoted in commencement addresses, and awarded The Meridian Essay Award in 2023.
What it explores
- —Attention as devotion: why noticing is a form of love
- —The thirty-day café experiment and what it taught
- —Listening across difference: hospitals, classrooms, borders
- —Five daily rituals for a more observant writing life
