On Paying Attention
And a few other summer thoughts
Hello! Welcome to MUMU Stories! My name is Marianne Manzler. I’m a writer, educator, editor, and arts administrator, and this podcast explores the unique shapes that stories take. Thanks for being here.
This activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund.
This summer, I’ve traveled to Bali, Indonesia, for a delayed honeymoon; Nashville, TN, for a last minute trip to see family and ponder the ever-present question of home (is it who? what? where?); and Gambier, Ohio, for a week away at the delightful Kenyon Review Writers Workshop. Traveling, whether to new places or familiar, always has a way of igniting my creative spirits and fortifying the home we’ve built in our tiny piece of the Midwest.
I’m still processing our trip to Bali and the tiny temples built into the fabric of each family compound, for as far as the eye can see. The smell of burning incense in woven handmade baskets, a daily offering made at the threshold of every home and warung. A quiet refuge, while also a place where giant coach buses squeeze through narrow graveled roads. The sense of oneness that permeates the thick humidity and harmony of traffic and midday rain. A 35-hour journey across the world, only to venture further inward to the core of the writing process. Witnessing the Balinese approach to family, nature, and a slower, more intentional pace of life-it made me want to build a space and gather all my people to live there together and be safe forever.
Between all these places, I’m grateful for the sense of community that tethers us. At Kenyon, I met a new group of writers and realized how important friendship is to the act of creativity. We bonded over mosaics, essay fragments, the art of flash nonfiction (#FLASHERS!!! iykyk), haibuns, and I am forever indebted to the people I’ve grown up with and who I’ve met along the way, whether twenty years ago or this summer, who have dedicated their time and energy to reading and lifting up my work, and each conversation and interaction that continues to shape my work and what is to come, giving me the fortitude to keep pushing forward. My fellow KRWW workshopper, memoirist, & Substacker Carolyn described KRWW best: “I felt like a kid at summer camp.” My highlights: raising a toast at the Kenyon Inn with my loves Felicia and Melissa, from Sewanee to Gambier. Writing late night in Gund Commons with Divya and Misha; karaoke after the evening readings. Finally meeting Asa, Alecia, and Grace IRL. Learning from Rajiv and Krystal, from Jason, Debra, Jackie, and Minerva. Waking up early in my quiet dorm to write before light.
I’m reminded how important it is to make time to write and feel and pay attention. A few months ago, the Loft hosted Maggie Smith and Jeannine Ouellette at Open Book as part of the tour for Maggie’s new book Dear Writer, and they had a fascinating conversation about the key ingredients to creativity, one of which is attention. Attention paid to language, to detail, to the world around us. Attention is valuable, so it is worth our time to start noticing more. Use it or lose it. Writer Jenny Qi in LitHub, who is the author of the award-winning poetry collection Focal Point and has a PhD in Biomedical Science (Cancer Biology), describes the inextricable relationship between poetry and research and how “[her] scientific training has also helped hone [her] ability to pay attention to things” and ultimately stems from curiosity and inquiry about interior and exterior worlds. I love thinking about the act of noticing on the cellular level—whether parsing apart a sentence or paying attention to how we feel in any given moment—we cannot separate these sides of ourselves.
I do this exercise with my students, where they practice the art of paying attention as a grounding technique: place both feet on the ground and look around you on your next walk or rest and jot down five things you see, four things you hear, three things you smell, two things you can touch, one idea or thing or phrase that comes to mind in the midst of all of this. You should come up with a word to describe your state at the beginning of this exercise and ask the same question at the end, and see if anything changes or what comes up. Jeannine Ouellette poses a similar prompt about observation and the importance of handwritten journaling and memory, and encourages the reader to take five minutes of their day to dig into the details of life, through fragments and by taking the pressure of the “I” out of it.
For me:
5: maze of skinny paper birch trees that obscure the sky; quiet library with a sign that says “ASK ME” and “WRITE HERE”; half-done puzzles in empty study rooms; brown and beige wooden furniture; computer monitor with shape-shifting visions of sand dunes and orange tents lighted from within
4: hum of the air-conditioning unit; a creaky cart wheeling around books; typing keyboard; silence
3: vanilla perfume; waxy pages in a reference book; furniture disinfectant
2: cool plastic; scratchy, polyester computer case that is identical to one another faculty member carries
1: thinking about why Ohio feels like home: the mysterious tightly wound spider webs in wild grass illuminated by dew; the symphony of cicadas that followed me around Kenyon’s campus in late morning; the intermittent light of fireflies that guided me home; the deer that watched me and crept closer to my front door, suspicious but curious; all bookending my days spent in workshop.
Give this prompt a try! Take 5-10 minutes of your day and write down your observations using your senses. Pay attention to your body and how you feel at the beginning and end of this exercise. You can use the 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 technique or free-write, whatever works best for you.
Coming Up
I promise I am working on this next batch of recordings! From interviewing my grandmother to my mother to my aunts, to recording the insights of incredible memoirists and poets living in the Twin Cities, I can’t wait for you to hear the stories of resilience, of chosen & blood family, of how we make community wherever we go.
I’m excited to continue exploring Minnesota, even on 90 degree days—up north in a few weeks to see family and down south in Northfield, where I’ll embark upon teaching a creative writing class this fall with undergraduate students.
I also have a few more teaching things coming up!
Loft Literary Center: Experimentation with Hybrid Memoir via Zoom for adults on Saturday, August 9 from 1-4 PM CT via Zoom. There are still a few spots left!
CRAFT of Creativity for Young Writers with 826MSP: Register here
Walker Art Center | October 16: “Teen Maker Break”—a free, drop-in teen writing session from 2-5 PM—and a generative writing workshop during Free Thursday Night for adults from 5-9 PM at Walker Art Center in partnership with the Loft Literary Center. For local TC peeps, I’d love to see you and/or your kiddos there! Here’s to getting started. Your story is worthy of being told!
