Hello, friends!
I’m writing in a pure stream-of-consciousness to you on this sunny Sunday afternoon. My feisty four-year-old grey and white cat is curled up on my legs and a book is perched open at my side. We’re cuddled in a beautiful quilt that my creative and artistic grandmother pieced by hand. The quilt is meticulously patterned in smaller, square patterns of bright spring colors — buttery yellows, warm pinks, grassy greens, and cornflower blue. The underside of the quilt is that same calm blue, dappled with white flowers and minuscule scenes of a little girl attending to her teapot, her dog, her dolls.
(When I was a little girl, “cornflower blue” was my favorite color in my Crayola box.)
I’m looking at the quilt and I’m noticing its colors. I’m noticing Tilly’s soft cat purrs on my legs, vibrating gently as she dozes in and out of sleep. I’m noticing how the little girl on the back of the quilt is completely absorbed in her work: pouring her tea, watering a flower, petting her dog.
I’ve been thinking about attention
In my “Close Readers” series, I like to ask the writers I’m interviewing what “close reading” means to them, and if they consider themselves a “close reader.” As I was preparing our next interview for later this month, I was reflecting on when I first started thinking about “close reading” as more than a reading habit and more of a way of life.
It was when I was teaching my very first writing course at Oregon State.
I was a 22-year-old graduate student with a baby face. I was very frequently mistaken as a student in my class, rather than the instructor. I’d just finished my own bachelor’s degree in English and I was in that lovely first phase of graduate study where you’re finding your feet and realizing that you’re actually doing it and trying not to panic about the thesis you have to start writing in a few months.
I was also trying to figure out how to get my introductory writing class, made up of first-year undergrad students, to do their homework. They weren’t doing the reading for class, and that made leading a group discussion about the reading rather difficult. I had a gut feeling it wasn’t anyone’s fault, though. Because I knew from my own experience that I’d never read anything because anyone forced me to; I needed to find ways “in” to caring about the things in the dull-seeming novels and dense articles I was often assigned. The way I had learnt to do so was through a sustained period of paying attention — of noticing things and taking notes on those things.
Maybe my students just needed me to help them find a way “in,” a way to be active, rather than passive, about reading.
So, I decided to have them “read” something other than words on a page or a screen. When they arrived to our classroom one drizzly afternoon, I asked them to clear their desks and put their phones away and sit quietly.
“All I want you to do is look around. Just look at the room. Notice the room, the air temperature, the ambient sounds, the colors, the light, the way you feel in your chair. Anything you notice. Just sit and notice.”
I gave us seven minutes just to look. To notice. To observe.
As you can imagine, many of them found it a terribly uncomfortable and awkward time. Because any time they reached for their phones or bags, I’d quietly remind them: “No, no. Just sit. Look.”
When our time was up, I asked what they noticed. They were quiet at first, and then almost every hand was up:
It’s really freaking humid in here.
The window near the back squeaks a lot.
This desk is so uncomfortable. My butt hurts.
The lighting is really weird. Do you intentionally not turn the overhead lights on?
The floor is so ugly. I never noticed it before but it’s so dirty and scuffed up.
It smells a little bit like mold.
I’m so tired. But this room, like, makes me more tired.
It’s weird we have a chalkboard instead of a whiteboard.
The light switches are all different colors.
You’ve just read the room, I told them. You noticed what was happening around you, and then you turned it into sentences. You’ve turned the passive stuff of your environment into active observations.
The next step, I told them, was to get curious about what they’d observed. This is easy, I said. You just add a “why” or a “how” in front of the observation and turn it from statement to question:
Why is it humid in here?
How does the window squeak?
Why do we have a chalkboard instead of a whiteboard?
You’ve just turned a reading experience into an analytical exercise, I told them. You took what you noticed and you turned it into a potential area for inquiry.
“I want you to leave your things here and go outside for the next half hour,” I said.
“I want you to find something else on campus to “read” the way you just read this classroom. Find something you’ve noticed, write it down, then turn it into a question. Come back at the 40-minute mark, and we’ll share the questions we came up with.”
Off they went into the wet, grey air.
I was asking my students to treat the act of reading as an art of paying attention, rather than passively looking at words on a page. I was hoping to help them see the magic that can happen when you decide to tune into your surroundings and ask questions about why things are the way they are.
I firmly believe that if you cannot do this — if you cannot find some level of care toward the world outside of you — you may struggle to connect the dots between yourself and that world. And in addition to being able to ask questions about the world being a key component of being able to pass your college writing classes, it also seemed like a good lesson to learn in general. After all, it was one that I had personally learned from a professor who became central to my life for many years, and which eventually blossomed into the way of living that let me decenter him to make my own life.
In How to do Nothing, Jenny Odell writes:
“If we think about what it means to “concentrate” or to “pay attention” at an individual level, it implies alignment: different parts of the mind and even the body acting in concert and oriented toward the same thing. To pay attention to one thing is to resist paying attention to other things; it means constantly denying and thwarting provocations outside the sphere of one’s attention.”
To pay attention — to closely read — is to bring yourself into that mystical, mysterious realm of oneness that all the gurus and meditators talk about with such reverence. To closely read is to notice those parts of you that are running, full speed, at anything but this in front of me and to pause, take a deep breath, and gently ask: “Where are you going?”
A few years ago, I worked on a branding team with a person who started every creative review meeting by stating, with a pitying smile, “you just have to remember that nobody reads anymore.” She used this as an excuse to not to any work, herself, but it also seemed like a pretty tragic worldview from which to exist.
To believe that “nobody reads anymore” was to believe, as she and others on the team seemed to with vigor, that “no one is paying attention, so we have to force them to pay attention to us. We have to trick them with too-good-to-be-true deals; we have to go for clichéd design that screams “WHAT A DEAL”; we have to scream everything we say.”
This was a tired view, but especially noxious because, as Odell points out, “What the attention economy takes for granted is the quality of attention, because like all modern capitalist systems, it imagines its currency as uniform…and uncritical.”
Good creatives tend to know that these differences in attention matter, and in fact make all the difference for how we pose and present ideas and questions and yes, products. We know that it’s not blinking lights and low prices that drive sales, it’s also brand identity and presence. It’s the way a brand earns your attention, respects your process of consideration and exploring your options, and speaks to you, through good writing and design, as a fellow human being.
But anyone who questioned this particular person’s approach was deemed a naysayer and blamed for embarrassingly low team morale. Regardless of how many styles and voices and creative directions we tried, nothing was enough. Nothing was loud enough, garish enough, mean enough to meet the ever-shifting criteria of the non-readers, the non-payers-of-attention, the folks whose disenchantment with the other, very real people on the end of every transaction belied cruel and inaccurate assumptions about how stupid everyone else was and how right they must always be.
A failure of imagination
People don’t read anymore? This excuse was not really about reading at all. It was actually about this other, deeper assumption that pouted right beneath it: if people would just read, we’d sell more product. If people would read, and weren’t so stupid, then my job would be a lot easier.
But this simply isn’t true.
Because guess what?
People aren’t stupid. And people do read. We all do. All the time. (And we listen and we watch: podcasts and product videos, reviews and ratings, novels and news.)
All of this requires storytelling.
Which is another way of saying: All of this requires that we make something worth paying attention to.
If I learned anything from being on that team for so (too) long, it was this: I believe it is always smarter to operate from the assumption that "reading requires my brain to do some work," rather than "nobody reads." This helps us shift our work to earning care and attention from others, rather than assuming no one cares about anything at all.
Building a brand isn’t just about throwing a bunch of ideas at a wall and letting the loudest voices in the room decide what sticks and for how long. And it is not “people not reading” that makes all of this so hard.
We tend to pay attention to what matters to us.
So, really, it’s about crafting a real story and knowing how to share it in a way that earns the fickle, shifting attention spans of yourself as well as the people co-existing with you in a world of constant stimulation and information overload.
My students returned at the end of class a little damp and a little bothered that I’d made them go outside to look around. But they were also a little bothered about how much they’d missed on their way to class each day.
As they filtered back into the room, they were talking to each other:
Did you know there’s a huge art installation behind the building next door? It’s made entirely of sticks from trees on campus. There’s a plaque and everything. When did that get here?
I didn’t know there was a coffee cart on the other sidewalk. They have hot chai! I’m going to take that route from now on. How come I never saw that before?
There’s no bike parking for this building. But the other four buildings all around us all have really nice, covered bike parking. Why?
I hardly had to say a word. They talked to each other and shared what they’d seen for the rest of our time. And with just five minutes left, I impulsively changed their next assignment from a close reading of an assigned essay to a close reading of what they noticed right in front of them.
A week later, I got mini-essays about why all their liberal arts classrooms were in the oldest buildings with chalkboards and no tech; how long the art installations on campus tend to be featured and how the campus selects new exhibits each fall; why the women’s studies’ building was named after the woman cast in bronze out front on the main stairs.
I got a pile of really good questions and pretty authentic curiosities. (And I actually enjoyed grading that week, which was a big perk!)
I also got the kind of student response that shaped my teaching ethos moving forward: that most students — and especially those who struggle most in English classes — need someone to help them find a way into new ideas. They didn’t need the ideas per se. They just needed to be reminded that they already had everything they needed to get curious about the world. They had senses and bodies and awareness that, aligned and channeled toward noticing, could have a lot of powerful results, or at least inspire a great conversation.
“Just as it takes alignment for someone to concentrate and act with intention,” writes Odell, “it requires alignment for a ‘movement’ to move. Importantly, this is not a top-down formation, but rather a mutual agreement among individuals who pay intense attention to the same things and to each other.”
So much of the angst and frustration that came from that branding job I had a few years ago — a tension that spanned the team and led to countless, pointless meetings to brainstorm new ways of “working together” — seems to have come from the fact that there was no “mutual agreement” among the group to “pay attention to the same things and to each other.”
In fact, there was a rotten belief at the heart of the team that leadership treated as truth: that no one pays attention to anything anymore, and that any of our attempts to build a meaningful brand story or connect in authentic ways with others were a fool’s errand. A waste of time; would never lead to “conversion” or measurable success. It was the tragic, seductive idea that we have to be cruel to each other to get anything done.
“An atomized and competitive atmosphere obstructs individual attention because everything else disappears in a fearful and myopic battle for stability,” Odell writes in her chapter “Anatomy of a Refusal.”
I learned so much about myself, from all that friction. I learned how much I care about the world around me, and how much I want to do work that makes it safer, happier, and calmer for others — rather than louder, meaner, even if more “performant.” I learned that I want to use my powers of close reading for good, rather than being constantly asked to trick people into buying something before they understood it. I learned that there really are some people who believe that those who pay attention — and who turn their observations into questions — are a threat.
Finally, I learned that I have no desire to spend any time with people like that anymore, or in spaces “atomized and competitive” where everything becomes a fight. I prefer those light-filled rooms where people excitedly ask each other if they’ve seen the amazing art piece in the quad, and genuinely ask each other for new perspectives that can drive even the most menial work tasks toward something meaningful.
What I’d learned with my students that day back in 2011 became a lesson I re-learned in 2023. It was one I already knew in my marrow, but had been encouraged — and even rewarded — for forgetting, in the “rise and grind” culture of a job that was a terrible fit for me in virtually every way. I got nothing out of it; it got everything from me.
These days, I’m far more interested in spaces where I, like the little girl on the cornflower blue of the quilt, can absorb myself in meaningful tasks of caring for my little world. I’m interested in the art on the walls (and supporting the artists from whence it comes). I’m interested in the cat on my legs, and how to make her life comfy and exciting and safe. I’m watering the plants, baking the banana bread, weeding the garden.
I’m interested in the good work we can do when we turn our attention toward making the kinds of choices that create alignment, rather than dissociation and fear. Because what we notice becomes the air we breathe, and I want good, fresh air that is a pleasure to take in and give back out. I want that.
“If it’s attention (deciding what to pay attention to) that makes our reality, regaining control of it can also mean the discovery of new worlds and new ways of moving through them.”
— Jenny Odell, How to do Nothing
Additional reading:
Why We Don’t Read (from The New Yorker)
Gen Z Broke the Marketing Funnel (from Vogue Business)
Ship Faster by Building Design Systems Slower (from Big Medium)
I love your personal essays, Haley! You have such a skill for blending the personal and the academic ideas.
This is another amazing essay, Haley! I'm in awe and I wish I could have been one of your students. What struck me the most is how you met your students where they were at and helped them discover the opportunities and possibilities rather than just telling them or lecturing on craft. I love using this approach in coaching, too, because as you say, "they need someone to help them find a way into new ideas." I hate that you had to experience the time at the branding job, but I'm glad that you are able to look at it and turn it into lessons learned... and a reminder for those of us who are so often caught between the nuances of a "job" versus our internal beliefs about creativity.