Join me in my live two-hour class and discover the Five Things I’ve Learned about the ways that expansive, open, and patient attention frees us creatively and offers us glimpses of our most important truths.

My name is Meghan O’Gieblyn and I’d like to invite you to my two-hour workshop, Five Things I’ve Learned About Will, Attention, and Writing.

Several years ago, I came across an aphorism by the French mystic and philosopher Simone Weil: “We have to try to cure our faults by attention and not by will.” I was both fascinated and mystified by this quote and ended up writing a memoir, Will and Attention, about my attempts to understand the relationship between those two ideas. As someone who has struggled with addiction and spiritual doubt, I know from experience that there are certain things in life that resist willpower, or (in some cases) become more elusive and difficult to achieve the more you exert yourself. You cannot simply will yourself to kick a pernicious habit, abandon an obsession, fall in love, or believe in God. Brute effort is especially useless when it comes to creative work: You cannot summon inspiration on demand, or overcome an obstacle in your work by simply muscling through. Such things require an indirect method, which I’ve come to think of as the path of attention.

I often say that writing is the only way I know how to pay attention. And I’ve come to believe that the value of any piece of writing comes down to the writer’s quality of attention — to their thoughts, to their experience, to the world around them, to the texture of a sentence. Attention today is often associated with “focus,” an intense, clenched effort to hone in on one thing while ignoring everything else. But there is another mode of attention that is expansive, open, and patient (“to attend to,” in older dictionaries, had the secondary meaning “to wait”). Over the fifteen years that I’ve been teaching writing workshops, I’ve observed that many of the blocks and frustrations writers experience stem from the anxious, overly-focused mindset we tend to adopt when trying to solve a problem — and which often leads us to get in our own way. Attention offers a different way to approach the creative process, one that involves looking instead of grasping, expectation instead of effort.

In this workshop, we’ll discuss how to avoid the pitfalls of overdetermination, remaining open to those discoveries and serendipities that arise unexpectedly in the writing process and often contain the most important truths. We’ll talk about how to attend to what the writing is trying to “tell” you, often subtly, even when you think you’re writing about something else. I’ll also talk about attention as a way of being in the world and how to cultivate the kind of close, wakeful gaze that leads to a writerly way of seeing. I’ll share with you some examples from writing that demonstrates these qualities, and we’ll do some exercises together that will allow you to practice attention in your own craft. While the workshop will focus primarily on writing, the concepts we discuss will be relevant to those engaged in any kind of creative discipline — and might offer some broader glimpses into what it means to live attentively.

I look forward to working with you.

—Meghan