01 — In progress, ongoing

Notes on Attention

A series of linked essays examining how attention shapes narrative, memory, and meaning — and what creative practice can still protect.

Hand writing notes beside an open book — Every essay starts longhand. The keyboard comes second.

The premise

We talk about attention as a resource to be mined, managed, or hacked. These essays treat it as something older: a moral act. What we attend to is what we become, and the devices in our pockets are not neutral about the answer.

Each essay pairs a small personal history — a classroom, a newsroom, a father's workshop — with reporting on the researchers, teachers, and monks, literal and figurative, who study focus for a living.

Attention is the rarest form of generosity. Every essay here is an attempt to practise it on the page.

The essays

Chapters in draft

The Reading Hour — what a classroom of teenagers taught me about deep reading.
Copy Desk at Midnight — focus as a professional discipline under deadline.
The Workshop — my father's bench, and the attention of the hands.
Monks and Modems — contemplative practice meets the notification age.

Form and publication

The essays are written to stand alone and to accumulate: each under 5,000 words, each ending where the next begins. Early versions are appearing in quarterlies through 2026; the collected volume follows the Forthcoming Collection into production.

Man writing at a wooden desk — Revision is attention with a pencil.

Read an excerpt

Editors considering an excerpt, or reading groups wanting a bound galley of the first three essays, should write directly — a small number of advance copies circulate each season.

Request a galley

Advance excerpts for editors, teachers, and reading groups. Limited each season.

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