During those early pandemic months, I started a personal project that kind of took over my life and helped me redirect my attention. In some ways, this project came from these two selves trying to figure out a way to navigate the world differently during that very strange time.
I.
In the summer of 2020, I started making a book report about Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing, a book I had read when it first came out the year before and which I found myself returning to in those early pandemic months.
In the beginning, my project was a personal creative response - a remix of the book’s ideas through hand-drawn illustrations, collages, watercolors and personal essays about the ways these ideas became more relevant during the pandemic.
I thought I could make a zine kind of thing for friends who I thought would be into the ideas in Jenny's book, but might not get around to reading it. I had never thought of myself as an artist, but working on this project became a way for me to develop a creative practice. It also helped me connect with people, at a time when connection was hard to come by.
Jenny tells the story of Old Survivor, an old-growth redwood tree in Oakland. Because of its strange shape, Old Survivor was never cut down by loggers. Old Survivor survived by appearing useless as a timber tree.
I think of my own project similarly: too oddly shaped for the publishing industrial complex or even the consumption industrial complex. How could anyone else even read it? It was handmade. For a long time, there was only one copy of it. And that copy lived in a cardboard box. In a shed. In my backyard.
Jenny encourages us to embrace ideas that are fuzzier, blobbier.
When a friend of mine read an early draft of my project, he said, gently, "It seems like the audience for this is...yourself." I think he meant it as, if not an insult, then at least an issue… that should be addressed in order to make the project more legible, more accessible to an outside reader.
But the original audience for this project was me. And I understood it perfectly.
II.
I wanted to record all the parts of Jenny’s book that I loved and that I wanted to remember. The first version of my project was 6 pages long - one oversized page for each of the book's six chapters.
Here's Chapter 4 from How to Do Nothing: Exercises in Attention.
Copying Jenny’s words by hand became something of a meditative practice for me - a way to slow down and better understand what I was reading, a way to internalize the book’s ideas.
There are illustrations of ideas inspired by the book:
I tried watercolor. Here’s Toni Morrison.
There’s a bunch of pictures of my kids:
And a lot of stuff about birds.
III.
There’s a concept I was introduced to while I was working on this project called “writing with” - it’s essentially the idea that you are writing with your subject whether or not they are formally participating.
In her book Spill about Black feminist thinkers, the scholar and poet Alexis Pauline Gumbs identifies as writing with Audre Lorde even though Lorde is no longer living.
In my case, I was “writing with” Jenny even though she had no idea I was working on this project for most of the time I was working on it. I was also writing with a whole universe of other thinkers and writers, mostly women of color: Robin Wall Kimmerer, adrienne maree brown, Grace Lee Boggs. And eventually this idea of writing with became "making with", and this project evolved from an individual exploration into a group project.
In some cases, I was collaborating with people because I had to. I didn’t know how to make a book. I didn’t know how to digitize the hand-drawn pages; they were too big for a standard scanner. In my early attempts, you can see my fingers holding the pages down.
Margaret helped edit the book report.
My mother in law “fixed” my watercolor and hand-cut the letters for the cover.
Justin helped me lay out the pages. He stayed at my father-in-law’s place down the road for a couple of days, and we read all 200 pages of the book report. Out loud. Together.
And this is Sara, who helped me put this whole thing together, even though neither of us had ever made a book before.
Here's Sara taking a shot after sending the final files to the printer.
I came to think of doing nothing as something that was not about centering myself but about being present with other people in my real life and imagining new ways alongside them.
I started thinking about how to share the book report - and the experience I'd had making it - with others. I wanted to show how it felt for me to direct my attention so intensely. I also wanted to replicate the joy of doing things in real life with other people, to intentionally reclaim our attention together.
I was invited to do an exhibition.
But what does an exhibition about a book that’s about another book actually look like?
The exhibition started with the entire book on the wall. It was a way for me to show just how out of hand this project became.
I made a little library organized by some of the ideas I was thinking about while working on the project: things like Poetry, Nature, Care and Creativity.
I also wanted to give people easy ways to exercise their own attention (without having to make a 200-page book), so there are little interactive stations as well:
Lynda Barry’s Spiraling Activity
Blind Contour Drawing
An Attention Archive
There were giveaways: nap tickets, gold stars, permission slips.
It turns out that this project is a lot about permission - granting myself permission to make time and space for something that had little productive value; and granting permission, in turn, to others to honor and follow their own creative curiosity.
This first exhibition led to other exhibitions.
At a public library…
A community space
A bookstore…with Jenny (!)
In my own creative practice, as writing with has evolved into making with, the project has transformed from an individual experience into a collective one. I keep sharing it because every time I do something, something else happens.
My friends surprised me by making their own book reports!
Shani (who I had never met) started making watercolors inspired by the project.
Someone gave me $1!
On its surface, my project is a book about another book, but more broadly, it is an attempt to practice cultivating collective creative attention.
This was, and is, a process project, about the attempts I made to pursue a creative practice where I didn’t have one, and my goal is to make the work of practicing creativity more accessible - to insist that creativity is not precious, that everyone is capable of it. And that creative output can be centered on ideas like curiosity, reciprocity and care rather than on cults of personality, or even originality.
And I am now convinced that practices of creative attention are available to anyone whether or not they identify as an artist or even creative.
Perhaps more to the point ...
So what is it that you're paying attention to?
Let yourself practice.
Give yourself a simple format without overthinking it.
Practice some more.
See what happens.
And let me know how it goes.
