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Welcome to Detail Oriented, a new monthly delivery of small good things. You can get all the info and FAQ about how it works here—and below, a bit on noticing as a creative practice.

It’s April, and it’s a good place to begin.

It’s my birthday month, for one, so it is a month of beginnings.

It’s also Poetry Month. So much of poetry, to me, is about smallness: A poem has within it the details, the tiny particulars, that only the poet themself could notice. When I started to think about this monthly project and what I wanted to make, I thought about this: “Poetry,” the writer Clint Smith said, “is the act of paying attention.”

Oddly, April is also a stretch when I feel a little unmoored. It’s supposed to be spring, but here in Maine it’s not, not quite. We’re likely to get snow, and for sure mud. It’s a month of in-between-ness when I—and maybe you?—could use something to hold onto until we get to the other side.

Noticing—cultivating an attention to the tiny particulars around me—offers me something to hold through the everyday. It might be a late glitter of light on my bedroom wall, or the pool that forms in a cracked-open rock on the beach near my house, or the path a snail has made, slow and careful, to find the sea (how does it know?). As I move through my day I collect these images—by taking a photo, or jotting it in a notebook or speaking it into my Notes app, if that’s what I have handy. It becomes a little trove I can carry with me and look through. Often, it sparks something else.

You don’t have to be a poet, or a writer, to start being attuned to the tiny particulars around you; you don’t even have to do anything with what you find. Just noticing is a creative practice. It brings me something like fullness, or joy, or a glimmer. The more I look, the more I find that’s beautiful and worth paying attention to, and I suspect you will, too.

So here is something new: Detail Oriented, a monthly delivery of small good things, sent via snail mail (and digitally, too).

Each month, you’ll receive a new Detail Oriented with a new theme: way of looking or a detail to look for. There will be a note from me, a glimpse of something I’ve noticed and loved, and a prompt you can use however you wish. Carry it around in your pocket, use it to spark your own creative practice, or just hang it up on your wall. My hope is this little physical object itself, an envelope with paper inside, pressed and printed, sent from me to you, can be something to hold onto.

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