Scott Edward Anderson's Poetry Blog

People ask me why a Writing Retreat in the Azores? My first answer to that question is: because I want to share my ancestral island and its natural and cultural gifts with you. My second answer is: what better place to practice deep attention to our writing than on a remote island in the middle of the Atlantic?

Writing without distraction is particularly difficult these days, that’s why I’ve designed the Azores Writing Retreat around what I’m calling Deep Attention. Everything we do will be guided by this framework, designed to develop a practice we can take with us long after the retreat is over.

Deep Attention is a practice I’m developing in response to our age of distraction. Paying attention in an age of distraction is hard. At any given moment, there is a myriad of distractions tempting us away from our writing.

If we’re paying attention, however, we can put our busy lives in perspective, create a context for what we’re doing on this planet. Living like this, life is not about going through the motions; rather, we actively participate in life, in all its facets.

Deep Attention sets us up for opening the writing brain, for preparing that muscle to do its best work. Working the writing-brain in this way makes it easier to pay attention, not only to our surroundings, but to our words and what the piece of writing is trying to say. It’s also a reciprocal, regenerative act: paying deep attention informs our writing and our writing helps us pay deeper attention.

For me, the practice of Deep Attention is part of the act of writing, as the practice of writing is part of the act of paying attention, a cyclical, symbiotic relationship. This type of attentiveness is akin to what Zen practitioners call deep listening.

As Zen practice implies, deep listening requires complete receptivity—an openness and attentiveness to what’s possible and to asking questions. If we have a question to answer through our writing, we need to ask it. Nevertheless, it sometimes seems like our minds are on autopilot and we are not truly paying attention, causing us to miss both questions and answers.

This deep listening and attentiveness are a form of tuning to the right frequency. Like the dial on an old car radio, if you turn a little too much to the right or left, you lose the signal. Through the act of paying attention, we fine-tune our ability to land on the right frequency.

Deep Attention requires a two-fold approach to paying attention: outward and inward. Outward: what’s going on around you and what you see, what you notice. Inward: what’s going on within you and your reactions to what you notice. Combined, this inward and outward focus develops our ability to see things others do not see and allows us to call attention to those things in our writing. Inward-focused attention also helps us turn observation into a piece of writing, aligning the frequencies and images to unlock the stories within us.

Deep Attention is, in part, a form of showing up, of being fully present, fully engaged. Distractions govern so much of our lives—from social media to work life—we so rarely allow time for deep attentiveness. If we make it a practice, however, we can begin to form insights and become more receptive to the poetry of our everyday lives and bring it into our writing.

Join me on the island of São Miguel for this five-day Deep Attention Retreat, October 13-18, 2023, where we’ll learn the practice Deep Attention, immerse ourselves in the incredible nature of the “Hawaii of Europe,” savor the delectable cuisine of the Azores, and get a lot of writing done.

Reserve your spot today: Azores Writing Retreat.