The art of paying attention (w/ Wendy MacNaughton and Laurel Braitman)

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1:32you're listening to how to be a better human. I'm your host, Chris Duffy. What you're about to hear is an episode that we recorded in person at the TED 2024 conference in Vancouver. Over the entire history of this podcast, we've only ever recorded a very small handful of episodes in person. Most episodes of this show, we record remotely with me, the guest and the production team, all in separate, quiet little places spread across the globe. The great part of that is that we get to feature guests from all over the world. But I have to say there is also something really special about being in the same room for a conversation.

2:07And I think there's probably no episode that could have been more perfect to do in person than this one. Because our guests, Laurel Braitman and Wendy McNaughton, are artists and writers and people who take presence very seriously. They make noticing and really being in a place and in a moment with other people into the heart of their individual creative practices. And together, they've started a very fun little society of people who want to do the same to unlock their creativity. It's called Attention Club. We're going to talk about Attention Club and about their individual work and about their work together in just a moment.

2:43But first, let's start with Wendy and Laurel talking about their friendship and their love for each other. This first voice that you're about to hear is Laurel. My favorite people, the people I am closest to in this life, are the people that I feel like I laugh the hardest with. And also I can talk about tragedy and disappointment and shame and the days when I have fallen very short of the person I want to be. And my biggest, deepest fears, often around loss and disappointment and heartbreak. and Wendy has been one of those people from the jump for the very first minutes we met. Right back at you, Laurel.

3:20My gosh. Yeah, I feel like, Laurel, you are somebody who I can call when I have something hilarious to share and I know you will get it and you are somebody who I can call when I can't get up off the floor and I know you will get it. Yeah, and I feel like everything all at once. Best compliment ever. As I think you can probably already tell, These two are hilarious and wonderful and heartfelt, and they're just so much fun to spend time with. And you're going to get to spend even more time with them right after this quick break. Don't go anywhere.

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6:10Today we're talking with Wendy McNaughton and Laurel Braitman about art, writing, the creative process, and how to be present and notice what's happening around you. Hi, I'm Wendy McNaughton. I'm an artist. I have a book called How to Say Goodbye, and I'm the creator of Draw Together. Hi, I'm Laurel Braitman, and I am an author, most recently, of the memoir What Looks Like Bravery. I am also a rancher and a professor and the founder of the global community of writing healthcare professionals, writing medicine. So I want to talk to you both about so many things, but let's start with how you two became friends.

6:47Oh, that's such a good question. Pop-Up Magazine, right? Yes. Yeah. So there was this incredible multimedia nonfiction storytelling extravaganza called Pop-Up Magazine. and it was based in San Francisco. And it was a live storytelling on stage and it brought together an incredible community of writers and artists and photographers and filmmakers and such. It traveled all around the country. Laurel, you were a, what was it, contributing? Contributing writer. Contributing writer. I was really scared of you. I met you at a party at your house and I hadn't performed for the magazine yet. Oh, that's great.

7:29And oh, my God, you were so cool. And I could barely talk. I was so intimidated. And I so desperately wanted to be your friend. Oh, my God. I was just trying to not look too thirsty. And, yeah, so we hosted a party there. And it gathered this community together. I mean, this is the best thing about Pop-Up is it introduced so many of us. And then we went on to become friends and collaborators. And, yeah, it was just a really great creation. Changed my life, that party. It was a good party. Yeah. It sounds like an amazing party. I wish you'd been there, Chris. I wish I'd been there, too. So now one of the, you two have collaborated in all sorts of different ways, but one of the ways is starting this attention club.

8:05So can you give me the brief synopsis of what attention club is? Sure. Well, Wendy and I have wanted to work together forever. And Wendy and teaching drawing to so many kids and adults all over the world now for years offers people drawing prompts. And I teach writing to not kids, but lots of adults and young people. and we talked for a while about how might the ways we ask people to pay attention to things and find meaning in hard things that happen to them or notice things that they might otherwise miss. How do our different styles of teaching, how could they overlap and complement each other?

8:43So when Ted offered the opportunity to do a workshop, we decided that would be a really great chance to create the attention club. Both of us, yeah, use our respective writing and drawing as a way to focus and pay attention and connect with people and each other and the world around us. And so we developed a workshop and we presented it. We asked people to use the tools of drawing and writing to look closely. Usually when we might be like going out into the world and exploring the world or, you know, going deep inside and having conversations, we were just in a conference room, right but it's pretty cool even in a conference room when you use simple tools to really focus your attention you can find bits of magic and then really explore that and create something beautiful out of it so you know you've both worked on really big projects you've also worked on smaller projects and stuff that is iterative and happens you know you send out newsletters or you send out prompts when you work with people what do you tell them about attention like to make it part of their creative practice?

9:41I don't know that I actually tell a student that I'm working with to pay attention. I think the very act of having someone sit still to engage with creative practice for a few minutes forces them to pay attention to something. And my job as a facilitator, whether it's in a workshop we're teaching or even in my own work, is to swing the spotlight onto something that we might otherwise not pay attention to. And that's really done, I think, by asking someone a thoughtful question and then giving them some protected time to either write their answer or speak their answer or draw their answer. And so to me, it's really about finding a kind of question that unlocks what someone is ready to ponder, whether that's a boring chair in a conference room that reminds them of a chair they sat in as a child or a shoelace.

10:35We used a bunch of different examples in Attention Club to show people that there's really complicated, interesting stories behind stuff that they normally would just rush past. But to me, it's the question that you ask somebody that kind of forces them to pause and be like, oh yeah, because so rarely do we have time to pay attention to a tiny detail. I've heard you, Wendy, write about the idea that everything that is happening is right for the material, that like you deliberately work with a medium watercolor where things can't be completely perfectly controlled. And that I think a lot of people, especially when they're like paying attention or trying to access creativity, they get stuck in the like, am I looking at the right thing or am I doing it in the right way?

11:15So I'm curious to just hear you talk a little bit more about like imperfection and mistakes. Like to what Laurel is saying, my interest with drawing is that it forces us to put a spotlight on something and then hold it there. Because through the process of drawing, we are paying close attention to it. We have to slow down. If we're drawing from observation, like you have to look really closely at things that if you just give it a glance, you'd never notice. And the more you draw, the more you notice, the more time you're going to take. And I would say that if most of us usually sit down when we think we're going to draw something and we leap to the end result where I'm going to draw this thing, right?

11:54And we might have an idea of what that's going to look like. But when we can really slow down and start to draw it and pay close attention to it, we let go of the expectation and we are completely immersed in the process of drawing. In that moment, you have no idea where that drawing is going. You'd have no idea what is going to happen. So there isn't any such thing as a mistake. Whatever happens is like the inevitability of the experience. And it's so much more magical than anything you could ever imagine. So like the mistakes are where the art is. The mistakes are where like the humanity is.

12:33The mistakes are where like the opportunities for falling in love with the thing is, right? And like that is what happens when we can really pay attention. Like that's what they call the flow state. Yeah. Again, like it's like love, like when you're really in that moment, you know, and you're fully immersed in the experience. I think that like Laurel was saying, like when we really look at that shoelace, when we frame the question correctly and we can slow down and look closely at that shoelace, an entire world reveals itself. For me, this line was important in my head of like having a day job or not having a day job.

13:06And now that I don't have a quote unquote day job, I realized that like that was a totally artificial line and like you can make great art. In fact, in some ways, I think maybe I made better, more interesting comedy before I worried about whether it would make money or not. But in my head, there's this line where before I'd made that jump, I thought so like, oh my gosh, like there's a, these are professional comedians. And then there's me and I'm so different. And something that I think is really amazing about both of you is you have these incredible professional accomplishments. You are very, extremely talented and that's come over years, but you're also really dedicated to breaking down that wall of like, I'm not capital A artist and you're lowercase a amateur.

13:50Like I'm not professional writer and you're amateur writer, but instead having people see that they have the ability and the talent and unique voice that they can express. So how do you get people to believe that? Because you both do a lot of work with people who probably don't initially believe that. Well, one of our rules was absolutely, you know, mistakes are encouraged and also no apologizing allowed, you know, before you share your creative work. And I think those rules aren't accidental. We need to set people free from also a binary of like, I am a creative versus I am not a creative, like creative becoming a noun of something you can be right.

14:31So offensive and terrible as if like people who are not quote unquote creatives then don't have license to do this kind of work. That's crazy and so limiting. And so I do think a lot of our work is about showing people the great capacity that they have, that very often a lot of the adults that I work with have told themselves such entrenched stories about how, you know, they have chosen to, say, be doctors or nurses or what have you. And the creative work is what somebody else does. And it's just reminding them that, listen, like, this is our birthright. We are born knowing how to tell stories, knowing how to be curious, knowing how to ask good questions.

15:10and to come up oftentimes with fantastical answers. And, you know, feeling bad about that is the feeling of doing it. You know, not being sure if you're good at it is the feeling of being creative. So I think it's also just normalizing that and inviting people in to be like, okay, we're all going to feel bad together. And in feeling bad together, like it's going to be okay. I love that. Yeah. Like I don't know anybody who is a quote unquote like professional writer or artist and doesn't feel like they don't know what the hell they're doing. like almost all the time. That is what it is, right? Also, so many people say to me, like, I can't draw.

15:47Okay, so what age level do you think you draw at? And they say, oh, I draw like a six year old. I'm like, so when did you stop drawing? They say, oh, when I was six years old. You know, and I was like, yes, exactly. And what happened when you were six? What made you stop drawing when you were six? Probably, you know, you were drawing a picture and some grown up, like, looked over your shoulder and said something like, oh, that doesn't look like our house or something like that and made some kind of judgmental, critical comment that planted a seed in that kid's head that there was an expectation of the way a drawing should look and that they had to achieve that in order to get approval from that person who is probably somebody that they care about, right?

16:27And that ends up growing and like contaminating our whole system and ends up in a perfectionist kind of self that so many of us, and ironically, so many of us who are very creative, carry with us. And so I believe that drawing is this, and especially when coupled with writing, it is this silver bullet that can go back to that place. And if we can start to use those very tools again to let go of that pressure, and that there's a right way to do something, oh my gosh, it's a a whole new freedom of creativity can unlock for us. I know you could give many different exercises, but maybe something from the world of drawing and something from the world of writing.

17:11If someone is listening, wants to try something, just something small that they can put into place, what would be a little exercise that you think might be interesting for them to experiment with? I think a fun assignment would be the assignment that we open Attention Club with, the blind contour drawing, and then asking someone a question. The prompt, what was the last time you were wildly happy? If you turn to someone in your life and you ask them to describe the last time they were wildly happy, they have to use all of their senses to answer the question. I love how specific you are when you give these prompts about using your senses.

17:52I think that takes people into their bodies and it takes people into the present moment and it gets them to write from a place that is not cerebral. It's writing from a place of experience. Yeah. It's also helpful to do it in the first person, even if it's a memory. So I open the door. If anyone is ever stuck writing, I tell people to switch to the present tense. Oh, to the present tense. Oh, that's cool. Yeah. This is something that I actually don't speak without doing this because I can talk for an hour about drawing, but I can actually offer people the experience to see how it impacts how they see, what they see, and how they connect with people in 60 seconds.

18:35I ask people to turn to each other, ideally a stranger, or it can be something they know, but ideally a stranger, and then draw each other for 60 seconds with two rules. The first rule is you're never allowed to pick your pen up off the paper. And the second rule is you're never allowed to look down at the paper upon which you're drawing. Okay, sounds totally disorienting. It is. But the actual point of that is that you are looking at somebody closely for 60 seconds without looking away. And moreover, you are allowing yourself to be looked at for 60 seconds. So it creates this immediate vulnerability and openness and exchange between two people that, I mean, has led to people becoming friends, you know, or like exchanging, you know, their social media information from different countries and they're staying in touch.

19:27But more so, it just takes off this little bit of the armor that we all have. So as we go forward, we're open to that exchange. And then when you follow that up with a prompt like Laurel gave. describe the last time you were wildly happy. And you told the person who drew you that story, and they told you yours. And we had each person take a few notes down on the drawing they did. And, you know, there's nothing like being in a room of strangers while they recount the last time they were wildly happy to each other using all sensory detail. It's so much fun. There is just such an incredible energy.

20:04And you could do it with someone you know well, you could do it with someone you don't know well. I do think it's fun with strangers, but it's something easy to do even around the dinner table. And part of the reason I think it's so effective is like the drawing is quote unquote bad, right? Like you don't look down at the paper, like you draw someone, it looks like a Picasso, you know, but like not a good Picasso. Yeah. There's like a floating eyeball. Oh yeah, they're so silly. Like it's a very weird thing and it forces you into, oh my God, this was enjoyable. This is actually a quote unquote good drawing, even though this looks nothing like the person.

20:39And I think that from that place then you're like, okay, we've reframed like who is bad and good at this. And the point isn't to make it look like the actual thing or the person. And I think that's huge. It goes back to what we were saying around how to help people feel more creative, I think, and how they lose it. I think part of it is not just being shamed perhaps by someone in your life saying like, oh, well, that doesn't look like our house. But it's also because you start to have tastes that you can't possibly meet. And so I think that's a part of like particularly if you're someone who loves the creative arts, like you may love great music.

21:18You have your favorite artists. You have your favorite comics. And you realize you're not that good. And so instead of pushing through to get to the place where you find your own unique way of doing it, you're so intimidated because it doesn't look like your heroes that you also shut down. And so I think all of this work is really about showing people like, you know, we're bad forever all the time, you know, even those of us who do it as a job. And so any of these kinds of ways where you can make yourself kind of productively uncomfortable or bad in practice is just so much fun. It makes me think that one of the single best pieces of advice I've ever gotten that I think about all the time in all sorts of creative work that I do is I had a friend who for a time was in charge of buying movies at a company.

22:03She was the person who read the script and then decided, do we buy the script? And interestingly, she left and now is a kindergarten teacher, which is great. I love that. Great choice for her. But at the time, I was like, okay, my dream is to write a script and to sell it. And I know a person who does it. And so I asked her one day, can I tell you a movie idea? And she was like, because we're friends. She was like, of course you can tell me an idea. But I will just tell you that a perfect idea is worth much less than a bad script. Because you can fix a bad script and I can't do anything with a great idea.

22:35I love that. Yes. That blew my mind. Yes. And I think about that all the time because it's so easy to get stuck in the like, what I need to do is have something perfect. And instead it's like, the only way you get to perfect is by making it bad. And then it gets better. So I have this little tattoo on my wrist. I have to tell you this tattoo story. It's a little arrow, right? And it points at my hand. And it's from a letter that the artist Sol LeWitt wrote to the artist Ava Hess in response to her letter to him saying, I have all of these huge ideas. I want to do all this great work. And I just can't achieve, like you were saying, Laurel, I can't achieve this magnitude of brilliance that I have in my head.

23:13and he wrote to her and he said, stop your whining, your thinking, your sniveling, your big ideas, your big ambition and just do. And it's this giant word do at the bottom with all these arrows around it. And I find myself getting so stuck, again, back to that perfectionism again or back to like these high aspirations and stuck in the idea place of it. When if I think about anything that I ever feel really good in my gut about doing, it was figured out in the process of doing it, in the making of it, you know? And so I tattooed this darn arrow pointing towards my hand to remind myself nothing good comes out of my head and definitely nothing good comes out of scrolling on my phone.

23:52OK, like coming up with an idea. Come on. It's actually through getting a pencil, sitting down and just starting to make something. We're going to be right back in just a moment. In the meantime, do not go scrolling. I know as soon as you said that you felt the temptation, resist that temptation. Stay present.

24:42We'll see you next time. with the Capital One Venture X card. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. Lounge access is subject to change. See CapitalOne.com for details. The market's uncertain. Revenue's tied and hiring on hold. That's why results-driven companies are using Upwork to keep work moving. Go to Upwork.com today and start hiring proven freelance talent fast. No bulky overhead. No rigid long-term contracts. Just the right expert right when you need them. Work smarter and faster with Upwork. Go to Upwork.com now and find your freelance expert. That's U-P-W-O-R-K.com. Post a job for free and get started today.

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25:53And we're back. Laura, like one thing that I know you really push people to do in their writing and that you care about a lot is to be specific and to think about objects and imagery. And in your book, you talk about a lot of loss. You talk about really missing your dad. And one of the things that I will think about for the rest of my life is when I see honey, I will think about this story that you have with your dad packing honey, basically, for knowing that he wouldn't be there and making sure that you would have this for years and years to come. So in the vast experience of your own life and your relationship with your father and dealing with grief, how do you find the thing that is resonant like that?

26:32And how do you make it so that other people can feel the resonance too? I know that's a huge question. Huge question. You know, we all have our equivalent, though. I am someone who, I am just like a magpie of meaningful objects, you know? I love stuff. It's very like non-Buddhist or whatever. Like, I just, I love stuff because they are receptacles for memory. They are receptacles for love, for longing. I love history is told by objects in my own life and that of others. And so often when I am working with other people or teaching, I have them bring a meaningful object into the space. And that's often a great prompt.

27:11You know, tell me why this object is meaningful to you. And it works with pretty much any age in any circumstance. My life has been one in which I have lost a lot of things I have cared about. People, animals, and when it came to a wildfire, like most of the things I owned and loved. And you would think that would teach me that those things don't matter in some way, right? The opposite is true. I am still very acquisitive. And also, I think it's important to realize that treasures are treasures because they are memory prompts, because they contain the stories that have made us who we are. And I find peace, particularly when I've lost something meaningful, to write about it.

27:54It's a way of making it real. I feel that way about people, too. You know, I've written about some of the people closest to me that have died because it's a way of making them immortal, at least for myself, and to make sure that other people can meet them too. And that's been a really fun, weird process, you know? You get to, as writing, you get to go back. And if you are using all of your senses, you kind of have to relive all of these things, you know, painful, less painful, funny, and inhabit them again. And I think it's the closest we get to having a kind of parallel universe in which we get to experience moments of our life again.

28:29And that's been really healing for me. It's also hard sometimes. And I just I want to help other people do that, too. You know, sharing these people and these really intimate and sometimes really hard moments of your life, sharing that publicly with strangers who can't know, who you can't know all the time. I wonder now that the book is out in the world, and a lot of your work before that was more journalistic, was more about other people. How does that feel? Like, how does it feel when someone comes up and knows some of these really intimate details of your life? Well, two things. On the one hand, I mean, this is why we write memoir, I think, or make comedy or draw about our lives.

29:06It's like, I want to not be alone in there. There's some piece of me that wants other people to know about the hard stuff and then be like, oh my God, me too. But mine was a little bit different in this way. I'm going to come stand over here with you because I am on this team also. And before this would have been, this tie between us would have been invisible. So that's to me my favorite thing about being like a public storyteller. It is also like just mortifying as all get out. Like, you know, like I am a professor at a medical school. Like the idea of the dean of the medical school reading about my Barbie Dyke bar, you know?

29:39Like, it just is so, so embarrassing, you know? And so you kind of have to convince yourself in the writing process that like no one will ever read it, which is like the only way I can get myself to do it. And then it comes out and you like desperately hope no one notices and also that everyone buys it. And you have to hold all of those together at the same time, even though they're kind of contradictory. So I'd say both. You know, I'm so relieved that my story is out there and I love hearing from people who have had their own losses and are trying to make meaning about the hardest, you know, seemingly nonsensical, unfair things that have happened in their life because I like this club.

30:22It's a club you wouldn't want your worst enemy to have to join. But also I think some of the best people are in here. None of us like small talk. You know, we tend to have a sense of humor and a sense of perspective. So it's a nice filter for the people that I want to meet anyway, I would say. You gave me this advice, which was really helpful and continues to be really helpful. This was specifically when I was asking you about writing my first book, which I'm still working on. But I think it really applies to almost any creative project or even most life projects, which is you said in your head beforehand, there are all the possibilities of what success looks like.

30:55And it's like, does it make a lot of money? Does it get good reviews? Do you connect with people? Does it open doors that you get to give speeches? It wins an award. like so many things could be success for this project. And what you said is like, just kind of pick like, what is the thing that you want from it? Because you're not gonna get all of the forms of success. Like no one does. So what is the one that you care about? And then kind of aim it towards that rather than trying to shoot at all the possible outcomes. Obviously, I'm trying really hard to apply that in my own life. I feel like how successful have you been at applying that when it comes to your own book and your own creative process?

31:30Like most good advice. Could I follow myself? Absolutely not. I mean, I'm trying. I think, you know, you have to have such a ridiculous ego to do this kind of work, particularly if you're writing about your own life, right? That your story is worth other people's time. And God forbid they pay like$30 for a hardcover for it. I mean, that's preposterous. And yet I want them to. I want it and continue to want. And a large part of my most recent book is about this, is the kind of chasing of shiny prizes to prove to myself that I am good. that I have not let down the people that I love most.

32:09And then to be disappointed when your story about that does not win you a bunch of shiny prizes is a little ironic. But of course, I want Oprah to call. I want all the things. I want all the things. And also I know that's a piece of myself to be skeptical of. And for me, I am trying to hold that, listen, if one person finds this book who is a grieving 17-year-old and it saves them a little bit of pain in their 20s and 30s. If they could learn a little bit from me and the sort of left turns I took so that they might avoid some of the pitfalls I fell into, that would be enough. And I do get enough of those letters.

32:49And that is the thing. That's the thing. I'm trying to hold on to that. Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, we're recording this at TED in the conference. And I feel like one of the things that I personally struggle with in a space like this, where there's all these impressive, incredible people with these accomplishments is I kind of vacillate between like, this is amazing. I can't believe I get to talk to these people and be in the same room as them. And then I got to impress them. I got to do things. Oh, what I have is not enough. And it's hard to balance those two sides because there is the driven ambition.

33:19It gets you somewhere. But if you let it take control, then all of a sudden I'm like, who am I? Why am I a different person when I come to Vancouver? I don't want to be a different person. But then truthfully, whether they be on stage or it's like a conversation with just somebody like, oh, wow, everybody here, as is everywhere, like just a person, right? Except there's like people who are really dedicating their entire lives to doing amazing things. Totally. But like these stories we have on our heads and the coping mechanisms, these complex coping mechanisms that we've developed from the age of 14 or whatever it was, they are strong and they are loud.

33:55Yeah. You want to reject everything before it rejects you. I don't know what you're talking about. Yeah. That can't be that comedic timing. That's a perfect joke. It's true. It's true. Well, Wendy, your latest book, How to Say Goodbye, you didn't actually think that you were going to publish this for the broader audience. It was kind of just a project that was for you and for a few people that you knew. Yeah, I made it eight years ago, something like that. Maybe it was seven years ago. Yeah. And I originally published it. I published it like as an artist book, just an edition of 200. And I gave it away as gifts with the ask that people would like pass it on.

34:35And that was my distribution methodology that every publisher was really sure taking note of. But I ran out and people wanted more. So I didn't want to publish it because when one publishes a book, there is a whole machinery that you enter. and it becomes about, you know, I don't know, about marketing and it becomes about getting blurbs and like all of this stuff. And it really becomes not about what the heart of the book is. And similar to what Laurel was saying, like I too have a lot of ambition, you know, that I want things to matter and I want things to connect with people. And this book was so personal to me.

35:20It has, you know, drawings of my aunt who I drew while she was dying. It has these people in it who I feel very responsible to and accountable to, people who have since died. And I was afraid of attaching those feelings of mine to this book and attaching that machinery to this book because I felt like it would be, what's the word? Like disrespectful. And then with some time, I realized that was making the whole project about me and that this book was very therapeutic for me to make. And it lived that life. And I think it was of service to those 200 people. But when I stepped back and said, this book is no longer about me, this piece of art is for other people and they can make of it what they want or not.

36:05It's not about me anymore. Then I felt ready to publish it. It also feels like, I mean, it's quite literally the advice that often people give, which is to like think less about what you're going to get from your work and to like make it as a gift to like think what you're trying to give away. Which I think is really hard to put into practice, but almost always is actually the best work. is like, what is it that the audience needs rather than what is it that you need? Yes, and there becomes like, it's a tricky line because if we're thinking about what the audience needs and we're thinking about being of service to others, a lot of time we end up tapping into something that is very different than our own gut sense of what we need to make right now, what we're compelled to create.

36:43In an ideal situation, I think like there's something coming through us that is we're creating something that the audience needs because we all ultimately need the same thing, like on a really deep level. And when we hit that place, we're hitting a really deep resonant note that connects. But I think that there's always a tension between these poles. We all feel it. Maybe some people feel it more in certain directions than others. But with like this project became a really good metaphor for those tensions for me and like going through those stages, like artistically. And I'm happy with where it ended up.

37:15Oh, I think it's such a beautiful work. And so it was so meaningful to me personally reading it. There are many things of both of your books that stuck with me, but just in a parallel to the honey thing from What Looks Like Bravery, in How to Say Goodbye, one of the things that I think really stuck with me and was emotionally really like hit me in the gut when I read it and I've kept thinking about is because you use visuals and narrative, you're able to in a way that I've really never seen in a book that is just words. You're able to capture the power and the emotional moment of silence. Like I thought the most powerful pages were quiet, but there was so much there.

38:02But I can't even put it into words because it's beyond words. I really appreciate that you got that from it. Look, it's a very short book. It's a very spare book. It has maybe 300 words in it tops, maybe 200. It has a drawing or two on each spread. There isn't much of a narrative. It's a collection of words that I received from people who were caregivers in Zen Hospice. And I combined their words with drawings that I did from observation. There's a lot of white space in it. So that's very deliberate. I think some people pick up their book, they're like, what is this? There's like, there's barely any pictures even, and there's no words.

38:47But what I was trying to do was to create a reading experience in a book that mirrored the experience that I had inside a hospice home, which is quiet and which is slow, which is very focused. I use a lot of white space in my drawing because for me, drawing is a way to focus in on things that oftentimes I would overlook, maybe because I'm distracted or because I'm afraid to look at it. And I was afraid to look at death. I was afraid to look at somebody who was dying or very sick. I don't know why. I was raised in a family that avoids it. But when my aunt was dying, drawing was the way that I could stop, slow down, and look really closely at her and in my own way, really be with her.

39:34And so the white space in the book also creating that quiet, like focuses in on the person. Thank you both for doing this. This was so good. I truly am like, well, we got to do six more episodes, but a few. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thanks. That was really fun. Oh man, the best. That is it for today's episode of how to be a better human. Thank you so much to today's guests, Laurel Braitman and Wendy McNaughton. Laurel's most recent book is called what looks like bravery. and Wendy's most recent book is How to Say Goodbye. But they're also both amazing and constantly making new great work.

40:12So find them, follow them, sign up for their newsletters, just generally bask in the glow of their brilliance. I am your host, Chris Duffy, and you can find more from me, including my weekly newsletter and other projects at chrisduffycomedy.com. How to Be a Better Human is brought to you on the TED side by the creatively and personally wonderful group that includes Daniela Balorezzo, Ban Ban Chang, Chloe Shasha Brooks, Lainey Lott, Antonia Le and Joseph Debrine. This episode was fact-checked by Julia Dickerson and Mateus Salas, who are in their own individual attention club where they pay attention to the details and citations and clarifications that I, quite frankly, would get wrong every single time without them.

40:48On the PRX side, our show is put together by a team who, when I ask how to say goodbye, send me a pronouncer guide and also an audio example so I get every single phoneme correct. Morgan Flannery, Norgil, Maggie Gorville, Patrick Grant, and Jocelyn Gonzalez. And of course, thanks to you for listening to this show and making this all possible. A podcast without listeners is not really a podcast. It's just a man alone in his room talking. If you are listening on Apple, please leave us a five star rating and review. If you're listening on the Spotify app, we have put a discussion question up there on mobile.

41:21We would love to hear your thoughts. We love reading them every week. We will be back next week with another episode of How to Be a Better Human. In the meantime, pay attention and take care. Thanks for listening.

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