Slow Looking: a rainy late fall morning

Last spring I submitted a proposal to the Festival of Faith and Writing for their upcoming 2024 conference—the first in about 6 years to be in-person—for a Festival Circle. My proposal was selected!

Slow Looking: Freeing the Mind to Observe

This Circle introduces participants to Corita Kent, an Immaculate Heart sister known as the "Pop Art Nun," who captured the imagination of the 60s and early 70s with her free-spirited designs (her iconic LOVE stamp is still sold by the U.S. post office). Sister Corita helped her students to see the world a new way—in small bite-size pieces. Her “finder,” a small cardboard frame, reshaped the everyday and brought minutia into perspective.

Jane Hertenstein is the author of over 90 published stories both macro and micro: fiction, creative non-fiction, and blurred genre. She teaches a workshop on Flash Memoir and can be found blogging at http://memoirouswrite.blogspot.com/

Do I have a clue as to how I’m going to present? No—it’s slowly coming to me.

The answer is in the rain, icy and splattering outside my front windows, in the sky leaden—the great black spires of firs punctuating the horizon—in all the leaves, soggy and hapless. The kind of morning to stay inside and sip a hot drink. The kind of day meant for slow looking, absorbing minute details, for jotting down the sights and sounds, filtered through perception.

I’m looking to Luci Shaw and her revelatory lyrics to guide me. Stay tuned.