Slow Digest: Five Kinds of Attention (Stories From Five Milwaukeeans)

This week’s edition of Slow Digest was edited by by Managing Director Katie Waddell. C21 graduate fellows selected the featured interviews. Audio was edited by Graduate Fellow Yuchen Zhao.

From September 2025 to May 2026, C21’s Story Cart project introduced Milwaukeeans to practices of radical attention. Our team developed pop-up workshops throughout the city and recorded discussions with participants about their experiences to discover whether 21st-century people can unlearn the habits of fast-paced timing, rapid rewards, and scattered focus that hamper capacities for critical thinking and deep engagement within civil and social life. 

Following the example of the Strother School of Radical Attention’s Attention Labs, C21 recruited three community Story Fellows—a licensed counselor, an artist-archivist-organizer, and a Milwaukee Renaissance man—to create attention workshops, which were carried out at various gathering spots. The Story Fellows made decisions about workshop content and formats, sometimes bringing in special guest artists and facilitators. These workshops revealed how deliberate, or redirected, attention can open pathways to new ways of noticing, interpreting, and connecting through sensation, questing, imagination, reflection, and memory. With phones tucked away, participants directed their attention inward, outward, and all around as they considered, and discussed on-record, the world beyond the screen.

Here are five of their stories.

Sensation

At the Haggerty Museum of Art’s Community Art & Wellness Retreat, we invited guests to take in the ambient sounds around them, then reflect on that experience, first through writing, then through conversation with Story Fellow Madeleine Doelker-Berlin. As a professional healer, participant Ronnie was uniquely attuned to the somatic experience of deep listening.

Click below to hear a clip from Madeleine Doelker-Berlin’s interview with Ronnie Jean Artero Frederick during the “Sound Bath of the Ordinary/The Listening” pop-up at the Haggerty Museum of Art on November 15, 2025.

Read the instructions for “Sound Bath of the Ordinary/The Listening”
  1. Put your phone away. Take a seat. Settle in. Get comfortable.
  2. Listen to the sounds around you. Do not engage with the sounds or respond to them. Just take them all in. First, listen with your eyes open for three to four minutes. Next, listen with your eyes closed for three to four minutes.
  3. Take a notebook and pencil from the table. Think about what you just experienced. Write about it in the notebook for five to ten minutes.
  4. When you are ready, look for someone in a black t-shirt that says “attn”. They want to hear your story. They will take you to a quiet room to discuss your soundbath of the ordinary.

Questing

At the Thomas A. Greene Geological Museum’s annual Darwin Day celebration, we invited visitors to engage with rocks and minerals through imagination and play. Visitors chose from a variety of “quests” in the form of prompt cards created by Story Fellow Adam Carr, each encouraging them to extend their curiosity toward whichever museum mineral struck their fancy. Some participants picked out crystals that would make a great podcast. Others sought out artifacts that looked like they might have a deep, dark secret. Participant and avid rock enthusiast, Elena, found a fluorescent fashion statement.

Click below to hear a clip from Adam Carr’s interview with Elena Calvagna during “Crystal Quest” at the Thomas A. Greene Geological Museum on February 14, 2026.

Read the instructions for “Crystal Quest”
  1. PICK: A prompt card, any prompt card**
  2. FIND: Your crystal (your crystal may be a crystal, mineral, fossil, or shell)
  3. TAKE: Five minutes with your crystal
  4. SHARE: Your thoughts with in a Story Cart interview

**Elena’s prompt card said: “Find a Crystal to PUT ON JEWELRY This is some serious sparkle. If you could pluck one Crystal to wear, which is it? Maybe you’re the accessory. CHOOSE WISELY. “

Reflection

At Havenwoods State Forest, we stepped out of the anthropocene’s blurred speed to walk in tune with the pace of nature on the first official day of spring. After the walk, we took time to reflect—first in writing, then in discussion with the whole group. Contributor-participant Harlem had a lot to say about Aries season, as well as the alignment of current events with the cosmos.

Click below to hear a clip from the sharing session following “(W)rites of Spring” at Havenwoods State Forest on March 21, 2026. The workshop was facilitated by Mia Rimmer and curated by Symphony Swan. Harlem Masimba is speaking in this clip.

Read the instructions for “(W)rites of Spring”
  1. Before your walk begins, clear your mind. Imagine that you’re going to send a postcard or a handwritten letter. What will you write about? You can write to yourself. You can write to a loved one, someone on your mind, someone that you’ve lost, or a place that you’re holding onto. You can write something short or long. You can pick up pieces that the natural world has shed as you walk and stick those to your paper, making them part of your message.
  2. Think of all the unsaid words and thoughts that’ve stuck with you all winter. Imagine providing a landing place for them on your paper. Anticipate that as you walk the land, these words will emerge in time and in slowness, as the world unfurls. Ask yourself, as I move out of stagnancy, what active energy am I opening space for?
  3. Take a walk, writing as the words come to you, for about 45 minutes.
  4. When you’re done walking, find a place to rest. Take about 15 minutes to reflect and wrap up your writing.**
  5. Read what you’ve written. See what you’ve made. Then hold yourself, brush off your shoulders, and say, I’m releasing this energy that is no longer mine, and I’m trusting that Mother Earth is going to compost all that is no longer meant to be, to make way for something beautiful.
  6. If you’re comfortable sharing, talk about your experience with the group.

**If you like, listen to Spring Equinox Soundscape by Harlem Masimba as you work. It was commissioned for this exercise. Go to TinyURL.com/WritesOfSpring

Imagination

At Beet Street Fall Festival, the Cactus Club’s annual, all-ages block party, we invited guests to surrender their phones to us for 30 minutes, wander about, then return to our booth to talk about what they did (and how it felt) with Story Fellow Madeleine Doelker-Berlin. Without his phone, instead of relying on Google for answers, participant Chris enlisted strangers to help dream up an explanation for a pressing question.

Click below to hear a clip from Story Fellow Madeleine Doelker-Berlin’s interview with Chris Hege during “Open Attention Walk” at the Beet Street Fall Festival on October 4, 2025.

Read the Instructions for “Open Attention Walk”
  1. Check in with C21 staff. Take a notebook and a timer. Leave your phone.
  2. Wander, anywhere you want, for 30 minutes. Take it all in.
  3. When your timer goes off, return to this booth. Talk to Madeleine about your experience.

Memory

At THE CR8TV HOUSE, a community art-centered third space that provides a platform for Black and Brown artists, Story Fellow Symphony Swan led a workshop that invited participants to tap into memory by unearthing and documenting personal and collective stories as a way of building archives that reflect the full spectrum of the Black experience. The workshop focused on the celebration and reconciliation of family histories through archival photographs, artifacts, and other forms of ephemera. After the workshop, participants had the opportunity to share their memories one-on-one with C21 Graduate Fellows.

Click below to hear a clip from C21 Grad Fellow Jamee N. Pritchard’s interview with Blue Lotus after the “Memory Activation” workshop at CR8TV HOUSE on November 8, 2025.

Read the instructions for “Memory Activation”

The following instructions are an adapted version of the directions given at the workshop:

  1. Gather photographs—old or new—from your personal collection to use as a starting point for your memory activation. If you haven’t already scanned or copied* your photos, you should so that your activation doesn’t damage the integrity of the artifact.
  2. Photocopy or print out a copy of the image from your collection. Set up your activation space by setting a large sheet of paper in front of you. Then, place your printed image in the center of the sheet of paper.
  3. You may wish to pause here to read bell hooks’ essay, “In Our Glory: Photography and Black Life,” keeping its themes in mind as you begin your activation. If you are completing the memory activation with a group, discuss the essay together.
  4. Begin to slow-look at your image. Interrogate everything in the image and use an archival pen to make notes, on the large piece of paper, of all the things you remember. Ask yourself, what do you see? What do you remember? What did it smell like? What did it taste like? Who are the people in the image?
  5. Keep going. No detail is too small! Ask yourself Who, What, Where, When, and Why for every object, person, environment in the image. Make note of the questions that come up for you as well. How do the memories feel to you? How does it feel to remember?
  6. When you feel like you’ve activated all aspects of the image and asked all the questions you can, consider combining the annotation with a written narrative that summarizes all that you’ve activated. If you are with a group, this is a good time to share your experience if you feel comfortable doing so.

Story Cart is a mobile story collection program that travels to community spaces and engages Milwaukeeans in conversations about their lived experiences. Our Story Fellows craft questions related to the current C21 research theme, record participant responses to those questions, and add them to our Story Cart digital archive (forthcoming).

Story Cart: Attention was inspired by the Strother School of Radical Attention, was supported by the Wisconsin Institute for Citizenship and Civil Dialogue, and was part of C21’s SLOW: The Pace of Being Human programming series.