I have been an avid practitioner and teacher of yoga for many years—it helps me to still my mind and tap into creativity. I’ve talked about how stillness helps me to break writers block and tap into creativity in other posts (here, here, here and here).
Most of the yoga sessions I teach begin and end by me asking my students to notice how they are showing up in that moment. Sometimes that can be noticing physical sensations in the body, like being cold or hot, or hearing cars go by or smelling food from the room next door, and sometimes it can be noticing how we are perceiving that moment, like being bored or irritated, relieved or excited. I do this little exercise before we begin and then again when we end as a way to check-in with ourselves.
When I’m asking my yoga students to notice how they are showing up, the key part is noticing. Our physical senses and emotional cues tell a story about the place and moment we are in, and we can apply that same idea to our writing.
In our creative writing, when we are drafting a scene, we can describe place not only by what we saw, but by the sensations we felt (sweat forming on our neck, heat rising in our cheeks and chest, tingling on the scalp). This means stepping into our characters, sometimes multiple characters, to excavate all of the senses and perspectives real and imagined.
Sue William Silverman does this so well throughout her essay collection, Selected Misdemeanors, which I recently had the opportunity to read and review. In her essay “Harbor Lights” she writes:
“I want to ask (my sister) to take my hand, help me stand. I don’t because she won’t. She either pretends she doesn’t love me or really doesn’t. There’s probably a difference. I look up at her. Her face is lost in a sheen of tropical light. A drop of her sweat lands on me—warm and salty as the sea—yet feels as distant as the horizon.”
Wow! That last line captivates me. We see so clearly how the physical senses and emotional cues are working together here. Everything carries so much weight. Silverman layers the external (her sister’s face in tropical light, the sweat) with the internal (the ache of uncertainty about her sister’s love). The sensory detail isn’t just atmospheric, it carries emotional charge. The drop of sweat, “warm and salty as the sea,” doesn’t simply describe something; it becomes a metaphor for distance, for estrangement. This is exactly what I mean when I talk about noticing. The body registers the place (the heat, the light, the salt) at the same time the heart registers the relationship. The two are inseparable.
Later, in her essay “My Russian Heritage” Silverman writes:
“My grandmother wears a bulky black dress, stockings rolled to her knees, shoes bulging from bunions. She smells of damp wool and cabbage. The other patrons, the very American women, wear strings of pearls, diamond earrings, carnelian dinner rings, Hermes scarved, Pucci dresses, and Gucci shoes. Their scents of L’Air du Temps, Shalimar, and Rive Gauche can’t possibly smell like the Old Country. The very American men wear silk ties and initialed pocket squares.”
Here, Silverman does something similar, but through contrast. Notice how the scents, textures, and clothing details don’t just paint a picture of the restaurant. They also embody cultural dislocation: the grandmother’s cabbage and wool against the perfumes of “very American women.” Again, the noticing here is about the external description of place and people, but it’s also about the narrator’s emotional response, the discomfort of belonging to one world while yearning for another. Place is experienced as both sensory immersion and interior tension. We can see so clearly what the author soon tells us: “…I want to sit at another table, with another family, not with my grandmother emanating herbs of bitter displacement.”
One way to practice this kind of layered noticing in your own writing is to begin with the body.
Step 1: Find a place you know well — your kitchen table, a patio or park, the driver’s seat of your car.
Step 2: Set a timer for five minutes and write down only what your five senses register: what you see, hear, smell, taste, touch. Don’t analyze, just gather concrete details.
Step 3: Set the timer for another five minutes and write into how you feel in that place. What memories are stirred? What moods are shaping your perception? Look at your lists and see if there’s one detail that carries both — a sensory description that also reveals something internal. That overlap is where writing about place gains its depth, where a drop of sweat can be both the sea and the horizon of distance.
When I try this exercise at my desk at home, here’s what comes up: the wood is smooth and cool under my arms, the birds caw outside my window, and a mug of tea sits close enough for me to feel its warmth. But as I linger a little longer, I notice how restless I feel. My legs are stiff from sitting in the dentist’s chair all morning, and the birds’ caws only sharpen that restlessness — they are flying around outside while I once again am tethered to a chair. In that moment, the birds aren’t just background sound; they become a mirror of my mood, a reminder of the movement I’m craving. For me, that is what makes this moment in this place unique.
That’s the work Silverman does so masterfully. A drop of sweat is not just sweat; it becomes distance and estrangement. A grandmother’s cabbage isn’t only smell; it carries the weight of exile and longing. When we let our own noticing move from sensory to emotional, from outer world to inner response, we step into that same space. Writing about place isn’t only about capturing where we are — it’s about revealing how that place is alive inside us.
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