Rachel Schwartzmann: Welcome to Slow Stories. I’m Rachel Schwartzmann. I'm a writer, creator, and the author of Slowing: Discover Wonder, Beauty, and Creativity through Slow Living from Chronicle Books.
For those of you just tuning in, Slow Stories is a multimedia project that began with this podcast and now includes a newsletter on Substack. There, I write about things like time, creativity, and pace—and on this show, I interview artists, entrepreneurs, and innovators who share slow stories—and big ideas—about living, working, and creating in our digital age.
Before we get into the episode, I wanted to quickly thank everyone who has shown support for Slowing in some way, shape, or form. Publishing a book—a first book, no less—is truly an all-consuming experience, and I'm so grateful to have received support and encouragement from readers around the globe. That said, if you want to show your support for Slowing, and if you've read and genuinely enjoyed the book, consider leaving a review, as this will help Slowing find even more readers.
As a reminder, you can also follow Slow Stories on Substack for a behind-the-scenes look at bringing a book to life, and follow me [on social media] @rachelschwartzmann for real-time updates.
For now, I'll leave you with this refresher on the book: Slowing caters to many literary sensibilities: essay and memoir, creative wellness, and personal growth. Language and lyricism are front and center, but there is also a practical component. There are various ways you can engage with and experience this book. For that reason, I don't know where exactly you'll find it on the shelf, but I'm confident it will fit somewhere in your home. That's where I wrote it, and that's what it means to me. I can't wait for you to read it!
Now, on to the episode, which begins with an opening story from writer Domenica Ruta, who shares a singular ritual that helps her slow down. Here’s more from Domenica.
Domenica Ruta: I'm Domenica Ruta, author of the memoir, With or Without You, and the novels Last Day and All the Mothers. I'm currently working on a new novel, which is to say, I am thinking and dreaming about this new novel, but very, very rarely do I get to sit down with her. What I do more often is open up the Word document where she's being born, slowly, read a few sentences, and just say hello. Whoever says, “write every day” is not a woman and has never paid attention to women for more than five seconds at a time. I'm a mother, a writer, and a day job holder living in New York City under late-stage capitalism. I don't do anything every day besides hurry. The act of slowing down, then, is very hard. Sometimes it feels impossible, and so out of pure necessity, I am forced to turn to a power greater than myself to slow it all down. For me, this means practicing witchcraft.
Maybe that sounds stupid, which is understandable. We currently live in the stupidest of timelines in which believing in science is a creed one has to defend instead of a basic shared reality. I hated that book, The Secret, and all the white supremacist capitalism it had inspired. I am an anti-vaxxer. When I had cancer, I opted for the strongest chemotherapy. I also cast spells. It is possible to both listen to doctors as well as trust your gut. Deriding something like witchcraft is an easy stance to take. That is true of most things that women and indigenous people love. It takes far more creativity to participate in something like witchcraft than it does to debunk it. I'd like to make the case that believing in witchcraft is not stupid, rather but foolish in the best sense of that word, the energy of the fool.
It's as powerful as any other archetype, one that is good for us to embody every now and again. After all, once upon a time, we were little children who believed in magic. Then, as most do, we grew to become older children who made a more conscious agreement to pretend, to suspend disbelief, to imagine worlds out of rocks and sticks and dolls that were both something real and something else. This is the same spirit who makes all of the art in the world, so why not in an act of humility and indulge her a little bit? Why not play?
I have an altar in my apartment decked out with images and icons. I keep the feathers I collect there as well as bay leaves and different colored candles and tufts of my children's hair. Sometimes I pull a tarot card. Sometimes I feel too fussy and demanding to pull a card. Sometimes I pray to my ancestors. Sometimes I just shake a handful of pretty rocks. It doesn't really matter because whatever I do when I am practicing witchcraft, it is slowing me down, bringing me back into my body, honoring both the child I was and the adult I am now—honoring the infinite creativity of this world. Again, do I do this every day or even every new moon? I wish, but I choose to believe that these pauses can charge up all the little and big energies floating around myself, and my home, and my world. I choose to believe that visiting my novel just to say hi is like this, too.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Thank you so much again to Domenica for sharing. Again, her newest novel is All the Mothers, and her works can be purchased anywhere books are sold, and you can also follow Domenica social media @domenicaruta. Now, here's my conversation with Maggie Smith.
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Across ten sections, readers are greeted with a wealth of inspiration that invites artists of all genres to tap into their creative practice. There’s the beauty of attention and the power of vulnerability, but beyond the page, Maggie contends with the more nuanced “ingredients”—intuition, luck, retreat. She spoke about all of these frameworks and shared more about her own writing evolution, how slow storytelling haunts and heals us, and the questions she has about—and for—writing.
If you’ve had the pleasure of reading or speaking with Maggie directly, you know firsthand how generous a space she creates through language and laughter. This conversation had no shortage of both, and I’m honored we got a chance to speak so intimately—but I don’t want to give too much more away. So, on that note, here’s my conversation with the inimitable Maggie Smith.
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Rachel Schwartzmann: There's kind of a question I have related to Ohio, but first, you know, in your introduction to Dear Writer, you mentioned that when listing out the 10 principles in the book, you narrowed it down to 13, which you say is your favorite number. I'm not sure if there's a story there.
Maggie Smith: It's my birthday. [Laughs]
Rachel Schwartzmann: Ah, well, there you go!
Maggie Smith: Yeah, my birthday is February 13th, and you know, sometimes it falls on Friday the 13th. So the sort of unlucky number, an unlucky day for me, I had to kind of reclaim it even as a kid. And so for me, 13 has always felt like a lucky number instead of an unlucky number. But it wasn't as neat a number as 10. So I got to 13 and then I thought, okay, that seems a little particular to me, that's not gonna really make sense to other people, but there are 13 principles, so I'll further narrow it to 10 and then I'm not narrowing any much more than that.
Rachel Schwartzmann: It's funny—the kind of pressure we feel to make things neat and tidy. I would've been interested in 13.
Maggie Smith: I think I started out with like 60 something, and I was like, okay, this recipe, if anyone sees a recipe online that has 60 ingredients, they're not making it. So it's in some ways like, how do we make this as like digestible as possible? Because I mean, in reality, every one of these 10 terms—and I kind of say this in the introduction—I imagine it as an expandable suitcase. I mean, each word in the English language is like that: Every word has other words kind of hidden inside of it. And so all of these ingredients in the secret sauce are also, I think, gesturing toward related terms. And so if other people would rather use the word courage instead of vulnerability, they're cousins. And that's okay.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Yeah, that's a really generous way to look at it. And we'll get into talking about the book, but just going back to 13 for a minute— and luck—do you believe in luck? What's felt lucky to you lately?
Maggie Smith: Everything about my life feels lucky to me. [Laughs] Honestly, I think, you know, I'm definitely of the mindset that I have worked hard and I think I'm pretty good at what I do, but the number of things I get to do and the opportunities that come to me—and the way that my life looks now—is not because I'm good at what I do and because I work hard alone. I mean, I really feel obscenely fortunate to have been in the right place at the right time, or have met the right person, or have received inspiration or generosity that I hardly deserve. And so honestly, I kind of move through the world thinking, how on earth did all of these good things happen to me? And I guess the best way I can describe it is it feels like wherever I am at a certain moment, it feels like a lot of hands have kind of carried me to that place and deposited me there. I did not get there on my own steam, so to speak.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Yeah. And I feel like at least in these times, I'm trying to think of luck as something, it's almost like a practice in a way. Like noticing. It's almost kind of like your beauty emergencies. I'm lucky to be experiencing, as we said before we started recording it was something like I’m having a good day in this dark world. Is that what we said?
Maggie Smith: Yeah. I'm having a good day in a bad world. [Laughs]
Rachel Schwartzmann: You heard it here first. [Laughs]
Maggie Smith: Yeah! The mugs are coming. Wait for the merch. [Laughs] Yeah. I actually do think it's sort of related to beauty emergencies, that just being in the world and noticing things and being present, even on a day when 50 different terrible things have happened, which frankly is every day—and again, that's a conservative estimate. Like, if you look, there's still a lot of good, and I think it's incredibly easy, I'm tempted to say in times like these, but all times are harrowing, so I won't say in times like these—like all times are differently harrowing throughout history. So it's tempting, I think, to turn our eyes and our ears toward all of the very loud bad emergencies instead of the quieter beauty emergencies. And yet, surviving requires us to be able to toggle and pay attention to what we need to pay attention to. And that's the good, too.
Rachel Schwartzmann: And thank God we have writing for that.
Maggie Smith: Thank God.
Rachel Schwartzmann: You know, as you kind of talk about beauty emergencies, maybe we should start by explaining a little bit what that is. You know, I think the last time we spoke for Coveteur, you mentioned that—but yeah, is there a beauty emergency that you've seen recently, or why does it feel correct even to attach beauty to emergency?
Maggie Smith: Yeah, I mean it's a phrase that we came up with in my house because if you just yell sunrise, no one comes running, right? I mean, it's just—
Rachel Schwartzmann: I do!
Maggie Smith: Yeah, well, I do too. I'm a poet, so I guess I do come running. I mean, if someone yells donut, I'll also come running. So it was something that I came up with when I wanted my kids when they were younger—to come see something that was fleeting, whether it was a rainbow or a sunrise or a cloud in a specific shape, whatever the thing was, it's something fleeting so that you actually have to look at it right then. Because you know, as with the sunrise, it's only going to be that color pink maybe for a minute, and then it turns that kind of peach. And the peach is nice, but it's not the pink. So it became something that we would yell, and my kids have picked it up. So my son, you know, would be brushing his teeth and would yell, Beauty emergency! And we'd all run to the back of the house to see what was going on.
I saw a beautiful, bright pink cloud as the sun was setting in the historic neighborhood of German Village in Columbus on Monday night, and just gasped. And actually, I had to kind of keep myself from whipping out my phone and trying to frame a photo of it, which I do often. I'm constantly taking photos of clouds, but I was trying to be more in the moment, and so I did not capture it. And so now I'm a little like, oh, I wish I had a picture of that pink cloud. But I suppose that's what our eyes are for.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Capture it in a poem.
Maggie Smith: Yeah, there's that too.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Yeah. And you know, as you talk about wanting to be in the moment, staying present, obviously, as a writer, you're always taking notes, and I'm curious about your relationship with daily documentation. In the book, you write:
“If you’re a writer, you know what I mean: there’s the you that lives, and the you that chronicles the life. The closer they are, the better, but I suspect they can never be flush, a perfect overlay, it’s a loss and a gift, I think, that separation makes the writing possible.”
So, how do you know it's worth—well, it's all worth experiencing—but how do you know it's worth writing about versus just solely being in the moment?
Maggie Smith: I mean, I guess the short answer is sometimes you don't. I find myself, you know, oftentimes standing just a little bit outside of an experience, trying to find the words to describe it for something I might make later, which is a weird way to experience the world. And maybe it's not that different for, say, a photographer who is just walking with a camera or without a camera and sees a shot they'd like to frame. It's hard not to look at your world through the lens of your art-making, I think. And so for me, oftentimes, I don't know, but the thing that kind of grabs me is usually if I can see something and a metaphor comes to me—like if it automatically clicks into comparison mode for me and I start kind of musing on it and that way, then I'm kind of off and running and I want to get the metaphor down.The sensory experience in itself is step one. Like I see, hear, smell, touch, taste, something. And then if I go to step two, which is okay, but what does that remind me of? What does that look like to me? What have I experienced in the past? What does that ponder up in me? That's when I kind of leave the experience and I enter writer mode.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Mm-hmm.
Maggie Smith: I wonder if people can see that happening. Yeah. Like if it's observable from the outside, like, oh, there she goes. Oh, she was just her, and oh, nope, she's not, she's not really here anymore. She's writing something in her mind.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Oh yeah, I'm sure. I mean it's almost like, you know, a dancer warming up to start a combination. There is that subtle shift in physicality and expression.
Maggie Smith: I love that.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Has anybody ever pointed that out to you?
Maggie Smith: You know what? No, but I know it's funny, people have taken photos of me while I've been writing before, you know, that I didn't realize. And then I'll look at the photo, and I'm like, oh, that's what I look like when I'm writing. And I basically just look like I'm kind of zoned out—but I'm actually zoned in. You just wouldn't know it from the photo.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Oh, that'd be such an interesting project to document the outside.
Maggie Smith: Yeah. What could you capture of like, when inspiration hits a person, regardless of the medium? I have no idea. You would have to basically just train a camera on someone all the time. I think, to catch those moments. But that would be an interesting, interesting thing to see.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Yeah, because have you noticed it in other writer friends or colleagues when they kind of shift into that space?
Maggie Smith: Honestly, I probably haven't because if I'm with another writer and they're going into writing mode, I probably am, too. Like sometimes I'll make coffee dates with other writer friends and we'll go sit at a coffee shop—or a even a bar—and just sort of like chit chat a little bit and then we'll both put headphones on and get to work. And so, some third party would have to document what that looks like, because I'm in my own world, too.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Totally. I wish I could write in those spaces. I need total silence.
Maggie Smith: Oh wow. I listen to music when I write, and so it actually doesn't bother me to be in a public place wearing headphones because it's not that different from being in my house wearing headphones.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Yeah, I mean, I feel like a more enriching experience in some ways. I just get so easily distracted and taken by music.
Maggie Smith: Yeah, I think I do, too. I don't know what it is. I actually think it might be one of those things where if you're part of your brain is bused with something that another part of your brain opens up when you come up with a great idea when you're washing dishes, or washing your hair, or folding laundry, and it's because some part of your brain is busy with another task and it allows some other kind of playful part of your brain to wander off and do something different. Sometimes I wonder if that's what listening to music does for me. It is a busy part of my brain. And then the other part, I don't know, wakes up in a different way.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Have you ever thought about writing music?
Maggie Smith: No, I don't play an instrument. Songwriting is really different structurally from, say, free verse poetry. So I don't have the skillset for it. But I think it would be fascinating to try to learn.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Everybody's a beginner at some point.
Maggie Smith: True. I know. And nothing excites me more than being cast with something I have no idea how to do.
Rachel Schwartzmann: I think a lot of it is timing, too. We have to be able to step into certain opportunities or endeavors and really feel aligned with where we are in our lives.
Maggie Smith: Yes, for sure.
Rachel Schwartzmann: I'm wondering, too, at what time in your life did you realize that writing was something that you not only wanted to pursue but share as a teacher?
Maggie Smith: Well, I went to graduate school for poetry; I have an MFA in poetry. And so I taught poetry classes at Ohio State when I was in graduate school. And then I taught for a year at Gettysburg College on a lectureship right after grad school. And then I left teaching, and now I teach, you know, occasionally I teach in a low-res MFA program at Spalding University. And I teach one-off one-week workshops here and there, and day-long workshops. And I love it.
I think I enjoy it more in my late forties than I did in my mid-twenties—probably beause I feel like I have a lot more experience under my belt. And it's not weird to feel like the authority in the room at my age now, but when you are 20, you know, three teaching 20-year-olds who look older than you. [Laughs] And you haven't published more than a couple of poems in a magazine. I sort of felt like a fraud, frankly. And I think a lot of people feel that way, probably when they're first starting out teaching and they're young and maybe don't have as much experience or as much to show for it yet. And so it took me a while of just writing—I worked in publishing for a while, and writing and publishing more books, to feel like I got to a place where I had more to offer to students and mentees.
Now I feel like I'm in a place where I've tried a lot of different things. I've fallen flat on my face many times and had to get back up. I've kind of reinvented myself a couple of times and have cobbled a career together [that] has not really looked the same at any five-year interval. And that puts me in a position where I feel not just more comfortable personally teaching, but also like I have something else to offer to people. I want to be useful, right? I mean, I think when you're making art in the world, at least I feel this way. I feel really fortunate to have had teachers and mentors—and even I count books and authors among them. People I've never met who never taught a class I took, but whose work gave me a permission slip or opened something up for me. And so to be in a position to be that, perhaps for another person, I don't know, it just feels like part of the cycle of what we do.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Yeah. That all resonates. And I think Dear Writer is a perfect culmination of that. It's a teacher, it's a guidebook. It's kind of a friend in a lot of ways.
Maggie Smith: I love that.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Maybe we can pause here and have you read from Dear Writer.
Maggie Smith: Sure, of course.
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Maggie Smith: Oh, I love that. That needs to be also on a mug or t-shirt.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Yes. [Laughs] I'll tell them that.
Maggie Smith: Okay. [Laughs]
Rachel Schwartzman: But I'm curious in what ways you've been rewarded or changed by attention, both on and off the page.
Maggie Smith: I mean, in every way. I couldn't have made anything I've ever made, nor would I be making what I'm making now if I closed myself off to the world. Even though sometimes it's really tempting to do that.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Do you think it's necessary sometimes?
Maggie Smith: To close ourselves off to the world?
Rachel Schwartzmann: I don't know if entirely, but like, is retreat part of the process?
Maggie Smith: In increments. [Laughs] Yeah, I mean there's a reason why I go to a cabin in the woods to write for days at a stretch, where I'm sort of off the grid and people can't reach me. And I'm not really away from the world. I'm in it. I'm walking in the woods, and I'm looking at the moss, and I'm listening to the crows, and watching the deer. And yes, probably taking pictures of clouds. So I'm not away from the world, the larger world. But for me, I think sometimes it's important to get away from the static of the human world—because there's a lot of wonder and beauty. And I have a lot of humans that I love in the human world. But there are also just a lot of things that if I think too much about them, I would probably just end up in the fetal position and wouldn't write that day.
And so yeah … it's funny sometimes. I think making things—regardless if you're a writer, an artist, [or] a performer—[it] requires you to sort of be porous in a way that is sometimes painful. But if you feel that you're becoming too porous and it's becoming too painful, then it's actually your responsibility to yourself as a human being—because you're a human before you're an artist. I believe that anyway. And taking care of yourself as a human is taking care of the artist inside you. And so, I don't really believe in sort of sacrificing everything about us in order to stay so open that we can constantly make things. Sometimes there are times for a retreat. Absolutely.
Rachel Schwartzmann: What are some things that you maybe had to pay attention to early as a writer that you've shifted away from?
Maggie Smith: I don’t know if there really is anything that I could name. I mean, I think my subject matter has shifted over the years. I realized [this]: I just turned in my next book of poems, and my kids appear less in that book than in previous books. And it's not because they're less a part of my life. In fact, the three of us are together at least part of every single day unless I'm on the road. So it's not that. I think it's as they grow, they become more of their own people, and they're off doing their own things. There's just more separation than when they were really small, and like I was physically carrying them around and physically their food source, and we were just much more enmeshed when they were really little. So, I think I'm writing less about parenting now that I have an adolescent and a teenager. But other than that, I mean, I think if I look back through even the poems I was writing in my late teens and early twenties, and then I'm looking at some of the things that I've been writing over the past year, a lot of the concerns are the same, even if they're being expressed in different ways.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Yeah.
Maggie Smith: Which is interesting to think about, that you might actually carry thematic obsessions from age 15 to age 75.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Totally. And when I interviewed Allie Rowbottom a few years ago, she basically said that the questions in your writing are the questions in your life. She's not afraid of repetition. And it's interesting too, I was just thinking of a moment in Dear Writer, where you said:
“One of the magic tricks of reptation is that it enacts remembering. Think about it: Memory is a kind of haunting, so repetition is a kind of haunting in a text.”
So that makes sense that you're approaching the same things from different vantage points. But it's interesting: we're in a culture obviously that prizes newness and quantity and trends. So with that in mind, I'm curious what comes to mind when you hear the phrase slow storytelling? You know, how can slowness haunt us in a good or generative way?
Maggie Smith: Oh, I love that. I love that. I think yes, our culture prizes newness and novelty. And yet it also doesn't. [Laughs] I mean, if you think about it, imagine the band that puts out a record and everybody loves it, right? Like they're just darlings. Everybody loves this record. And then the next record is totally new and doesn't sound anything like the first record.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Mm-hmm.
Maggie Smith: And maybe, maybe they really took their time with it. Maybe it was eight years until the next record, because they had to kind of grow and evolve. That's slow, right? They weren't trying to be a flash in the pan, they weren't trying to strike while the iron is hot or whatever cliche we can describe to that. And then there will be people who find them with record two and are like, Oh, this is great. And then can't believe that they also made record one. And there will be people who love record one and appreciate the evolution, and like both. And then there will be people who were like, but this doesn't sound like what I hoped it would, because I really liked the first one.
So, yes, I think there is something to novelty and being able to kind of do the next thing and recreate yourself and always be growing. And of course, none of us is static. It's impossible, really, to repeat yourself. It's just impossible. Stan Plum used to say the best thing you can do to try to make new work is imitate yourself, not others. Because you'll always fail. You actually can't do the same thing twice because you are constantly growing and changing. So even if you tried, you would fail, and that failure would be a success. That's the deep irony of it.
But yeah, it's a really tricky thing when you want to have a long career—and I think most people do; no one starts making things thinking it's going to be the only thing they ever make. So, if you want to do this for a long time, is the secret reinventing yourself every time? Is the secret finding out what people want from you and then just trying to do that over and over again? That doesn't feel like art-making to me. And so maybe part of the slowness is really listening to that inner voice and listening to yourself and having discernment, and again, trying to tune out the static of the outside world, which could be coming from agents or management or editors or even readers. Trying not to think too much about what people's desires or expectations are for what your next—or next, next—might be. But kind of visiting the oracle of yourself instead, right?
Rachel Schwartzmann: Yeah.
Maggie Smith: And asking that oracle, what am I driven to build now? Which is like a really unsexy way to approach this process. But it feels true, right? And maybe true is not sexy. That's okay.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Well, it's funny because when I ask that question of myself—when I think about what slow storytelling means to me, especially throughout the years of doing this project—one answer that's become very consistent is honesty.
Maggie Smith: Yeah, yeah. And accountability. I mean, and I think those two words really do go hand in hand. Like you are making the thing, your name is on it. So even if people are in your ear and giving you advice, and it might be great advice, chances are their name is not on it. And so it's not going to be part of their body of work. And so ultimately, I mean, part of having that honest conversation with yourself is really having to reckon with that. Like, this is my body of work. What do I want it to look like and sound like and feel like? I mean, just in general, I think just the concept of compromise is difficult. And note, it's not one of the 10 ingredients [in Dear Writer]. [Laughs]
Rachel Schwartzmann: Yeah. [Laughs] But it should be!
Maggie Smith: I mean, I don’t know. Maybe it shouldn't be. Like I was saying to someone the other day, some of my worst qualities—or what I thought of as a kid, like growing up, or maybe even to be more blunt about it, some of what I was told growing u,p were some of my worst qualities, the story that others tell you about yourself—is not that great. And one of those things that I heard a lot when I was a kid was that I was stubborn.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Mm-hmm. I still hear that.
Maggie Smith: Yeah. And people say it less, I mean, I'm more likely to just volunteer that about myself now, not as an apology, but just as like, by way of explanation, I'm totally open to your feedback, but be aware, I'm open to it, but I will not be slavish to it. It has to align with my vision for what I'm making. And so even if your advice, be it well-meaning or even smart, like, oh yeah, that would sell some books, so that would be beautiful or that makes sense from a marketing perspective, if it doesn't align with the thing that I have in my mind that I want to make, I'm probably going to say no. And it's not because I'm trying to be difficult. And so it's funny how sometimes some of the things that might have been framed as negatives that we might even still think of as not wholly positive traits actually serve us really well when we're making things. And I think stubbornness, frankly, like a balance between stubbornness and openness, the right balance is really important.
Rachel Schwartzmann: It is. And just as we talk about the things that we're making, I'd love to ask a question related to my book Slowing.
Maggie Smith: Yeah.
Rachel Schwartzmann: You might know that it's structured in three sections, Beginning, Middle, and End, as a kind of nod to a slow story or slow day. And so I wrote to these ideas—how we think about those chapters, how I want to redefine them, challenge them. And I asked this to those I interviewed in the book, but I'm curious how beginnings have changed for you both on and off the page, and maybe what are some questions we should be asking about beginnings in our creative lives?
Maggie Smith: It's a beautiful book... Oh my gosh. I feel like I need to sit with that. I mean, maybe for a weekend, that's honestly such a beautiful question. It honestly makes me want to sit down with a pen and a legal pad, Rachel, and unpack that for myself.
I guess just off the top of my head, I don't know if beginnings in my writing have changed that much. I mean, I get an idea for a project, I start it, but I feel like I'm much more, maybe sort of meta-cognizant of beginnings in my life, if that even makes sense. I'm at a point in my life where if I meet someone new, or if a different kind of opportunity presents itself, or if I visit a place I've never been, and it feels kind of like weirdly homelike to me, I get that sort of spidey sense feeling of like, oh, this is the start of something.
I think that's about intuition. And I don't think I had really tuned into my own intuition—definitely not in my twenties. I'm going to argue my thirties [that] I was still not trusting my gut to the level that I trust it now, but now I do. And so I feel like I move through the world feeling those kinds of threshold moments or those door-opening moments really acutely. I think maybe that's not unrelated to what we were talking about earlier, which is just feeling incredibly lucky. And so I feel like these days, as new chapters begin, whether they're professional or personal or with my kids or with friends or whatever the case may be, I feel myself moving into that space in a strangely physical way and being like, oh wait.
I wrote about this in my memoir that the idea of you doesn't have a sense of foreshadowing in your life. You know, so often when something, especially something traumatic has happened, you look back and you think, oh yeah, there were some red flags, right? But it's so easy to see red flags or even green flags in your life in the rearview. In hindsight, now I realize that's where that was leading, or it was inevitable it was going to go that way, or end that way. But I really wasn't good at noticing in the moment what was going on around me or what the kind of vibe was. And I think now, and I don't, I have no idea how to even explain the shift or why it has occurred. Maybe writing the memoir helped, frankly, but I feel like I'm much more able to feel my life kind of shifting in real time, and not only get to see things clearly in the rear view mirror. That feels like a gift.
Rachel Schwartzmann: That's amazing. And I think that sets us up to have you read another section from Dear Writer if you're good with that.
Maggie Smith: Sure.
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Rachel Schwartzmann: Yeah, I was certainly surprised a lot when I was writing Slowing. You also wrote in another section [of Dear Writer]:
“Following where the work goes without letting my ego get in the way. Letting the language take the wheel. Sometimes I might mistype a word, or misread my own scrawl in a notebook—word for world, see for seem—and stumble upon a layer of meaning I decide to keep.”
I had this happen [to me]. I even wrote a whole essay about it for Literary Hub.
Maggie Smith: I love that.
Rachel Schwartzmann: I accidentally wrote scared instead of sacred, which I thought was very telling. [Laughs]
Maggie Smith: Perfect. That is perfect. I love that. And you're like, oh, okay. So there's that. Let's unpack how those two words are related and how I feel inside those two words and how they're bouncing off of each other or sparking against each other, like stones. That's great.
Rachel Schwartzmann: It was an interesting thread. It was such a small detail, but it wasn't obviously. But yeah, it stayed with me.
So this might be a strange question… but let’s see.
Maggie Smith: I love it already. [Laughs]
Rachel Schwartzmann: If writing was an entity or a being that you could ask a question to, what would you want to know, or what would you ask?
Maggie Smith: Oh, I mean, honestly, I think what I would ask is also a question I would not want answered. So I would ask and then plug my ears. Because to me, the big question my whole life has been, where does it come from? That's what I want to know. I don't actually want to know where it's going. That's up to me, right? Like when I get an idea, I don't actually have questions about writing. Once the idea comes to me, it's just my job then to deal with the material I've been handed. The question, for me—it still doesn't make any sense, it still feels like a gift every time—is why did I walk outside and look at something and then hear this scrap of language in my head? Why did I drive someplace in the car, and while I was listening to this song on the radio, remember this time when I was seven years old, in such a clear way, when I don't even remember something I did four days ago? And why am I thinking about that?
It's really about the inner workings of the mind and how inspiration happens. And I'm both dying to know how this is possible. And [also] I want nothing to do with knowing, because to know, again would kind of kill it. I feel like in a lot of ways, writing feels like part magic and part work. And the work, to me, starts when I get the idea and then I have to deal with it. The magic is everything that happens before then. And sometimes there's a little magic too when something clicks together—like scared and sacred, right? These little things happen when you're building a thing and it's like, oh wow. Like I'm here I am writing and it feels like it's kind of coming through me and I had no idea this was going to go in that direction. The magic is the part that I'm endlessly curious about. And yet it's important to me that it remains magic and therefore unknowable.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Yeah, because that would just make it another sort of like act of life, like a daily thing.
Maggie Smith: Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. The mystery is what makes it so fun and exciting and sort of inexplicable.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Well, it's kind of like the moment from the section “Wonder” where you stumble upon the phrase “poet's eyes” in a children's textbook.
Maggie Smith: Oh. [Laughs]Yeah, I loved that.
Rachel Schwartzmann: You know, it's kind of funny, I know you said earlier you're not writing as much about your children these days, but something I've really loved asking people lately on this podcast is about their creative lineage. And a lot of your work, as you said, does kind of feature the people in your life, your kids. [So] how would you describe your creative lineage and what have you inherited, and what do you hope to pass down to your people—whether that's your children, your students, other writer, friends?
Maggie Smith: Oh my gosh, these are fantastic questions and something I really probably need to sit with and think about before I die. [Laughs]
Rachel Schwartzmann: [Laughs]
Maggie Smith: Like I've been so busy making a playlist of songs to be played at my funeral. I have not even thought about my creative lineage. And that feels like much more important question.
Rachel Schwartzmann: I mean, that's part of it though. Not to get too morbid, but a playlist would be something to pass down. That's an act of creation.
Maggie Smith: Oh, for sure. I mean, I do think about this all the time, and I guess it is a creative lineage.
I think [about this] all the time, what will people remember about me? My children or my neighbors, or people who pick up my book—what will the sort of impression be of me when I'm not here to be making new impressions on people? In some ways, I don't know, and I don't know that I should know. It's almost the same as when I finish making something, the best thing I can do is send it out and then just start making something else without thinking too much about how that first thing is going to be received. Because if I think too much about that, it might make me reticent about making the next thing. Or it might kind of put me in a stuck mindset.
So I think, in a way, thinking too much about lineage or even about legacy, it's a beautiful thing to think about and it also is like deeply uncomfortable because it requires us to kind of—for lack of a better word—summarize ourselves. And I don't even know what that would look like. I would hope that at least my children will remember that I was a really enthusiastic person. And I hope that comes through in my writing too, that I was excited about things, that I'm not a cynical person, that when I listen to music, I really listen to music—meaning very loud[ly] and there is singing and dancing. That when I see something in the world that I find beautiful, I'm effusive about it and I want everyone else to look at it, and I'm taking pictures of it and pointing it out, and I have zero chill. Maybe my legacy is a zero chill legacy. I guess maybe that's okay. Maybe that's enough.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Do you think we inherit creativity or is it nurtured or both?
Maggie Smith: I have no idea. I think if you ask my parents, they would say it's not inherited because they don't have any idea how this happened. [Laughs] They're both numbers people. And so there isn't a history of art making in my family—extended family, and immediate family. I didn't grow up around painters and dancers and filmmakers. This never seemed like a path that was an option based on what other people were doing in my life. But I did grow up reading a lot, listening to a lot of music, and being outside. We had a creek in our backyard and trees and I was always out there catching things, and paying attention, and watching the way the water moved around the rocks. If I wasn't reading or listening to music, I was outside. So I think, in some ways, all of that is part of that inheritance of taking in art as a young person and also being a noticer from a pretty early age.
Rachel Schwartzmann: And I'm sure you noticed the world anew as a parent.
Maggie Smith: Oh, for sure. You can't not because, at least when my kids were young, they're new to the world, so they're seeing everything for the first time. Even if I had a tendency to be cynical, which I don't, you can't really just take a walk in your neighborhood with a 3-year-old and a 6-year-old and not be called to look—that’s what you're going to hear every three feet. And it’s a broken robin's egg on the sidewalk or a squirrel print in the cement that is somehow dried and has been left there, or crocuses and daffodils coming up, or trees starting to bud. I mean, I say when they were younger, but honestly, I took a walk with my son just a couple of days ago, and what did we notice? I [took] pictures of squirrel prints in the concrete and the eyes on the side of birch trees that look like they're watching you, and some clouds. We heard a woodpecker.
That kind of makes me think more about my legacy: I've been raising people who pay attention.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Hmm. So, so critical now.
Maggie Smith: I think so, yeah.
Rachel Schwartzmann: I mean always, but especially now.
Maggie Smith: Always, but yeah. Yeah. Now more than ever, perhaps.
Rachel Schwartzmann: I loved your poem, “At the End of My Marriage, I Think of Something My Daughter Said About Trees.”
Maggie Smith: Oh, thank you.
Rachel Schwartzmann: I think that kind of ties back to that [idea].
Maggie Smith: Yeah. Yep. That was Violet in the car. It's amazing what just paying attention will yield—just all kinds of gifts.
Rachel Schwartzmann: What do you think poetry is asking of us?
Maggie Smith: Oh, just that isn't it slow down and pay attention? I mean, to me poetry is the best. I'm biased but I do think it's the best genre. If I had to choose my fighter, it would be poetry. Even though I'm sort of writing a lot of everything right now, poetry is always home base. And I think part of the reason is that I started there and part of the reason is that I don't think there's another form of writing that does the job of saying the unsayable—maybe music, but tthat's cheating because they have melody. I think as far as like words only if we're going to go toe to toe, poems do the best job of articulating things that we cannot articulate as human beings. Those unknowable little corridors and corners of our hearts and minds and experiences that feel sometimes even inaccessible to us.
Then I'll read a poem by another person—it's not like my own poems are cracking open those spaces for me. I mean, sometimes writing something does help me realize something about my life, but it's other people's poems that are doing that for me. And what a gift when there's so much that we want to be able to explain to ourselves, let alone other people about what it is to be human. And that poems are there giving that to us. And what they ask of us in return is attention.
Rachel Schwartzmann: What poems have changed your relationship with attention lately?
Maggie Smith: Oh my gosh. I am loving Tiana Clark's new book. I don't know if you have read it. It's called Scorched Earth.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Oh, I've heard of tt.
Maggie Smith: Oh my gosh. I mean, and it's very much of this time and yet of all times, and I think the best poems do that: They speak to the moment we're living in, but not just to the moment we're living in.
I'm looking at my bookshelf right now, another book that came out last year but that I've been dipping back into a lot is Matthew Zapruder’s newest collection of poems. It's called, I Love Hearing Your Dreams. And it's funny, both Tiana and Matthew, their styles are very different from mine. Like if you laid a poem by each of them and a poem by me out, it would not be hard for you to discern whose poem belonged to whom. But part of what I love is reading against the grain of my own aesthetic, reading poems that don't sound like my poems, they don't look like my poems, they don't move like my poems. I feel the same way about other genres of writing, reading novels by people who don't write fiction the way I'm attempting to write fiction, essayists who are writing essays that don't do what I do because they teach me things. I think writers read for pleasure, of course, but we're also reading as spies.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Definitely. Even if we don't know it.
Maggie Smith: But we do, don't we? We know it.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Sometimes, I pick up a book though and I don't know that it had something I was looking for, which is the best feeling.
Maggie Smith: Yeah. But all books do, right? I mean, every book has something, even if some if some books tell you what you don't want to do, right? Like some books are great negative examples of like, well, I don't want to treat character that way, or I’m not interested in doing X, Y, or Z. And that is sometimes just as useful as a model for what you do want to do in your own work.
Rachel Schwartzmann: For sure. And all books definitely, or inevitably lead to questions. Questions are at the heart of writing and living. And this is a question that I ask all of the people who come on this podcast: What is a question that you wish people asked you more often?
Maggie Smith: Oh gosh. People ask me lots of questions. Is the answer sometimes, I wish people asked me fewer questions? No, I'm kidding. What do I wish people asked me about more than they do? You know, I think coming off of the memoir, I would've said craft because I was tired of talking about my life. I really wanted to talk about how I built the book, and not so much about the experiences in the book. And in some ways, I feel like Dear Writer, I mean it's a craft book. So it's sort of my sly way of forcing those questions. Now, if I want to have conversations about craft, a very pointed way to have those conversations is to publish a book. [Laughs]
Rachel Schwartzmann: Gets the job done. [Laughs]
Maggie Smith: Yeah. So I think, I mean that for me, that's what I really like to talk about—how the sausage gets made. And more than being asked about it, I really want to ask other writers. I'm so curious. I would love to ask Tiana: What does the first draft of this poem look like and how did you get from that point to this point? I would love to ask Matthew: Were these poems in this book always in this order? Or how did you arrange them in this way and what was your logic? I'm so curious about the books I read and the writers I admire. So those are the kind of conversations I geek out about and would love to have more of.
Rachel Schwartzmann: And more often than not, I think people want to discuss that and they want to share.
Maggie Smith: Sure.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Is there a question that you want to ask yourself moving forward as you kind of bring Dear Writer into the world?
Maggie Smith: Talking about intuition a little bit earlier, I think the question I probably owe to myself is how can you listen better to that inner voice all the time? Not just when it's telling you something you want to hear, but even when it's telling you something that's inconvenient, you know, that you don't want to hear, even when it's saying you should say no to that opportunity. because you don't have the bandwidth, right? It's really easy to dial past that bit of intuition and keep going because you really want to do all the things. Probably this is a time in my life where I need to be really listening regardless of what the voice is saying.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Yeah. I think for me it's a question of what's going to keep you going? What's going to sustain you?
Maggie Smith: That's a great question.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Because there's a lot pulling at our attention right now, but refocusing on what feels true.
Maggie Smith: Yes. That is the thing. Honestly, even the question, what feels true right now? That's a question that actually just gave me goosebumps, Rachel. That's a question: What feels true? Because if the answer is not that thing you were about to spend the next three weeks doing or not that relationship you thought about starting, I mean that is a clarifying question, isn't it?
Rachel Schwartzmann: It is, and I didn't even know that I was going to ask that until I just said it!
Maggie Smith: Genius.
Rachel Schwartzmann: There are probably so many questions that I keep asking you, but maybe to close things out, we could have you read one more time.
Maggie Smith: Sure.
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Rachel Schwartzmann: That was my conversation with Maggie Smith. You can purchase Dear Writer and Maggie’s earlier works anywhere books are sold—though we recommend supporting local and independent bookstores if you can. You can also follow Maggie on social media @maggiesmithpoet. I’m Rachel Schwartzmann, and you've been listening to Slow Stories. Thank you so much for tuning in.