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Episode 365: Maggie Smith
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Maggie Smith is a poet and the author of You Could Make This Place Beautiful.
Substack: rageagainstthealgorithm.substack.com
Show notes: brendanomeara.com
Social: @CNFPod
Support: Patreon.com/cnfpod
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Transcript
Introduction to the Podcast
00:00:00
Speaker
I'm probably a poet on roller skates, to be honest. I don't know how to sort of shed that.
00:00:10
Speaker
Hey CNFers, it's CNF Pod, the Creative Nonfiction Podcast, a show where I speak to badass people about telling true stories. I'm Brendan O'Mara. How's it going?
Maggie Smith on Her Memoir
00:00:21
Speaker
We have the Uber Poet Maggie Smith on the show this week for episode 365. Oh, she has a new memoir called You Could Make This Place Beautiful. It's published by Atria.
00:00:35
Speaker
this book is a stick of dynamite man loved it Maggie is at Maggie Smith poet on Twitter and Instagram and she has a great sub stack where she talks all things writing and breaking down poems many times her own poems and can I share something real quick so at the end of our conversation with with with Maggie this is that took place a few weeks ago
00:01:00
Speaker
I accidentally hung up the phone. Not exactly a phone to record these things, but you get it. And I had no way of calling her back to let her know that I had hit the wrong button. So as soon as we were done with the interview, I fucking hang up on her. See you later, Maggie Smith.
00:01:17
Speaker
I got what I needed, now be gone. I was horrified. I broke out into a sweat and I frantically was typing an electronic mail to her that I hit the wrong button and I waited for about an hour still sweating like a hog and she wrote back saying she figured it was a technical snafu and then I stopped sweating.
Promoting the Podcast and Newsletter
00:01:41
Speaker
Make sure you're heading over to BrendanOmero.com for show notes and to sign up for the Rage Against the Algorithm newsletter. It's now on Substack. Just click the lightning bolt on my website or visit rageagainstthealgorithm.substack.com. Still first of the month, no spam. So far as I can tell, you can't beat it. What with Twitter, burying any tweet that has a link that takes you away from Twitter, I'm more and more inclined to just be done with Twitter altogether.
00:02:09
Speaker
This is how we rage against the algorithm. If you dig this show, consider sharing it with your network so we can grow the pie and get the CNF-ing thing into the brains of other CNF-ers who need the juice, man. You can also leave a kind review on Apple Podcasts so the wayward CNF-er might say, shit, I'll give that a shot. Also, show is free, but it sure as hell ain't cheap, so consider heading to patreon.com slash CNFpod and consider dropping a few bucks in the hat.
00:02:37
Speaker
if you glean some value. From what we churn and burn here at CNF Pod HQ, shout out to Tracy Slater, she's a new patron, and someone who just signed a book contract. This podcast, along with a couple others, helped her through the process of the book proposal, and she is shared on Twitter that she's got a contract, signature, and everything. Awesome. Congratulations, Tracy, and thanks for the support. I can't wait for your book to come out.
Maggie's Evolving Relationship with Writing
00:03:05
Speaker
It's hit an overstatement to say that Maggie Smith is a national treasure. In this episode, we dig into our 3 a.m. voices, how her relationship to writing has changed over the years, and how she broke out the highlighters to help structure her brilliant memoir. So are you ready to get after it? This, on the day Metallica, releases their newest album, 72 Seasons. Oh yes, let's hit it. Riff.
00:03:43
Speaker
Up late, I have what I like to call, it's an enemy of sorts, but it's my 2 or 3 a.m. voice, because I usually wake up around 2 or 3 a.m. and it's not a... Yeah, and I get hit with this voice, especially now since I'm working on something that actually has a concrete deadline. It is...
00:04:04
Speaker
It is not a it's not a pleasant voice and it keeps me awake and often gets me out of bed and they have like no choice but to go to the couch and read or try to find some other place to sleep. And for you, it sounds like you get up that at that time. Do you have that nagging voice of self doubt that wakes you up at two or three in the morning and then you have to somehow contend with that?
00:04:26
Speaker
I don't even know that it's a self-doubt voice. I think it's like a life overwhelm. Yes. To-do list.
Dealing with Nighttime Worries and Insomnia
00:04:35
Speaker
Have you forgotten something? Are you on top of all the things? It's like the nagging feeling that the mom has on the airplane when she realizes in Home Alone that Kevin is not on the plane. It's like that Kevin.
00:04:50
Speaker
voice where I wake up in the middle of the night and I feel like there's something I was supposed to do today or there's something I was supposed to do this week that is not on my radar and I'm missing something. It's like the feeling of having packed your bags and you know that like the medication that will keep you alive is not in the suitcase. It's completely irrational and most of the time it's nothing and I can never really figure out what the thing is that's
00:05:20
Speaker
that's waking me that I'm forgetting about, but I often cannot go back to sleep once my mind is active like you. So I get up and sometimes I might work for two hours in the middle of the night on student work or my own writing or something for my sub-stack or whatever, because if I'm going to be awake, I might as well not be just staring at the ceiling feeling bad about it.
00:05:44
Speaker
Well, that's the thing, too. Yeah, you're wrestling like that. And, you know, for people like us who are usually in front of computers all day, reading all day, sometimes, like, even though you're sort of told you wake up in the middle, like, go to the couch and read, it's like, all I do is read. And sometimes my eyes are just bleeding out of my head. So I almost don't know what to do. I can't look at a computer screen.
00:06:05
Speaker
at three in the morning is just gonna burn my retinas, even with my blue blockers on. It's just like, I don't know what to do with myself.
00:06:17
Speaker
And it would probably be better to like go take a walk or like go do something physical that can sort of like exercise that whatever that nervous energy is out of the body instead of continuing to sort of live in one's mind, which is where the nervous energy like lives and thrives.
00:06:37
Speaker
Um, but I can't do that in my house at night because I've got kids sleeping upstairs and a dog sleeping downstairs and creaky floors. So whatever I do in the middle of the night needs to be pretty much silent so that I'm not disturbing anybody else. Yeah.
Writing Across Genres and Styles
00:06:51
Speaker
It's, um, now I understand you, you, uh, celebrated your, uh, a birthday recently, right?
00:06:57
Speaker
Happy birthday The I've been asking some people this late, you know, I have of late that uh that to give you a little context I feel like every five ish years or so my sort of like relationship to writing has kind of changes be just as you know, just maturing or whatever call it that is a
00:07:25
Speaker
It sounds weird coming out of my mouth. So I wonder for you, having just celebrated another birthday, how has your relationship over maybe five or even ten year increments changed as you've gotten a little bit older, matured?
00:07:43
Speaker
matured. Yeah, I'm not sure. I'm definitely getting older if I'm maturing that I suppose is maybe best left to the people in my life who could be a better judge of that than I am. I still do like to roller skate, so I'm not sure that the maturing is actually happening.
00:08:02
Speaker
Yeah, I don't know that my relationship to my writing has changed all that much and that my process is still pretty much the same. I approach projects pretty much in the same way. I think I respect it more than I did five years ago. You know, I just turned 46, so when I was 41, I'm not sure I really saw writing as my work in the same way that I see it now.
00:08:29
Speaker
And I'm sure there are a whole host of reasons for why that was. But one thing I will say that over the past few years, I think writing, beginning to write and publish more prose, as opposed to only poetry, probably has changed my relationship to my writing more than any maturing I may or may not have done.
00:08:56
Speaker
That has been really different. And I was talking to a poet friend recently about that. And it just occurred to me, why do we not write as widely as we read? If most of us read short stories and novels and poems and essays and articles and memoirs, why are we not
00:09:25
Speaker
why are we not allowing ourselves really to sort of dip into these different spaces that we do dip into as readers? Because what we feel like it's not our territory. And yeah, so that's been the big shift, I would say over the last five years to sort of reconsidering what my territory might be and letting myself like
00:09:49
Speaker
exit the poetry bubble. If we're gonna continue with the metaphor, which is always like, metaphor is the thing, isn't it? Well, it's kind of like cross-training, in a way. You can write and get outside of the bubble of your brand, to use a real gross term. But it's like, I find that, I'm primarily a non-fiction guy, and
00:10:18
Speaker
And in the vein of like kind of profile biography feature that kind of realm. So if I dabble and just say like writing fiction on the side.
00:10:32
Speaker
not even for publication, but just as an exercise in imagination, but also ways to not forget about scene and sort of dialogue. And then I'm like, oh, now that I've kind of remembered what that feels like to write, maybe those are kind of the questions I can animate my reporting to build better nonfiction scenes that are verifiably true. But it kind of comes through in the muscle of working out the fiction tactics.
00:11:02
Speaker
I don't know if that makes any sense to you in Dabbler. Yeah. It does. I mean, I think I write everything as a poet, regardless of genre. And I don't know of most people who write across different genres feel that way. When they're writing prose, they feel like a prose writer. And when they're writing something else, they feel like something else. But I feel like a poet doing whatever I'm doing.
00:11:32
Speaker
I'm probably a poet on roller skates, to be honest. Like, I don't know how to sort of shed that. And so it's true that I think we can sort of squirrel skills from one kind of writing, you know, into another. But I'm definitely always trying to sort of squirrel my poetry skills into my other kinds of writing because that's where I feel comfortable.
00:11:58
Speaker
So I don't know how to write prose as a prose writer, if that makes any sense. Like it would almost feel like ventriloquism to try to do it from some, come at it from some other angle. I can only really enter any piece of writing as a poet. And so that informs every decision I make.
00:12:18
Speaker
That makes sense. I totally get that because even when I dabble in the little fiction things, I'm like, if I just do a little more legwork, I can make this nonfiction. This feels too fake for me. I appreciate this and it's just like, but I don't know. The guitar's out of tune. I'm not a fan.
00:12:42
Speaker
And I kind of get this. So I guess as you're approaching everything as a poet, even when I do think about it, I approach it as a journalist. And it feels something doesn't feel quite right.
00:12:59
Speaker
Yeah, no, I totally get that. Like something about the container feels off. Like you're always trying to make it this other thing. I mean, every time I sit down to write anything because I've got a little scrap of language or a line or a sentence or an image or something, even a story I want to tell, I always try to make it a poem first.
00:13:22
Speaker
And it's funny because it becomes pretty apparent fairly early if it's going to work as a poem or if that container is like way too small, like literally too small to do everything that I want it to do and then it needs to be, I need more real estate so it needs to be an essay or a series of essays, etc, etc.
Concise and Poetic Writing Techniques
00:13:47
Speaker
And a moment ago you said something about your comfort zone, of course, is poetry and you approach everything through that prism. And I believe it was just today in your sub-stack that came out that basically, you said right at the end just to sum it up, you said, my two cents, don't get too comfortable. If you've noticed some patterns in your own work, it's up to you to keep pushing yourself in new directions and testing out new possibilities. So that seems to be something that's kind of on your mind, right?
00:14:14
Speaker
Oh, of course, I'm always thinking about that. I mean, it's funny. I think if we look at our work, if we can look at it like we're not ourselves, right? Like try to come at it from an objective perspective. If I flip through a book of my poems, I can see visually what my comfort zone is as a writer. And even flipping through my memoir, I can see visually
00:14:41
Speaker
what my comfort zone is, which is I like to write small, right? I like to write, I can write something long by writing something small over and over again. I'm a whittler. So that's, that's my mode. But it's, I think it's helpful to know ourselves as writers and know what our sort of default modes
00:15:02
Speaker
are so that we don't get too cozy and risk, I mean, just creative and stylistic complacency because we are kind of copying and pasting a version of the thing we've been writing over and over.
00:15:19
Speaker
and over again. And we all, I think, travel over the same territory and material. In some ways, I've been writing maybe the same five poems my whole life because I'm obsessed with a few big subjects, and I'm always kind of approaching them in various ways. But I don't want to be falling into ruts stylistically and creatively where
00:15:47
Speaker
The poems sound the same and look the same and sort of like have the same rhetorical moves or the same narrative arcs over and over again. I mean, that's I don't want to bore myself, let alone the reader. Yeah, you don't want to turn into like the Michael Bay of poetry.
00:16:05
Speaker
I don't know. Michael Bay is, I mean, he's pretty set. Am I right? Like he doesn't have to pay for his health insurance on the marketplace. So maybe I do want to be the Michael Bay poetry. Exactly. Yeah. We need some more Transformers poems out of you.
00:16:22
Speaker
Oh my gosh. Is that all it takes? Okay. It's the formula. So I understand. I love what you said a moment ago about like writing small and even because when you write small, especially, I mean, it could be like literally and just in terms of like the word choices are even small and like not as polysyllabic as some as the word polysyllabic is.
00:16:47
Speaker
But it's like the vessel of those words can carry such a heavy punch. There's a density there. And I wonder if that's always on the forefront of your mind as you said a moment ago too, like whittling down.
00:17:04
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, I think my revision process is really about making things more concise and more distilled. And so I'm always asking myself, what fat can I cut away? What connective tissue isn't necessary here? Would a juxtaposition do the same work? Do I need this
00:17:25
Speaker
transition material, what information can I get into a title that will allow me not to clutter up the essay or the poem with a bunch of exposition, which is the enemy of lyric. I'm always thinking about how to make a thing
00:17:46
Speaker
like boiled down but not reductive but boiled down in that like every bit is essential and there's not a bunch of extra stuff. And so to like approach something like a memoir where you're kind of shooting for a word count which is something I've never done before. Yeah.
00:18:06
Speaker
I mean, it's sort of weird to get to your 40s and other than like a book review or an article for the Post or something, to have never really had to write a book to a, you know, a guideline word count because that's not how books of poetry are built.
00:18:23
Speaker
no one cares how many words as long as they're the right ones in the right order. And so the only way I could really approach a project as large as the memoir was to allow myself to write every individual piece the way that I do, which is by cutting the fat and thinking about what's essential and trimming it down and then moving on to the next thing and treating it the exact
00:18:49
Speaker
same way. And basically sort of playing by poetry's rules, even though I was traveling into the wild frontier of the entire page and pushing myself all the way to the right hand margin, which is something I haven't done much in life.
00:19:07
Speaker
And when you were originally conceiving of the memoir, what were some books and maybe who were some authors that gave you inspiration, even a model for what you were hoping to pull off, perhaps?
00:19:24
Speaker
Oh, yeah, that's a great question. I mean, I've I've read a ton of memoirs and some of them I looked at and I was like, I don't know how someone did that. It's like how I feel about novels. Like, I don't know how someone did that. And then I would pick up other memoirs and I'd say, Oh, either this person is also a poet or they're writing in such a way that I as a poet feel like I'm being let in and I'm being shown a way that I can do this my way.
00:19:54
Speaker
So, something like The Two Kinds of Decay by Sarah Manguso, who's also a poet, In the Dreamhouse, Carmen Maria Machado, Safe Keeping by Abigail Thomas, Definitely the Chronology of Water, Lydia Juknovich.
00:20:15
Speaker
books that kind of gave me permission to not just tell the story, you know, like deal with the content of the book, but gave me permission to do it as a poet and maybe in a sort of more lyrical, you know, peace-ier way.
00:20:37
Speaker
Yeah, those books that you mentioned, I've read a few of them and they are very distinctive. And I imagine that in terms of permission, like you just said, it gave you this idea like, oh, I can totally inhabit my own voice and my own sense of self and make this memoir not look like anything else but something that wholly came from me and only me. And I'm the only one who could have written this one.
Authenticity in Memoir Writing
00:21:04
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, it's like, I didn't wanna write this book as someone else. I didn't want to sort of like put on some sort of like, I don't know how to describe it, like a prose writer persona where I would then like change my style of writing in order to write a new kind of book. I really wanted to be able to write this book
00:21:30
Speaker
as myself and I think honestly I needed to because it was such a vulnerable act even writing the book that it would have felt like too much to be like putting on airs stylistically as I was doing it. Like I needed to not have to think about being myself or not being myself. I just had to be able to kind of show up as is and hope that it would turn out okay.
00:21:58
Speaker
Yeah, and I wanted to get a sense of your approach to it in terms of form and structure, because we're dealing with a lot of short chapters, and then there's quotes and poems and repeated beats throughout the entire book. So what was the thinking behind those stylistic choices? Yeah, well, when I write a poem,
00:22:22
Speaker
Like my first thought is how do I sort of best embody or enact the content in the form? Like I'm thinking about how the shape of the thing will actually shore up what I'm writing about. And so I kind of think what I was tasked with writing this book was how to accurately embody or enact the experience
00:22:49
Speaker
And so the experience was marked by complexity and fragmentation and recursiveness and rumination. And so it was definitely more of a spiral or a series of waves more than it was sort of a history book timeline. And so I really, I knew I needed the writing to move in that way. So the vignettes for me
00:23:14
Speaker
weren't just my comfort zone as far as writing in small sort of distilled pieces, but that form felt most psychologically true to me because memory is associative, right? Like when I hear a song that reminds me of something else, then that pings and reminds me of something else. And then suddenly I'm back in that car, which reminds me of the person who owned the car, which reminds me of this one time,
00:23:40
Speaker
And that's not a straight line. That is almost sort of a web or constellation. And I really wanted to get at that when putting the book together. So it literally was like assembling a poetry collection for me, which meant printing out hundreds of pages, laying them out on my living room floor.
00:24:04
Speaker
while my kids were at school and I had the house to myself and getting out a lot of colored markers. It was a complete Luddite process.
00:24:14
Speaker
And like color coding the different threads as I saw them in the book, you know, the quotes, the forward narrative, the flashback stories, the italicized parts that kind of mull over these metaphors, the sort of narrative threads where I'm thinking about plot and character and setting,
00:24:37
Speaker
um and sort of like okay one thread was pink and one was blue and one was green and then assembling the book so that the narrative is forward moving but that no one thread drops out for a chunk. So if I read 30 pages and I realized there was no pink and that all the pink was
00:24:58
Speaker
in the back, I would have to kind of figure out a way to like, as elegantly as possible, redistribute some of that. So it was a lot of paper shuffling, honestly. Yeah, that's a the color coding thing is such a that's such a brilliant way. So you can add a helicopter at a glance, you can just you see the balance right there or the lack of balance.
00:25:20
Speaker
and you're like all right yeah like you said I gotta figure out how to fold the fold this color in over here and then it's just gonna feel far far more yeah just like in tune in balance I love that but I love you say you know you were saying that the the paper things were like kind of a Luddite thing but I think it's so important to
00:25:40
Speaker
detach ourselves from the screen and be able to hold things in our hands and to mark things up. Is that something you do quite a bit even with your poetry and how you kind of annotate and even edit? Okay, so confession. I don't know how to type.
00:26:01
Speaker
I only use my two index fingers and I always have. So I write pretty much everything longhand first until it takes enough shape
00:26:15
Speaker
for me to justify putting my two poor pointer fingers to work at my laptop, and then I input it. With this book, I did actually do more writing on screen than I've ever done in my life. And I don't know what it is about
00:26:34
Speaker
writing a paragraph versus writing in lines, that my brain feels like that sort of relationship works. But because I type so slowly and so inaccurately, my brain works better with my fast hand when I'm writing longhand. And I always feel like I'm thinking too fast for my fingers when I'm at my laptop.
00:27:00
Speaker
That's crazy. Usually it's the other way around where like people need to like write longhand to slow their brain down Not me it's funny because I mean both of my kids can type like for real because they've learned this in school and I didn't even have email till college so I started writing longhand because it was before I had a computer and
Writing Habits and Challenges
00:27:25
Speaker
to write at. I used to pay a woman in our neighborhood to type my high school papers on her typewriter with my babysitting money as payment because we didn't have a computer at my house when I was younger.
00:27:42
Speaker
this is this is these are how habits are born i suppose yeah i've i uh a while ago several years ago i think i tweeted like the greatest thing i learned from my high school education was how to type oh i feel cheated yeah like when you think about it it's just like it's the greatest skill i've ever like really ever learned it like someone starkly said like oh some some public education i'm like
00:28:08
Speaker
Well, what? I'm like, whatever, man. Like, this is the actual thing that I'm actually taking from my high school education that's actually like making me a professional. So it's like this actually works. It's a good vocation at a time. A hundred percent. I cheated in keyboarding, which is what led to this. So let me be like, uh,
00:28:25
Speaker
a cautionary tale to any high schooler who may be listening to this. Do not cheat in keyboarding by moving the little wooden, you know, hand cover away from your keyboard as the teacher circulates the room because cheating and typing leads to just despair in later life if you end up being a writer. Look at my arthritic pointer fingers.
00:28:50
Speaker
I know. They're powerful, but they have like, I really should have like, I should ensure them. Like, you know, like hand models have those insane insurance policies for their beautiful hands. Mine are not beautiful, but these pointer fingers, if I lose them in some terrible, you know, chopping vegetables accident for some vegetarian meal, we're in a world of pain.
00:29:18
Speaker
In the book, too, you wrote, you know, how can the story, this experience, be useful to anyone other than me? How can I make this material into a tool you can use? I think that's such a valuable couple of questions to ask anyone writing a memoir so it doesn't feel self-indulgent, but it is respectful of the reader. So what was the calculus there as you even put that on the page?
00:29:44
Speaker
Yeah, I'm glad you used the word self-indulgent because I think it's so, every sort of like, every writer I know who's published a memoir at one point tweets, why did I do this? Why did I think anyone else would want to read about my life?
00:30:00
Speaker
Yeah, right. I mean, you've probably seen these tweets too. And of course, as a poet, I was like, Oh, please, like, everyone wants to read about your individual experience, it doesn't need to match mine. Like, I love seeing a window into your life and sort of what you've experienced. And it, you know, that's, that's great. And then and then you do it. And you find yourself thinking, if not tweeting, why did I do this? Why would anyone else want to read about my specific life?
00:30:27
Speaker
And so I think I got to a point in the writing of this book where I just I thought that like what you know I was really sort of having a conversation with myself about the value
00:30:41
Speaker
of sharing specific life experiences with a wider audience, many of whom, you know, these people don't know you at all, and who may not have shared or had any of these same experiences. And so what, like,
00:30:58
Speaker
How do I justify doing it? How can I make this useful for other people to justify doing it? And in the writing of the book, I actually got to a point I think a bit later where I'm like, you know what, actually experience is enough. Like sharing experience, sharing a human experience with other human beings,
00:31:20
Speaker
is enough and is kind of instructive in plenty of ways, but I don't need to, it doesn't need to be useful to you in like five bullet point ways I can share to make you buy this book. It doesn't have to be quote unquote a tool for it to have value. Right, it doesn't have to be a self-help book. And I know that as a poet,
00:31:46
Speaker
Yeah, like I don't know why I never thought of that writing poetry. I never thought like, what am I really offering to people with these poems? And so I don't quite know why memoir felt different to me in that way. Like why I would even think that I would have to justify the sort of the process by having an end result
00:32:12
Speaker
that was quote unquote useful. Yeah I wonder if it has to do with the time commitment to read a memoir versus say a few poems or even a poetry collection which you can kind of you know depending on how you metabolize it you could read in a day or you can choose to read it piecemeal. Maybe it does feel like well you're probably going to be spending an entire
00:32:34
Speaker
week and maybe several hours reading this, you need to like know something of the secret sauce in the end. Yeah. Yeah. Or like, what's the value? Like, if I'm inviting you in and you're going to spend a day with this book, like, you know, I mean, I'm not offering recipes, I'm not giving you any, like, what's the value add? Like, there is definitely a roller skating playlist in this book. That's a spoiler alert. So if that's what you're looking for, it'll be useful.
00:33:03
Speaker
Um, but I, yeah, I just, I think probably if I'm, if I'm really honest with myself and I try to be, I think it was probably coming from an insecurity about, you know, again, venturing out of my comfort zone, out of my bubble into a different bubble and recognizing that the readership for that bubble was probably wider than the poetry readership. And wondering if I had the right
00:33:32
Speaker
to sort of like to do it, you know? As a writer, you know, primarily a poet or identifies as a poet, when you stepped out of the bubble, what surprised you or what felt, felt, I don't know, just for lack of a better term, what felt weird about being outside of that comfort zone, that bubble?
00:33:59
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I think with poetry, there's a speaker, right? So even if a poem that I write is in first person, it has an I in it. And even if the I in my poem has a dog and two kids, which I do, we are trained as readers of poetry and as teachers not to conflate the author with the speaker of the poem.
00:34:28
Speaker
So even if it's a poem about a woman and her two kids, and it's definitely like very close to me in my neighborhood, definitely my Boston Terrier, those are definitely my two kids. That's not how we talk about the poem. And so even if it's like flimsy cover,
00:34:48
Speaker
I've had it all this time, where it's the speaker of the poem this, the speaker of the poem that, it's not me, Maggie Smith, writer of the poem. And so, you know, venturing out of that comfort zone and into memoir and into personal essay, it's like,
00:35:06
Speaker
Oh, okay, it's just me now. Maybe it was fairly light cover in a poem, but now I don't actually feel like I had any cover. The eye in this book is just me, the person that you can see at the grocery store if you're there at the same time I am. And so that, I think, was weird, the collapsing of speaker or slash narrator and writer.
Discovery Through Writing
00:35:36
Speaker
And one of the ways I made that less uncomfortable for myself was pulling in some of the kind of meta narrative and also writing some of it in third person because I just I wanted to sort of play with this idea of like what happens when we write as ourselves and
00:36:00
Speaker
how is it maybe more comfortable not to? If I had novelized my life, would it have been more comfortable to write this as he, she instead of I? And in some ways, yes, it would have been more comfortable. Because again, writing a semi-autobiographical novel is cover in the same way the speaker of a poem is cover.
00:36:30
Speaker
Right. And at the start of the book, you have this wonderful Emily Dickinson quote that where she says, I'm out with lanterns looking for myself. And when you put something like that right at the start, it really signifies something. So what was the significance of that particular quote that really animates what we're about to read?
00:36:55
Speaker
Yeah, I mean I really, my approach to this book was the way I approach any piece of writing, which is not knowing how it's going to turn out.
00:37:05
Speaker
You know, like all writing is discovery. I never know what I'm writing about when I sit down to write. I never know where it's going. I don't have the end in mind. Like I have no idea where I'm going. So I may just have enough light to kind of like get the next few steps and then I can travel the next few steps with that light and then the next few steps. And so I came to this book really with a spirit of, you know, curiosity and openness.
00:37:34
Speaker
about my adult life. And maybe also a bit of naivete in that I thought if I think deeply enough into these experiences, which I'll need to do to write this book, I will have all the answers. And I will have figured it out. And I will have, you know, for lack of a better word, solved.
00:37:59
Speaker
all of these mysteries of my life and how I got here, you know, the sort of the David Byrne talking heads, how did I get here? This is not my beautiful life. I really thought and sort of believed that some of this was solvable, at least in my own mind, if I really put the time and energy and thinking into it.
00:38:23
Speaker
being out with lanterns looking for myself. And I did find more of myself in the writing of this book. I did not, spoiler alert, find all of the answers because of course that's not how life works.
00:38:37
Speaker
Yeah, and early on, too, I love how you wrote this. My husband and I became friends in an advanced creative writing workshop in college. You might want to dog-ear these details in your mind so you can come back to it later. So naturally, I dog-eared it. And it's one of those things where you have two creative people who meet up and
00:38:58
Speaker
There can be, if one gets some recognition or one stays on that path and one might divert off that path, there can often be resentment and bitterness there. Is that what you found to be true, where the foundation started to kind of crack and get brittle?
Balancing Creativity with Life
00:39:20
Speaker
Well, it's hard for me to know. I mean, that's like part of why like no book is a tell all is that you only have access to your own experience. And so, you know, like a big part of my approach with this book is like, I can only speak for myself and what I experienced and witnessed and how it felt, though I don't actually know that this, you know, capital T truth.
00:39:46
Speaker
of what that was. And so did it feel like that was part of the tension from my perspective? Yes. But I don't know that it was because I'm only in my body and mind and not anyone else's.
00:40:00
Speaker
I do think it's hard for two creatives to be in a relationship. I think it's hard for two people in any career to have kids and try to balance the work of their own stuff and raising children. So I think having all of that in the mix was not an easy, a lot of ingredients and not an easy recipe.
00:40:29
Speaker
Oh, yeah. Even when you throw in the multiple role aspect of it, there's a point where one of the chapters was the spreadsheet where one of your friends really itemized everything, the unpaid labor that she was doing around the house. And you come to this realization that when you had gone away,
00:40:48
Speaker
You never, for like a writer's conference or a retreat or whatever it was, that you didn't feel missed as a person. I felt missed as staff. My invisible labor was made painfully visible when I left the house. I was needed back in my post.
00:41:02
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, that's true. I think for writers or creatives who are the primary caregiver, it's a tough balance when you need to be away for a book tour or for a reading or a college visit or AWP or whatever the thing is. And I've always seen my work as being twofold. I'm a writer and I'm a parent.
00:41:28
Speaker
And I don't really see them being at odds, you know, like being a parent has actually enriched my writing. But the time issue and the presence issue can
00:41:42
Speaker
can put those two things at odds, right? Like I can't always be parenting if I also need to be elsewhere to do something in service of my writing. And I can't always be someplace in service of my writing because I need to be parenting, which is why I'm not attending AWP this year. And so that's like a balance that I'm learning to sort of strike on my own now as a single parent, but it was often tense when I was married.
00:42:12
Speaker
Yeah, and the moment too about bitterness and resentment. I know you didn't want to put words in your ex-husband's mouth, but when good bones went viral, you mentioned that there was a wince when that happened. And right there, I could feel that sense of
00:42:32
Speaker
of jealousy and resent me just because those are feelings that I feel when I sometimes see other people's successes and I'm like why haven't I had mine? And it's, I feel that wince and it's not even, I'm not even in a contractually bound relationship at the time so it's. Yeah, no we all do. I mean I think it's hard and I think it's also natural.
00:42:58
Speaker
you know whether you're married to the person or they're your best friend or just like a writer friend who you see get something that you think oh and maybe it's not even something you could have gotten or applied for or anything but somehow like you know I do think there's this sort of like scarcity mindset in the writing world where it's like there's only so many things to go around and if somebody else gets something it means we're like it's like being taken from us
00:43:26
Speaker
which is such a like impoverished view of how this whole uh sort
Impact of 'Good Bones' on Career
00:43:32
Speaker
of like I don't know I think of poetry as sort of a gift economy um so I try not to think about it that way and I would like to believe that if the roles were reversed I would be you know like
00:43:48
Speaker
completely pleased and happy and not at all put out or, you know, inconvenienced or cranky about my partners.
00:44:00
Speaker
success or need to suddenly travel a bit more. But who knows, you know, if the rules are reversed, it may have been exactly the same. It's, you know, I'm not perfect. I have no idea how I would have behaved. It's, you know, it's this stuff isn't easy.
00:44:19
Speaker
How did you metabolize the virality of good bones when it came out, being in relative obscurity and then suddenly being thrust into the spotlight?
00:44:33
Speaker
It was really strange. Yeah, I mean, I had two small kids and I was working from home. And, you know, most people in my community really didn't know me much as a writer. And so I was like the person who pushed the stroller around town and was like at toddler story time.
00:44:52
Speaker
And so I kind of felt like I went into a phone booth and came out and was this poet suddenly, even though I'd been doing it for years. So it was, it was weird. I mean, I can't lie, it was really strange and it had a, I think it could have had risked having a negative impact on my ability to write going forward.
00:45:18
Speaker
I just remember sitting down and having this sort of conversation with myself about, okay, what now? Like, suddenly, you know, I was read by a fairly narrow audience of mostly other poets and people who really like poetry with my first couple of books with small presses. And now all these people are
00:45:39
Speaker
like actresses and musicians and, you know, other people who sort of aren't in the poetry circle, which is a small, beautifully discerning circle that I love, suddenly all these people are kind of watching. And what do they want from me? Like, what do they expect from me next?
00:46:01
Speaker
you know i can't recreate this i'm not going to write a sequel to this poem i'm not going to be able to like to do this whatever this is again every poem is a one-off you know so i had to kind of like sit down probably the way that like people who have a radio hit are like oh no like what next and i think the the good thing about poets
00:46:27
Speaker
Is that like, I don't, you don't have like an A&R person or a manager. I didn't have an agent. I didn't have anybody telling me anything. And so there was absolutely no pressure to like capitalize on this or monetize this or like, now we need to make your next, you know, quote, single sound like this because that's what is getting radio play and that's what people want.
00:46:50
Speaker
And so I just sat down and basically said, well, I can completely be paralyzed by this because I don't know what is worth writing next based on the success of this poem, or I can pretend it never happened. And so I just pretended it never happened and started writing poems about sticks and stones, quite literally. And just like whatever came to my mind, the smallest, most granular, no one would possibly ever care about them poems.
00:47:19
Speaker
just to kind of like clear the decks and like flush all of that attention from my system so I could just get back to work.
00:47:30
Speaker
And, you know, and the name of your memoir derives from, you know, basically the kicker of the poem. So in a way, it kind of brings the poem back up to the surface and probably going to reintroduce it to an entirely different audience. So in a sense, was there a hesitation to have like a callback to the poem as the title of the book or did it do they feel in some in some way together entwined?
00:47:56
Speaker
Yeah, they do feel entwined. And honestly, hearing you say that, I'm like, I didn't really think about, I'm so in my own head so much. I didn't even think about the idea that the memoir might introduce people who are not familiar with the poem to the poem.
00:48:15
Speaker
But I have to say I love that idea because most people encounter this poem when bad things happen. Most people, I think, encounter good bones on the internet when someone tweets it after yet another school shooting.
00:48:33
Speaker
So I like the idea, frankly, that someone could have like a more sort of joyful introduction to the poem that doesn't have to do with, you know, a tragedy in the news.
00:48:50
Speaker
There's a wonderful Rebecca Solnit quote that you use in the book too where she writes that writing is work that can hold up its head with all other kinds of useful work out there in the world and it is genuinely work.
Writing as Legitimate Work
00:49:02
Speaker
And I just love that as an ethos about how this is, you know, craft and work and just, like you were saying earlier in our conversation, like whittling things down and getting things down, that it is,
00:49:17
Speaker
that it is work. And I wonder, what about that like really resonated with you? Well, I think, you know, and even the idea of having to think about this book as a tool that I could offer to readers, you know, even that kind of like self justification, I felt like I needed halfway through writing this book comes from a place of like not always having the work treated as such.
00:49:45
Speaker
And it was really important to me to approach it that way and to sort of like honor that part of my life and invest in it without apology, without permission. And actually when I recorded the audio book,
00:50:05
Speaker
I remember reading whatever happens right before that in the book and then reading that Rebecca Solnit quote and pausing, waiting for the audio producer to say, can you read the sentence again? Or that sounds great onto the next page. And it hitting me that some of these quotes, particularly the quotes by women writers that are peppered through the book, it's like I had this wonderful gang
00:50:33
Speaker
of people also speaking on my behalf. It was like the strangest experience. It's like, and not only do I believe it's work, but here's Rebecca Solnit also backing me up, saying that it's work. And not only do I feel this way, but here's Maggie Nelson saying that she also
00:50:52
Speaker
And it felt really powerful to me, recording the book, having these voices in particular of other women who do what I do, because it is work.
Self-Discovery vs. Romantic Narratives
00:51:05
Speaker
And there's the Joan Didion one to where you say like it's easy to see beginnings, the beginnings of things and harder to see the ends. And, and I think that was that especially hit home to the way you constructed the whole postcard delivery system in the in the book and where you really start start with the discovery and then
00:51:26
Speaker
Bit later. I forget exactly where later, but you know, there's a the moment where you You share the survey of like midlife crisis the prescription aviators the black luxury car and they're like midlife crisis and someone says like oh he definitely has a new girlfriend you're like yeah, you kind of blow that off and like a week later you're like, oh I I find the postcard and
00:51:50
Speaker
Yeah, sometimes life plays funny tricks on you like that. You're like, am I in a movie? Like, yeah, I thought my life was much more dull than this, but it seems to be following some fairly like predictable plot points right now. And towards the, you know, I clipped out a bunch of things. Sometimes I had an e-galley for my Kindle. So sometimes I don't know where they are in relation to the rest of the book. It's just kind of disorienting with an e-reader versus an actual paper copy.
00:52:19
Speaker
But you wrote, you know, this isn't the story of a woman who fell in love again and therefore was healed and lived happily ever after. This is the story of a woman coming home to herself. And I loved hearing that distillation. I think that echoes your poem, Bride, too, is that right?
00:52:39
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I, I was sort of, you know, one of the bits of feedback I got somewhere along the way of writing this book is like, you should write about the relationship you're in now. And I thought, you know, I actually don't really want to write much about that, because that's not the point. Like this, the arc of this story isn't like woman, woman gets married, woman loses husband, woman finds new person, woman feels better. Yeah.
00:53:06
Speaker
Like, that's not the story arc here. And I don't even want to let people read into that, that that might be the story arc here, because it's just simply not it. So it felt important to me to pull the reader aside and just be like, listen, if you're tempted to think that this is how this is going, please, that's not what's on the menu here.
00:53:28
Speaker
I think it also underscores, you know, just given the form and the structure of the whole book about selection and what you choose to share and what you choose not to share, other points of views, you openly say, like, I'm not gonna tell his side, like, this is my story, and I'm just gonna, we're gonna stay with me, like, love it or not, you're staying with me.
00:53:51
Speaker
Yeah, that's right. Yeah, I mean, you can't talk for other people. I don't know how, and I wouldn't want anyone else talking for me. Like, you know, I don't, I'm not revealing my kids interior lives in this book either. I just, I think
00:54:08
Speaker
like I set up sort of boundaries in life and boundaries in writing, I had to set up parameters for myself, that I was comfortable with. And I realized that probably there are readers who will want more and certain moments in the book, and who aren't getting more, because, you know, it's a memoir and not a deposition. And so I'm not actually required to give everything.
00:54:34
Speaker
Absolutely. Well, well, Maggie, I want there's so many more things I definitely could have dived into and I want to be mindful of your time. And as I bring these conversations down for a landing and I hope the sort of confirmation notes got to your way where I like to ask for people for a recommendation for the guests for the listeners. I'm sorry. My brain is still all fucked up from the flow.
00:54:59
Speaker
So like a recommendation of sorts for the listeners and that can be anything that you're excited about that's just bringing joy in your life or whatever that you might recommend for the people out there. I love this idea of recommendations. This is like, this is a really good thing.
Recommended Reading
00:55:18
Speaker
So I have an advanced reader copy of Matthew Zapruder's new memoir. It's called Story of a Poem.
00:55:28
Speaker
He is a poet and this is a book of prose so you can probably guess from our conversation that I'm super into it because I love when poets write prose but it's such a moving book and it's really about
00:55:45
Speaker
I don't want to give too much away, but it's it's about writing and and about sort of parenting a child with special needs and how those two things sort of inform each other and it's just a beautiful book. So I would love to put it on people's people's radar. It's out in April.
00:56:05
Speaker
Alex, while you could make this place beautiful is also a beautiful book. I truly I love that I ate it up. I read it really, really quickly, which is saying something because I'm not a very fast reader. And I just love being with you in this book. So I just got to commend you on it. And just thanks so much for the work and everything you do. Oh, goodness. Thank you.
00:56:30
Speaker
Well, that was cool. Well, thanks for listening, CNFers. Thanks to Maggie for coming on the show. Maggie, just me and you here, if you want to call me and hang up on me, go for it, all right? If you like this conversation as much as I did, consider sharing it and tagging me on the show at CNFpod on Twitter, ugh, or a creative nonfiction podcast on Instagram, also, ugh.
00:56:55
Speaker
This show will only grow because of you. As you know, I'm something of a nobody. So it's the validation of your endorsements that makes the needle move. There's so much content out there. So many old podcasts that are worth listening to and many more new ones that are worth listening to as well, especially like new ones from like famous people. And then you're like, God damn it. How now you're clouding up the works. Anyway, this show will only survive the pod fade if you celebrate it. So long as it's worth celebrating. I think it still is.
00:57:25
Speaker
Consider heading to patreon.com slash cnfpod to throw a few bucks in the tip shaar tip shaar the tip shaar jesus the tip jar show is free but it sure as hell ain't cheap you know when i see someone like maggie smith on let's say instagram being interviewed by someone like let's say cnfpod alum leslie jameson i'm like
00:57:47
Speaker
Now there goes an intelligent conversation rife with intellectual insights that will, no doubt, showcase the pyrotechnics of their brains. Then there's CNF pod. Something, something, something's come across my my transom sometimes when I'm editing these things. I'm proud, I'm not an academic type. Someone stilted in wooden, earnest, wearing flat front khakis in a form-fitting blazer.
00:58:16
Speaker
I also like that I'm not a teacher, not because I don't respect teachers. Love me some teachers. But there's addiction teachers adopt, and whenever I'm around academic types, I can discern a sort of performative intellectualism that has more to do with proving what they know at the expense of what I don't. Or maybe I'm just insecure because I grew up next to a cranberry bog amidst jackets in the crooked teeth. So when I'm editing these things, I kind of
00:58:45
Speaker
I kinda like that I'm sort of this dude you run into at a party. Maybe you're not happy you ran into me at a party. And what I'm gonna do is ask you a bunch of questions, probably buy you a drink or two, and you'll walk away feeling heard, a little buzzed, but probably a little exhausted. You'll feel smarter because I'm something of an all-pro-smiler and notter. You might, though I doubt it, wanna grab coffee to talk more at another time at a quieter venue. And you will forget, but I won't.
00:59:15
Speaker
You'll likely say, wow, I probably wouldn't wear a Metallica shirt and a Red Sox cap to a cocktail party. I guess what I'm trying to say is, I'm glad this little podcast that could doesn't try to be anything that it isn't. I like that the podcast, such as it is, doesn't give too many fucks. It gives a few fucks.
00:59:36
Speaker
It wants to grow, so there are some fucks given, but the fucks it gives are fewer and farther between. You might need to visit a rest area between the fucks it gives to maybe get a Mountain Dew in a Snickers bar. All right, that's gonna do it. I'm gonna go listen to the new Metallica album for the 44th time today, okay? 72 seasons. If you're streaming it right now, odds are so am I. So stay wild, CnEvers, and if you can't do interviews, see ya.
01:00:06
Speaker
you