Maggie Smith poet

Dear Writer

Posted on by Wendy Kennar

A few weeks ago, I wrote a blog post about the “pep talks” portion of Maggie Smith’s Dear Writer: Pep Talks & Practical Advice for the Creative Life. (If you missed the post, click here to read it.)

This week, I’d like to share some more, because Dear Writer is one special book. In fact, I think Dear Writer is one of those books that won’t just sit on the shelf with other writing-related books. Dear Writer will be read and re-read. 

The book is organized into “ten essential elements”: attention, wonder, vision, surprise, play, vulnerability, restlessness, connection, tenacity, and hope. Within each section, readers will find craft-centered essays, writing prompts, and suggestions for related reading. 

But, I don’t think this book is only for writers. Or artists. I think the inspiring words found within this book, could really be applied to any area of life.

Here are some of the passages I marked with a sticky note. What do you think — only for writers or all humans?

“Although my work has changed over time, the act of writing feels no different to me than it did five or ten or twenty years ago. I’m still gathering, still collecting, still trying to make a garment from these scraps. The pleasure in the writing is the surprise — having no idea what you’re making as you’re making it.”

“When you try something new, whether it’s writing or baking or running, you’re in a period of apprenticeship to that art or activity. You’re a beginner, a novice, an amateur. But the root of amateur is the Latin amare, meaning ‘to love.’ An amateur does something for the love of it. And when you love something, you stick with it.
“When you stick with something out of love, you grow in it and with it. Each day, truly.”

“I don’t go to literature for comfort, as a writer or as a reader — I read and write to be changed, to see anew, to revise my own thinking. Actually, change is the opposite of comfort. But change invigorates. It stretches muscles you might not have known you had. It might hurt a little, that strain, but ultimately it strengthens. 
“I want to write and read pieces that lean toward wonder and rediscovery — toward questioning rather than knowing, toward authenticity and sincerity rather than irony and cynicism. Art is a site of wonder and discover — or rediscovery. Art is a place where we might learn what we think, not a place where we teach the reader what we’ve already processed.”



“The discovery doesn’t end when the piece is published. Sometimes readers will point things out that surprise you. Sometimes you’ll be reading a piece aloud in front of an audience, and something will strike you differently. The piece isn’t static, because you aren’t static. You change, your perspective changes, your experiences pile up, and you engage with the piece differently because of it.” 

“Creativity is artistic mischief. As writers and artists, our work is play. We come to the page — to the canvas, to the stage, to the studio — with trickster energy and a sense of daring. We’re working, but we’re delighting in the work.” 

“When we create, we choose the openness, the exposure, the risk — and that takes courage and nerve.
“There is no vulnerability without courage. They travel together, and I don’t think you can create without them both.” 

“I got ordained on the Internet for the same reasons I write poems. To marry two people is an act of hope, optimism, and connection. To write is an act of hope, optimism, and connection.”

“I’ve said for years that what every writer needs is a combination of tenacity — fierce, bulldog-like tenacity — and patience. The two go hand in hand. Tenacity is stick-to-it-ive-ness: part perseverance, part stubborn persistence, part fortitude, part endurance, part determination, part mettle (I love that word: mettle), and part drive.” 

“To make things that don’t exist yet — and don’t need to exist, because that is the very definition of art — and to send them out into the world is wildly, impractically, gorgeously hopeful.
“This is my way of saying there is no creativity without hope. Creativity is inherently hopeful, and the reverse is also true: Hope is inherently creative. Hope is imaginative; it allows you to envision what might be up ahead, even when you see nothing.”

“Remember: You are a writer if you write. You’re succeeding if you answer when the idea knocks — if you let it in, and pay attention to it, and see it through. If you don’t half-ass it. WHOLE-ASS IT. Your creative life deserves all of you. The whole you.”

Please note: I am including a link to buy the book that I’m highlighting this week. If you use my link, I do make a small commission on your purchase at no additional cost to you. I am working with Bookshop.org which also sends a portion of the profit to support local, independent bookstores.

You Could Make This Place Beautiful

Posted on by Wendy Kennar

The cover of Maggie Smith’s memoir is stunning, and the words inside are no less striking. You Could Make This Place Beautiful is a memoir written by a poet, meaning readers will encounter sentences and images that you’ll need to read more than once, just to soak in the beauty (or “savor the flavor” as we say in our family). This is a memoir with an unconventional structure, a memoir that gives readers a glimpse inside to the end of Ms. Smith’s marriage and the beginning of what comes next.


From the book flap: “With a poet’s attention to language and a transformation of the genre, Smith reveals how, in the aftermath of loss, we can discover our power and make something new. Something beautiful.”

Here are a few of the passages, that for one reason or another, I marked with a highlighter and sticky note. Some of these passages are beautifully written. Some passages resonated with me, though on the surface it would seem Ms. Smith and I lead very different lives. But that’s one of the reasons I enjoy reading memoir — I learn about another person while also learning about myself, because it really is true — what we, as humans, have in common is so much more than our differences.

“How I picture it: We are all nesting dolls, carrying the earlier iterations of ourselves inside. We carry the past inside us. We take ourselves — all of our selves — wherever we go.
“Inside forty-something me is the woman I was in my thirties, the woman I was in my twenties, the teenager I was, the child I was.”

“Being married isn’t being two columns, standing so straight and tall on their own, they never touch. Being married is leaning and being caught, and catching the one who leans toward you.”

“For most of my life, I’d been a planner — driven and organized in my work; wedded to a schedule as a parent. But both the divorce and the pandemic meant a loss of control. So many of the things I had planned for were no longer possible, and I had to let go. I loosened my white-knuckled grip on my life and instead of feeling panicked, I found myself being more playful, more spontaneous, less tethered to order for order’s sake.”

“What I want to remember about that time — and what I want my kids to remember — is unselfconscious joy, tenderness, and togetherness. I want them to remember that their mother was happy, not that she had dinner on the table at 6:00 every night, or that bedtime was always at 8:00. I want to remember all the things we did, not the things we weren’t able to do.
“Sometimes yes looks like reminding yourself of what is still possible.”

“I’ve wondered if I can even call this book a memoir. It’s not something that happened in the past that I’m recalling for you. It’s not a recollection, a retrospective, a reminiscence. I’m still living through this story as I write it. I’m finding mine, and telling it, but all the while, the mine is changing.”

“The way you’ll be remembered is the way you’re living now, I tell myself. If you don’t like it, change it.”

“I’ve tried to love them as if there is a right way. No, I’ve loved them without having to try at all, because I’m their mother, and the love is not work. Parenting is work: the cooking of meals, the washing of clothes, the tending of wounds, the taming of cowlicks, the helping with homework, the driving to soccer, the packing of lunches, the finding of missing things (water bottle lids, baseballs, library books, mittens), the consoling to sleep. The love? It’s not work.”

“How I picture it: We are nesting dolls, carrying all of our earlier selves inside us. I feel so full of the life I had before — the life I have already lived — how is there room for anything new?
“We feel and feel, and live and live, but somehow we’re never full. This life is elastic, impossibly elastic. There is always room for more experience. Our lives expand to accommodate anything.”

“ ‘Wish for more pain,’ a friend’s therapist advised, if you want to change. If you’re in enough pain, you won’t be able to continue living the way you’ve been living; you’ll have to do something differently. But be careful what you wish for, because you just might get it — and then what? Then the pain is yours. The pain is yours and it will change you.”

“Now I see the title as a call to action — a promise I’d made not only to this book, and to you, but to myself. A promise I intend to keep.” 

“I keep thinking that this story, this life, could’ve happened another way. In some parallel universe, maybe it did, but here it happened like this — or, rather, it’s happening like this. How will it end? I don’t know. Every ending is one of many possibilities, one of many unknowns. Every ending is secret until it happens.”

Please note: I am including a link to buy the book that I’m highlighting this week. If you use my link, I do make a small commission on your purchase at no additional cost to you. I am working with Bookshop.org which also sends a portion of the profit to support local, independent bookstores.