Maggie Smith is a poet whose work has been widely published, anthologized, and has appeared in Best American Poetry, the New York Times, The New Yorker and elsewhere. Her latest book, Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change, a collection of essays and quotes, is a national bestseller.
In this episode, Maggie and Eric discuss this new book and how for her, writing poetry is having a conversation with herself, problem solving, and healing on paper.
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In This Interview, Maggie Smith and I discuss Writing for Healing and…
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If you enjoyed this conversation with Maggie Smith on Writing for Healing, you might also enjoy these other episodes:
Fresh starts. Do you believe in fresh starts, Chris, I do. I've had multiple fresh starts in my life, and always for the better after I got through them. Yeah, those of us in recovery certainly believe in fresh starts because suddenly there's a day where it's like everything sort of changes. Right. Fourteen years ago for me was the last drink, So yeah, we can make big changes. I can also think back about seven years ago to kind of when I became a steady meditator and helping people find that fresh start and making those consistent, long term changes in their life is what I do in the one you feed Personal Transformation program. So if you're looking for a fresh start in go to Eric Zemmer dot coach slash application and sign up for a thirty minute call with me and we'll talk about whether I can help you or not. No pressure, no hard sales, just an opportunity to talk about you and your life and see if we're a fit, and I'll make sure that you get some information that's helpful to you either way. That's Eric Zimmer dot coach slash application. The future is empty. I'm making it up as I go. I don't know what will happen. Probably there will be some plot twists, not all of them will be good. The past has told us that welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how their people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Maggie Smith, a poet whose work has been widely published, anthologized, and has appeared in Best American Poetry, The New York Times, The New Yorker, and the list goes on and on. She's also a Columbus, Ohio native, which we are very proud of. Today, Maggie and Eric discuss her new non poetry book, Keep Moving Notes on Loss, Creativity and Change, and Maggie, welcome to the show. Hi, thanks for having me. I am really happy to have you on. We're going to be talking about your book called Keep Moving Notes on Loss, Creativity and Change. But before we do that, we'll start like we always do, with the parable. There is a grandmother talking to her grandson and she says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second. He looks up at his grandmother and he says, well, grandmother, which one wins? And the grandmother says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. Mm hmm, I love that parable, you know. I was thinking about how when you feed something, it thrives. If you want to feed a fire, you give it oxygen. If you want to starve it, you take that oxygen source away, and when you feed something, it gets bigger and stronger. And I think, for many years, without realizing it, I was feeding my fear more than anything else, and it was, you know, sort of unbeknownst to me, getting bigger and stronger. I was giving it oxygen every day. And I call myself a recovering pessimist um because when I was going through probably the hardest year of my life, I decided to feed my hope instead, really just out of need just to function, I needed to feel something other than fear, and so I tried feeding that every day with small actions, and what surprised me was that it got bigger and stronger and sort of one out over the fear at least some days. You know, I think some days one wolf is maybe edging out the other one. It's not. It's not always a straight shot. Some hours I'm doing better than other hours. But what I really learned was it's about making conscious choices and and what you give your attention and energy too. And so I've really tried over the past couple of years to give more attention and energy to the things that are going right, into the places where I can make a positive change rather than allowing myself to sort of backslide into worry and um worst case scenario thinking, which is really easy to backslide into. And the more I focus on the good stuff, the more I notice it, the more it presents itself to me. Learning that about a daily practice For me, it was writing, you know, writing myself a little pep talk every day and focusing on something positive. That daily practice of feeding that positive part surprised me and how effective it was to spend time doing that, especially first thing in the morning every day, And it also alerted me to the fact that I hadn't been doing that and that the reason my fear was so big is that it was getting all the attention and talking the loudest and taking up all the all the air in the room. A lot of people ask like, well, how do you get from being someone who's afraid to being someone who's brave, Like it's just a switch that you can flip on or off. And I don't think that's it at all. I think it's little things that you do on a daily basis based in awareness and trying to turn your attention toward something that maybe is feels unnatural, like optimism when you're depressed, right, yeah, yeah, even that question assumes that we are one type of person or the other. I'm a brave person, I'm afraid of person, and we certainly have tendencies. But those tendencies, even outside of some genetic component, are simply the results of what has been fed up to that point, oh, completely consciously or unconsciously. You know. We we are simply just a result of constant causes and conditions. And so to even assume that I'm a brave person or I'm an afraid person is imputing a constancy that we may just not have. Yeah. Absolutely. And also, you need fear in order to be brave. I mean, if you didn't have any fear, you wouldn't need courage. So it's it's kind of handy like that. It actually it forces you to work that muscle. If you weren't scared, you wouldn't have a thing to overcome. The bravery would be kind of a moot, point yep. I want to come back to the recovering pessimist part and ask you a couple of questions about that, particularly as it relates to poetry. But before that, let's back up and just set the stage for this latest book. It's called Keep Moving, Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change. And up until this book, you had been a poet, primarily been known for writing poems. And this book is not a poetry book. It's a collection of short, little daily things that you wrote yourself that you needed during a really difficult time in your life. Can you sort of set up that difficult time in your life just to give listeners a sense of kind of where this emerged from. Yeah, in the fall of two thousand eighteen, my marriage ended, and so after I don't know, eighteen and a half years and two kids, I was suddenly thinking, Okay, what now, what do I do now? And I was in a really dark place, and one day I just got up and I wrote myself a little note to self, And the first one was it was something about burning grief and anger as fuel and using it to get through the day. And that was where the phrase keep moving came from. It was from that fuel, just keep going. And it felt really good to just write that thing to myself. And I posted it on social media more as a way of sort of holding myself accountable for that intention, but also as a way of kind of coming clean because I think those of us on social media can agree probably that we maybe present ourselves at our best light there, and we have these sort of curated feeds, and we don't always align our online selves or public selves with what's happening inside our homes, you know, behind closed doors. And it felt important to me to align those two selves instead of just saying, hey, I published a poem on the internet. Meanwhile I'm barely getting out of bed at home. I just I needed to be one person in the world and that one person was having a hard time. But what I found was, as I did this as a daily practice, it was helping me. But I started hearing from other people on Twitter or on Instagram, or people if they knew me, would text me or email me and say, oh my gosh, I needed this today, or this thing that you wrote for yourself just got me through the last three hours, or I wish I had had some of these five years ago when I was going through my own worst year, and it was the strangest thing because I have never felt more alone than I did, and like those first few months when everything really just imploded, and then at the same time, I had never felt more like a greater sense of purpose and community because suddenly these things I was writing to myself meant something to other people who have their own stuff going on, whether it was a divorce or a job loss or I mean, this was pre pandemic. So you know, a lot of us are going through stuff right now, but a couple of years ago we were going through stuff too. You know, life. Life didn't just get hard, right, I got harder, but not hard. Reading the book definitely took me back to when my marriage imploded. My son was too, and I was so devastated when it happened, and reading it sort of took me back to that. And you know, I certainly thought your book would have been a lovely thing to have during that point. My lifeline was a book called When Things Fall Apart by Pema Children, which is such a powerful book about similar ideas, right, And I think the thing that I loved about what you're doing through that book is you're showing that like there is something brighter up ahead and that this loss in pain can transform you and at the same time, this really sucks. Yeah, it's both both. Those messages are really important because we just give people the boy this is gonna be You're you're growing. You know what a growing what a growth opportunity? Right, You're just like shut up, Right. But if, on the other hand, always see the pain, we get lost in it. And so I always feel like to give people both as a tricky balance, and I felt like the book did a nice job of that. Oh I'm so glad. Yeah, I mean, I think if you only focus on how wrong everything is, you lose your sort of hope and motivation to keep pressing forward. I mean, that's a really dangerous headspace to be in. You know, hope is imaginative, and if you can't picture the future being better than the present, if you can't picture yourself crawling out of the bottom of the dark, well then it's going to be really hard to take steps to do that. But at the same time, yes, I you know, have never really been much of a self help reader. And obviously I call myself a recovering pessimist, so I've never really been much of a Pollyanna or a particularly hopeful person. I was sort of the ere in my family, which is why all of the things that have happened in the past couple of years are kind of funny. Um, if you're an my family, but I think it's it's really important to be able to hold both. And it's not even a butt, it's an And like everything is terrible right now, and so much is suddenly possible because this thing just burnt down. And now it's not only that I have to make it something else. I get to make it something else, Like I get to make it up now, I get to build something from scratch. And sort of shifting my thinking from the half to to the get to has been part of what I've been working on. Personally, I do have to do it because no one else is going to do it for me. But also it does feel like an opportunity to maybe do some things differently that I wouldn't have thought to do when I, you know, met my ex husband in my early twenties. And what does your life look like when you build it in your early twenties, And then if you either get to or have to or forced to reevaluate in your forties or in your fifties or in your sixties, what might you do differently because you're not exactly the same person anymore either, And maybe some of the things that you would have gone along with just because of sheer momentum or inertia. Um, how are those two things related exactly? Maybe maybe you wouldn't do those things the same anymore as a person really interested in how people change, we do know that there are few things as fertile for true transformation than just basically heart wrecking loss. You know, you never wish it on anybody. You actually say that at some point in the book, like I never would have chosen any of this, but since it was chosen for me, I'm going to choose to create something out of it. And we do know that real loss and real pain can have a transformative effect like few other things, because the rest of the time life just kind of goes along and you steer the shift and make some changes. But that sort of when it all, as you say, burns down can be a really powerful time. But again, to say that has to be done with a certain degree of delicacy, because again nobody wants to hear it makes me think of an Ann Lamock quote, which is it's similar. She basically says something like yeah, yeah, yeah, let go and let god I know, I know, you know, and if I could, I would, And in the meantime, I want to stab you in the forehead with a fork, right or something like that. You know, it's that basic idea of like, yeah, I know this is the growth opportunity, but zip it about it because I'm dying over here. Yeah. Like, I definitely went through a period where if one more person said what doesn't kill you makes you stronger, I was just like, I don't want to be stronger. I want to be happy. Yes, I just want to feel better. I don't want to be better. I don't want to grow. I just want to feel Okay, I just want to function. That's right. Um, yeah, it's that's that's a hard pill to swallow for people, I think is that you know you're growing and this is going to be really good for you. And you know, one of the things that I tell people when they're going through their own stuff, because now people call me when they're going through things, I do say it gets better, because I do think that is fair to say it gets better, it gets easier, not because you get to heal. I have a real dubious relationship with the word healing. You know, not because you get to heal or set down the thing that you're carrying, but because you will learn how to carry it better and differently, and so it's not always going to hurt the way that it hurts right now. But you're not ever really going to be able to set it down either. And that's like the sort of tough love, realistic part I think of this book, which is like, you just learn how to carry it differently, and that's okay. Let's talk about the word heal. That would be an interesting place to take it. Tell me why why you're dubious about it. I think healing it feels like a cure, like there's a cure for the human condition, which I don't think there is. And there's like a there's a Beckett quote that I'm not going to be able to think of exactly, but it's something like, you're on earth. There's no cure for that. There isn't. So if your heart is broken, if you lose a child, if your marriage ends that you thought was a forever thing, if the career you thought you would have, that you've been working for all your life is suddenly up in smoke, healing feels a little too neat to me. My friend, the poet Dana Levin said recently something about it's not about healing, it's about endurance, and that to me feels right, and that I think maybe speaks to that carrying like healing suggests that you get to set it down or that you don't feel it anymore, and I think endurance to me, suggests that you just learn how to live with it better, and that feels more realistic. To me. Healing sounds great. I mean, don't get me wrong, I am team healing. If that is on the menu, I'm ordering it. I don't necessarily believe that it's on the menu for me. Yeah, I have mixed feelings about that. I think I can look back at some things in my life. That marriage I told you, you know, falling apart happened when my son was two and a half and he's twenty two now, so twenty years ago, and I can largely say it doesn't feel like I'm still carrying it. But it's been a long time. That gives me so much hope though, because I'm only two years out, so that gives me hope that maybe my sense of healing is just the fact that I'm just not there yet. I've got to I've got the I need the endurance to get me through the years until that. Maybe I feel some of the healing, but some things, like the loss of a child, I would be willing to believe that never fully heals. It seems to me it wouldn't. Before I did this, I had a solar energy company and it was my life and my hope and my dream. I had to put it down, and I thought I would be heartbroken about that forever, and I occasionally still feel a little something about it. But the podcast emerged out of it. But I think the interesting thing about healing is my experience with it has been the only hope to whatever extent healing is possible for me. It comes through being really fully willing to feel it. You know, the thing I did right when that relationship fell apart was I just fell apart. That's what I did, right. I allowed myself if I'd followed advice way longer than anybody would have said would be appropriate. I allowed myself to sob. You know, I wrote angry letter after angry letter after angry letter that I destroyed, like I really worked to like move those emotions through. I think that's so smart. That's the important part. And all this stuff is such a tricky balance. Back to this idea, we need both and we've got to feel the feelings. And sometimes if we just immediately jumped to, oh, it's going to be okay, we bypassed that process now in my case, and it sounds like in your case, that wasn't even an option. There wasn't even an option to bypass the feelings. Like if I could have, I'm almost certain I would have. If that had been on the menu, I would have ordered it, exactly. It's just not who I am as a person. I mean, that's the part of part of writing this book, you know. I remember writing this book and talking to a friend at a coffee shop as I was writing this book and thinking, what am I doing. I'm basically spending the this year of my life not only feeling all of this, but having to process it in words, and so even professionally, what was paying my bills was stewing in my own juices, and I just thought, you know, maybe this isn't the right thing. And then I realized, actually it was exactly the right thing, because I think if I had done something else for work, if I had had a regular day job, I could have thrown myself into that job and not processed all of this stuff. You know, when a relationship ends, especially along one, it's never just about that. It's about everything else. It's about who am I? And who were we? And what was all of this? And I mean, it's just the such big questions. And I think as painful as it was to really go in and feel everything, it was really useful. You know. Writing Keep Moving was really useful because it forced me to face myself every day and really I never let myself off the hook, and I probably, if not healed, I probably processed things better and got to a better place faster than if I had spent that time distracting myself from it. It makes me think a little bit. I often say to this to people. The second time I got sober, I was in a relationship with somebody who was a heavy drinker and it was around me all the time, and they don't recommend that. And if I could have changed it, I would have. But it built a strengthen me that you know, I was no longer like I had to go into that awkward duckling phase that all alcoholics go through. It's like suddenly I have to emerge into the world where people drink again. I'm like, oh, you know, I was kind of prepared for that. I want to read one of your little what do you call them? So I want to read a little one hey, to give listeners a sense of kind of what the book is made of. And it's one that speaks to what we've just been talking about. Stop calling your heart broken. Your heart works just fine. If you are feeling love, anger, gratitude, grief, it is because your heart is doing its work. Let it keep moving. There it is. Yeah, I remember describing myself as broken hearted over and over again, and and it just hit me one day that metaphor, because so much of the way we talk on a daily basis is metaphor. So much of the way we talk about grief and change, it's all like journey and struggle and battle. I mean, it's all metaphor. And it occurred to me, like, actually, my heart's not broken. It's working. If it were broken, I might feel better because I wouldn't be feeling all of this pain. It's definitely working. Oh, it's in there. It's in there. Another thing that I wanted to touch on, and I'm kind of just jumping around because the book is lots of these little notes, so I just extre acted a lot of them that spoke to me. But one that spoke to me and I was thinking about, is it says, remember when you would have been over the moon, thrilled to have just a fraction of your life as it is now? Look around you. It is enough. And I kind of wanted to talk about that because as I was reading your book, I was so struck by and I'm sure other people have commented upon this is the book starts with you in devastation and now your life, I mean, at least from a professional success. You know, you and I've talked about like you know, you're on the Today Show, You're interviewed by Maria Shreivor, like amazing things are happening. You know. It was so interesting to me to sort of be watching it from the end. I know it's not the end. Stories actually never end, but this vantage point looking back, but that idea of remember when you would have been over the moon, thrilled to have just a fraction of your life as it is now? Yeah, I mean even for sure now there are things that have happened related to this book that I never would have dreamed of But even then, even even at my worst, even at my lowest, I had two healthy kids, and you know, a house on a street with neighbors I love, and a freelance career that I found really fulfilling, and friends and family who loved me and had my back, um when I really needed them. So even then, even when I was at the bottom of the well, I needed to take the time and look around and say, Okay, actually, yes, this one piece which was a really big piece, Like I'm not minimizing it's a really big piece. This piece has now sort of like broken off the continent. It was sailing away. But look at everything that's still here. You know, after the book ends, I have to keep living. That's that's how books work. We don't get to stay in them. We have to keep living our lives. Um. So many wonderful things have happened because the book has touched people in ways I didn't think about is even being possible. You know, when you write a book for yourself, you know, in some ways I wrote the notes for myself, and then the essays in the book those I really think of as being for the reader, those essays are really for other people. And there to give context to the quotes, but also a way of me having a direct conversation with the reader about here are some things I've been through, and here are some of the ways I reframed those experiences for myself, and maybe thinking about them in this way will help you reframe something tough that you're going through too. I had somebody say to me yesterday about your book that she's dealing with something totally different. She was like, it's helping me with emptiness syndrome. That makes a lot of sense, actually, because I mean, all of our big life changes when when you really think about it, no matter what it is, they're all like identity issues, right, Like if you lose your job and so much of you was tied up and what you do for a living, the question is who am I? If your spouse leaves you? The question is like who am I? If your kids move out and you've been actively invested in parenting on a daily basis and that big part of your life is no longer there? Who am I? I mean, I think so much of this. Even though those things are all really different, they all put us in a place where we feel uncertain about the future and questioning like who we are, what our role is, what our usefulness is, what's coming for us. And frankly, this year with the pandemic, I think we're all feeling a lot of those feelings because none of us are living the same lives that we lived a year ago. And some of those changes have been positive, and some of those changes have been negative. And again it's the and that's right. Yeah, and back to that idea of when you were saying that even in the midst of what you were going through, it was helpful to look up at all the things you still did have. You know, it's and it's this part of my life is on fire and these other things are good, you know. I find that word is so useful. Yeah. It really can bring together things that we tend to get locked into one or the other, or even I think we sometimes lean towards but as if they're in opposition and not just naturally occurring together. Um, like, it's not light but dark. It's light and dark like things things are are beautiful and terrible and lucky and unlucky at the same time and always will be. Yeah. I don't know anybody. Maybe I just know most the ordinary people, but I don't know anybody whose life isn't If we were to just sit down an inventory it that we wouldn't go good, good good. I don't know about that. I wish that wasn't the same. Oh good, good good. Oh nope, that's not so good. Like a cynical way of saying is it's it's always something, it's always something, right, But yes it is. There's always something that's not the way you want it to be. But that's life, right, that's the way it is. And so which perspective do we want to look at? And that even that statement is not either or it's really being able to look at both perspectives and to find a way to hold both of them at the same time. It makes me think that every time something good happens, however small, we should say there's always something exactly, which is a totally different tone, right, because like, there's always something it's annoyed because the bad thing crops up. But what if when you get to see a beautiful sunset, or your kid makes you something out of clay, or a friend you know text to you that you haven't heard from in a while, what if that is also always something? You know? The thing that when you're you're slipping a little bit in your day, something arrives to kind of like booy you a little. Yeah. I love that. I've recently started thinking about a little game called What's Right, which is just sort of the opposite like we you know what's wrong, we know what's wrong. If I ask anybody in the world what's wrong, they will be liked. But we could ask the exact opposite question, what's right. And when I sit down and start just sort of playing that game, I'm just overwhelmed by it. Like there's so much that's right, yep. And that's that's the thing, Like directing your attention toward that on a daily basis. The more right that you notice, I think, the more it creates. And it's sort of like this right begets right or hope begets hope kind of thing happens and it's snowballs. And I realized that probably sounds more Pollyanna than I wanted to you, but I honestly believe it that the more you turn your attention toward the things that you have to be thankful for, the more you'll realize what's actually there. And it's just so easy when you're in a dark place, to sort of get really claustrophobic and sort of myopic about what your life looks like, and just to focus obsessively on the things that aren't going well. And whatever whatever that thing is that's yelling the loudest is usually something negative, and then it colors everything. It just poisons everything. And so you could have a beautiful day, and if one negative phone call happens, or one you know, terrible interaction, or someone says something snarky, or you get some sort of professional disappointment, it just shuts everything else down into that gray scale space where before it was color. And I, you know, I think we have to work actively to not let that happen. I certainly know I need to work actively not to let that happen. And I'm pretty certain anybody who's a fan of the One You Feed podcast also needs to actively work to not let that happen. There are probably lots of people out there that don't need to do that. There seemed to be some people who are just born with a sunny disposition, but I am not one of them. I'm not either. Let's talk about an idea in the book that you write about called the future is empty. As Ben Buddhist, I always want to talk about emptiness so um, but but the future is empty. Yeah. So when my marriage ended, I suddenly felt like my future was wiped, you know, like a hard drive when suddenly like nothing's there anymore, and you're you're thinking, where are my documents? They were just here. It felt like I had this whole written, planned out novel, you know, story, and then suddenly it was just gone. I had lost it and I didn't know where it had gone and now what, And and thinking about it more, I realized that it actually had never been written past the moment I was living. And and that we I think the way that we use pessimism sometimes as self protection to sort of guard ourselves against getting our hopes up, I think we also use planning and projecting into the future as self protection. Because if we think our life as it stands will just continue this way. And if we can plan the vacation next year, and if we know what professional projects are coming up in one and if we you know, you know what our kids are going to be doing educationally next year, whatever the thing is, it gives us a feeling of control. But really, and if has taught us anything, it probably should be this. We don't actually get to say, well, the future is going to be like, um, it's all it's just empty and we're making it up as we Oh, and um, I feel often times like I'm sort of like paving a road, like one step ahead of the step I'm walking, and that's as far as I get to pave it. And if I try to trick myself into thinking I'm paving a mile ahead, I'm just not because that's just not how it's at least not how I think life works. And so, yeah, it actually was really comforting to think, oh, it had always been empty. All of the stuff I had been thinking was for sure quote unquote for sure in the future really wasn't. And so my future now was no less empty than it was before. It just the difference really is that that person is certainly not going to be a part of it, or will be, but not in the way that I had expected, And now I have to make it up as I go. Yeah, I absolutely love that idea, just to think of the future is empty. And you go on to describe sort of what you just said, and then you said, is this freeing or heartbreaking? Comforting or terrifying, all of it all at once, and I think it's both. I often will do this with coaching clients, is you know, their brain will be telling them about how they're going to fail in the future, and I'm like, that voice doesn't know. If that voice knows, if you've got a future predictor in your head that actually knows, you should be betting on horses, not talking to me. Yeah, that's a moneymaker right there. But assuming you don't have that, that voice doesn't know. Yeah, none of these knows. We don't And that can be again, depending on the perspective we're taking, can be a really positive or comforting thought. But I think if we're locked into negative patterns, it can be really comforting with like, oh, yeah, the future is empty. It's not pre written, no, and as many things can go right as can go wrong. And that's what I have to keep reminding myself. The future is empty. I'm making it up as I go. I don't know what well happen. Probably there will be some plot twists, not all of them will be good. The past has told us that if we're learning from the past a sort of project into our future, all that we know is that more changes coming, because that's the one thing that we've been able to count on in the past. It's that we don't know. And again, you know, sort of going back to what we were talking about earlier, I wouldn't have believed in my darkest moment that I would have been talking to you right now about this book, or that this book would have existed, or that I would have had any of the opportunities related um to this that have happened this year. I couldn't have foreseen the worst parts of my life happening. But I also couldn't have foreseen the best parts of my life happening. That's just not how it works. You know, I talked about in the book, like we don't get to flip to the end to see what happens. It would be joyless if we could. But it's not on the menu, you know, talking to my daughter about that, like we don't know what's going to happen next. But if we did, wouldn't that be boring? I mean, isn't part of what makes life interesting free will a but be also just the adventure of it, which would be you know, the knowing everything is a kind of death. It's a killer of hope and imagination and creativity and motivation. If everything is preordained and set in stone for us and we're just sort of wrote going through the motions, you know, filling a role that's not authorship. That doesn't excite me. I'm want to go back to the recovering pessimism for a second, because my question is, as you've become less pessimistic more optimistic, has that crept into your poetry. I think it was creeping into my poetry before I even realized I was shifting. I mean, even even the poem good Bones, which people think of um, I think is being sort of dark. Um it does say the world is more than half terrible, ends on a hopeful note and a sort of call to action to make the world a more beautiful place. So I think I've always been sort of carrying the two things that sort of light in the dark, the hope and the despair. At the same time, I don't know that that my poetry is changed greatly becau as of this new outlet or this new outlook, because poetry is sort of a quiet, quiet place I go to, um and so I'm certainly not writing suddenly cheerful poems about you know, kittens and rainbows. I'm still using poetry for the most part to have a conversation with myself on paper. And often what drives me or motivates me to have a conversation with myself is puzzling over something or processing something, or sort of troubling over something or grappling with something. I think a poem of praise another way of saying, this is a poem of praise, as I think one of the most difficult poems to write, I would agree. I mean, I find the world has a shortage of songs and poems about being happier, or maybe it doesn't have a short a jum it as a shortage of good ones. I don't I'm not sure. I'm not sure which it is. But it's really hard. I mean, it's it's really tough to express that without it being sap. So I'm always on the lookout for them, sort of collect them in my own way, but they're harder to find. They are, I think, maybe, and at least for me. If I'm really enjoying a moment in my day, I don't feel the need to write about it. I just want to live it. Yes, if I'm puzzling over something or sort of grappling with something, that is what drives me to want to sort of work out and problem solve it a little bit on the page. That's a different thing. If I if I'm just having a good day, I don't even need to get out my pen. I just want to go have the good day. That's right, that's right. I think that is definitely part of it. And I think it is interesting to to realize that because I think a lot of people will read an artist whose work is primarily what you might call darker and assume that that's that person in their entirety, which is certainly not the case. It's just that that's where they go when they're in that place, and they have plenty, you know, plenty of other time that's not there. Yeah, it's always funny to me. You know, I haven't given a poetry reading in public and you know, a year, but it's always funny to me when I give poetry readings, because people will come up to me afterwards and say, I didn't realize you were so funny. And it's because humor doesn't really come out in my poems. Um and so when I give a reading, I feel sort of self conscious about reading, sort of like a melancholy poem or an introspective poem after melancholy or introspective poem, And so my readings tend to be sort of self deprecating stand up punctuated by poems that are slightly dark. That's what makes it fun for me. Um, but I think sometimes it's jarring for people who expect you in your lived life to be like the voice of your poems, and that I think is a mistake. I in my lived life, I'm closer to the voice in my essays because um, I'm speaking as myself. So so keep Moving is a sort of a departure for me formally, because in books like Good Bones, there is the poems have speakers, and those speakers aren't necessarily me. Even if it's first person, I it's not Maggie, you know, it's just a person speaking the poem. But and keep Moving. I wrote it as myself, So the person who wrote those essays is the person that you could run into at Kroger. And that is also sort of a test of vulnerability, to write as yourself without any layers of persona or aesthetic distance that that poetry provided and provided some pretty good cover that I took for granted until I didn't have it anymore. Yeah, Yeah, Would you like to read a poem for us? I'd be happy to do. You have a request, Well, um, I gave you a couple I like, but I am open to whatever. If you've got a rainbow and unicorn poem, now is the time to try the speaking of darkness. Okay, now, i'll I'm going to read one of the ones that you brought up, all right, and it actually has darkness and the title and this poem, the title is a run in, so it goes straight into the first the first sentence of the poem. At your age, I wore a darkness several sizes too big. It hung on me like a mother's dress. Even now as we speak, I am stitching a darkness you'll need to unravel, unraveling another you'll need to restitch. What can I give you that you can keep? Once you asked, does the sky stop? It doesn't stop. It just stops being one thing and starts being another. Sometimes we hold hands and tip our heads way back so the blue fills our whole field of vision, so we feel like we're in it. We don't stop, We just stop being what we are and start being what where? What can I give you to carry there? The shadows of leaves, the lace and solace, this soft hand me down darkness. What can I give you that will be of use in your next life, the one you will live without me? I love that poem. I love the lace in solace. I just love that you can look at the word solace and see the word lace inside of it. Well you can, I can now, I can now now there's there's always something. But before I wouldn't have been able to see that. Yeah. I particularly enjoy reading your poetry too, because it has a real sense of place, like a lot of good poetry does. And your sense of place is my place because we both grew up in central Ohio, and so when you make specific references, I'm like, I've been there and there and there and yes, that's the way this area looked when I was a child too, And so for me it's particularly nice. I love that. Yeah. I think sometimes we think of setting as being something for fiction, you know, stories need to have a setting, But um, I think setting plays a really important part in my poems, probably because I still live in my hometown more or less and and never really left. And so the streets and neighborhoods and houses and kinds of trees and kinds of birds and and these things, all of these landmarks are really important to me. Yeah. I think a lot of the poetry that I am particularly drawn to has maybe I was gonna say, has a sense of place, but maybe I'm imbuing it with a sense of place. I don't know that. We've got another of your little notes to yourself at I really liked, and it was it is not enough to think positive. You have to do positive. Push hope from theory into practice. Do something today, however small, to light up your own life or shine on someone else. The light will reach you to keep moving. Yeah, I mean, I think positive thinking always felt a little wishy washy to me. I just kept thinking like, well, what does that do? It just didn't feel enough to think good thoughts. Um. It reminds me of the old you know, thoughts and prayers, Like we can't throw thoughts and prayers at things. We actually need action to help real people live their real lives. And when I was at my lowest, but frankly today every day. I need something more than good thoughts to get through my day. I need good action. And it doesn't look the same every day. I don't mean like every day I'm doing volunteer work or every day is not some big thing. It just means like doing a good thing. Maybe it's you know, calling a friend because you know they were having a hard time a few days ago, and so you're remembering that and checking in or feeling yourself kind of spiraling and knowing that probably you need to get out of your house and go take a walk, and maybe you could take your dog along, and that would be doing your dog is solid too. Um. You know, it's like it doesn't have to be a big thing. And that's something that's really helped me on a daily basis over the last couple of years. It is just trying to focus on what I can control, because part of what put me in the bad place emotionally was feeling out of control, like feeling like I didn't get a say in the way that my life was changing. And so part of reframing that for myself is, um, I can't always control the circumstances, but I can control how I think about them, and how I react to them or don't, and so trying to be a little bit more mindful about those sorts of things and being more positive in my daily interactions with people. You know, I might be really tempted to reply to snark with snark, but I could also just be the bigger person and have some integrity and let it go, for example, you know, or if somebody does something that makes me unhappy, I can't change what the person did. I just can only control my own actions. And sometimes it is frankly exhausting trying to be the bigger person. I don't always like it, because sometimes it's really satisfying to be reactive. Right. Sometimes it feels really good in the moment to do the wrong thing, but it doesn't pay dividends. It never feels good in the long run to have done the wrong thing. You know, if you have a conscience, it will come back and it will bother you, and you will think about it and you will realize that you were widening the gap between the person that you want to be in the person you were in that moment. That's not good. And so I'm always trying to sort of do things that would make future me proud of present me, you know, and you know future me is really glad. I ordered six pints of Jenny's ice cream to be delivered last week. Um, and I think future me will also be pleased with how I managed a difficult situation this morning. And so I'm always trying to sort of even though the future is empty, I know future me will be there. I hope she'll be there, and I'm hoping I'm trying to do my best for her as much as I can. Yes, there's that funny Simpsons thing. And I was not really a Simpsons guy, but you know, the future Homer. I feel really bad for that guy. No kidding, right, A bad for present Homer. I mean really present Homer is in trouble also. And listeners of the show won't be surprised that I picked that piece out, given how frequently I trod out this phrase that I heard originally a a which is sometimes you can't think your way into good action. You have to act your way into good thinking. Oh. I like that so fundamental to my approach to life that anytime anybody writes anything like that, I end up I end up bringing it out of the book. All right, One last thing, and then we're going to wrap up, which is I don't know if I'm going to pronounce this right, but can you tell us about serotinous pine cones? You did pronounce it right, yeah, so I know I love that word. So serotinous pine cones are the pine cones of certain trees that are sealed really tightly with this thick layer of resin, and they require forest fires to open and then spread their seeds. So even a little bit of fire isn't enough to do it. They actually need what we would consider to be a catastrophic event in order to live and thrive and grow. And so I have been watching a nature documentary, as I often do with my kids because it's one of the things that we can all agree on. Um. They're really partial to um Attenborough narration. When there's a different narrator, they get very cranky because it doesn't have the same quality of his voice. But uh, yeah, So we watched a documentary once about these trees, and we got to watch the fire and then watch the slow mo of the cones opening, and then watching in these charred spaces that looks like nothing could possibly ever grow there. Again, these new trees grow Jack Pines is one of them. Lodgepole Pines is another one. I loved that idea, the fact that you have to go through, like you were saying earlier, a catastrophic event to get to a place where you can grow, that idea of post traumatic growth, that maybe, even if it's an unwelcome change, even if it's not something you would have ever wished on yourself or your family, maybe somehow it makes that level of fire is what makes it possible for you to grow and become a different kind of person and maybe maybe a better kind of person even than you were in the life that you got to live before. And thinking about that metaphor helped me through that time because I thought, maybe something's happening here and I can't see it yet. There are inner workings that I am not yet privy to, and I just have to trust that the person who emerges on the other side of this seemingly catastrophic event will be um someone worth being and worth knowing. I won't know what it's going to be. I still really don't know what it's going to be. I mean, I'm living in the after, but it's not really the after. The after is continuing right, Yeah, it's just now. Yep, it's just now. Yeah. I love that idea of the pine cones. A because nature amazes me, like how could that even be? Yeah? And and B it's a great metaphor for personal transformation. And see, we've had an awful lot of forest fires this year, and it's at least marginally comforting to know that nature knows what to do with that, and even part of nature is designed for that. Yes, part of nature is specifically designed for that. Seems wild to me, Like wouldn't we have evolved to a place where that wasn't necessary? The answer apparently is no. And I think maybe for us to the answer is no, like we maybe we still need these shake ups, that the snow globes still needs to be picked up and shaken really hard sometimes for us to make breakthroughs in our lives. Yep. I think so. All right, Well, that is where we are going to wrap up. You and I will continue in the post show conversation. I may lean on you for another poem in there and listeners. If you're interested in post show conversations, ad free episodes, and all sorts of other good stuff, you can go to one you Feed dot net slash Join. Maggie, thank you so much for coming on. It was such a pleasure to have you on. I really enjoyed the book and I was so happy to have you on. I had dreamt that you and I would do this in person as a gathering in Columbus, Ohio, an event, and finally it was like, well, who knows when that could ever occur, So here we are. Let's just say sometime in the future, it'll be possible. It will be It'll be possible. Thank you. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast. When you join our membership community. With this monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members only benefits. It's our way of saying thank you for your support. Now. 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