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Maggie Smith’s new memoir You Could Make This Place Beautiful starts with a postcard written by Smith’s husband to another woman. The postcard marks the beginning of the end for Smith’s marriage, when she “lost the narrative” and “stopped knowing how to tell herself the story of her life.” Smith brings us along as she goes looking for her new story. Like her poem about the sky rushing in after a tree is cut down, Smith’s new story is about a marriage cut down, and all that rushed in to fill the space: Smith’s children, her writing, greater trust in the universe, and a renewed sense of her own agency and worth.
Smith’s prose is as warm and welcoming as her poetry. She draws us in close with direct address and further gains our trust by inviting us into intimate spaces—her home, therapy, her first Christmas morning without her children. She admits she can’t give us everything. But even when she is ostensibly warning us to stay back, Smith somehow accomplishes the opposite. By calling out the memoirist’s sleight of hand, she only makes us trust her more.
I spoke with Smith about choice, memoir conventions, the meaning of work, and more.
This interview had been edited and condensed for clarity.
Brianna Avenia-Tapper
Let’s talk about the scene in which your husband’s lawyer refers to your writing as “work,” making air quotes with her fingers. It made me so angry to read, but it was also so familiar. When did you know that you could call your writing your work?
Maggie Smith
I don’t necessarily have to support myself with it to consider writing my work… which is good because it’s not like I’m writing books, sending them out, and then a bag of money arrives on my porch!
I’ve run into two blocks when thinking about my writing as work. I think all artists, whether you paint or take pictures or dance or act or make music, are encouraged culturally to treat art as a hobby, especially if you’re not paying your mortgage doing it. The other block is that—at least in my home—my labor as a caregiver was more valuable, even financially, than my labor as a writer. So I helped our household income more by being ever present as a parent than I did by being a writer.
If I think about work as how I can do the most good and be of most use, it’s clarifying. How can I best use my time and talents to do good and be of use? I can parent my children, and I can write.
Brianna Avenia-Tapper
What good does your writing do? How is it useful?
Maggie Smith
Well, I suppose that’s not for me to say. Honestly, it’s kind of none of my business what happens to the work when I’m done with it. I do think I can do more good as a teacher, editor, and writer than I would if I worked as a postal worker or a nurse. Those jobs are more necessary than what I’m doing! But if I were doing one of those jobs, I wouldn’t be able to do the writing and teaching and editorial work that is uniquely mine. I feel that way about all the writers I read, too. Something they do is uniquely theirs, and no one else could be plugged into that slot. They couldn’t do the same amount of good for my heart and my mind if they had been plugged into another slot. So I suppose it’s intuitive. I just feel like writing is what I’m supposed to be doing.
Brianna Avenia-Tapper
There were many places where I read You Could Make This Place Beautiful as a love letter to writers and writing. For example, in the scene where you signed your divorce papers, you write, “what now? What do I have now? What do I have to hold onto? When I looked down, I saw the pen in my hand.”
Maggie Smith
I love that you framed the book as a love letter to writers. I hadn’t really thought about it that way. My friend described it as a love letter to my kids. I suppose those are the two great loves of my life: my kids and my writing. If I have a dual purpose, that’s it.
Brianna Avenia-Tapper
Your kids’ voices come through so clearly and tenderly in your memoir. I know they are often the subject of your writing, but do they influence it in other ways? How has becoming a mother changed your writing?
Maggie Smith
I actually didn’t write at all for the first year after my daughter was born. It wasn’t exactly the greatest writing weather in our house. But that makes you recalibrate. You ask, “what kind of writer am I going to be now? What’s my material?” Because my daily life was burp cloths and missed naps and a lot of crying. Both me and the baby—a lot of crying. None of that felt like the stuff of poetry. Up to that point I hadn’t been writing so close to my own life. I didn’t know how to do it. I was well aware of the cultural bias against “mommy poems.” So I thought, “how am I going to do this?” I overcame that by integrating the different parts of myself. Maybe life isn’t an interruption to the writing. I found permission in other writers—people like Brenda Shaughnessy or Beth Ann Fennelly or Sharon Olds in particular who are writing about not just their kids, but the shift to being a mom in smart, wise, rigorous poems.
Brianna Avenia-Tapper
In the book, you keep returning to the image of dark and dangerous things moving unseen in the water around us. You incorporated your literal experience of being in the ocean, and you used the ocean as a metaphor for your marriage. We can look at creative work this way too: dark things moving unseen through our subconscious that slowly rise to the surface, taking shape as they do. As artists we can catch them in our nets and make dinner, or those same things can eat us alive. Could you talk about how this book came to the surface and took shape?
Maggie Smith
I approached writing this book the way I approach writing a poem, but it needed a different container, more space. I knew this was going to be a memoir, but I also knew that I was going to write it as a poet. I write small. Even as a poet, I write small. I’m a whittler. I am always looking to make something as concise as possible, looking for places to cut fat, asking myself what is essential.
The vignettes felt like the most psychologically true form because memory doesn’t happen in a straight line. Memory, to me, is associative. When you’re remembering, you’re not thinking in a timeline of your life like a history textbook. Rumination doesn’t happen in a straight line. It’s more of a spiral or a coil. Grief doesn’t happen in a straight line, at least in my experience, it happens more in waves. So I asked what are some narrative structures that I could apply to the book to make it feel true to me, true to the experience.
When it came to assembling the vignettes, it was almost like with a poetry manuscript. I printed hundreds and hundreds of pages, lay them out on the floor of my living room, and color coded the different threads. I built the forward narrative, and I had all of these color-coded pieces–the other threads in the book. I would be like, “oh wait, the pink kind of drops out for 50 pages. I need some pink here.” I don’t even remember what pink was, but there was pink. Then I would go back and reorganize because I really wanted most of the threads to carry through without falling away. It was multiple breadcrumb trails in the woods, and I didn’t want one to drop off.
Brianna Avenia-Tapper
I’m curious about one of those breadcrumb trails—the one with the ‘Notes On…’ (Notes on Conventions, Notes on Plot, Notes on Character). I’ve seen this kind of explicit acknowledgement of form in several places recently—Sarah McColl’s memoir, Joy Enough, and Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s hybrid work, Ghost in the Throat, for example. I was wondering whether the content of these memoirs (each about mothers in some way) was somehow connected to this hyper-awareness of form. Why did you choose to name those elements of form in your narrative?
Maggie Smith
For me it’s because I don’t think of myself as a storyteller. When I’m writing, I’m focusing on sensory experience. I’m new to memoir, so putting my cards on the table made me feel comfortable. I also thought that if I was going to be as vulnerable as I am in this book, I wanted to be really forthcoming as a writer. I didn’t want to be vulnerable as a human, but hide all of the craft.
Entering this project, I thought a lot about the preconceived notions about memoir. I was thinking about what a memoir is and can do, and about the reader’s expectations of a memoir. What will people think is on the menu when they open my book? I’d like to tell them right away what’s not on the menu because it’s actually never on the menu. Even if a book is marketed as a tell-all, it’s not a tell-all. We can only ever speak for ourselves.
Brianna Avenia-Tapper
I’ve heard your writing described as accessible. I’m not a fan of this characterization because the word is sometimes used to imply that a piece of creative work is simplistic. Your work is complex and multilayered, not simplistic. I think ‘welcoming’ is a better word. What are your suggestions for writers hoping to create a similar sense of welcome in our work?
Maggie Smith
I mean, I’m hopelessly Midwestern! I do think it’s fairly accessible in part because I write about what happens in familiar settings and familiar experiences. We both recognize that ‘accessible’ can be a backhanded compliment because what does it mean, particularly if you’re calling a woman writer accessible? What you’re saying is it’s maybe not as rigorous or not as complex. There’s a sneer there.
My writing is more accessible now than it was even 20 years ago, which is sort of strange to think about. When I was getting my MFA, I still had in my mind this idea of what poems should sound like, and that maybe they shouldn’t sound like me. They should sound like someone else, someone smarter than me and better than me and more evolved than me. Something has happened over the course of aging where I’ve decided, ‘no, I can actually show up as myself.’ I can use the vocabulary that I use in my life, in conversation. I’m often telling students or editorial clients to bring the diction down. Meet yourself in the middle between where you think the poem should be and how you would describe this to your sister.
Brianna Avenia-Tapper
I like the idea of imagining that you are talking to your sister when making choices about vocabulary and syntax. At the end of the book, you write, “life, like a poem, is a series of choices.” Could you talk about your understanding of choice and its role in your life?
Maggie Smith
I live in my hometown. I’m someone who values constancy and dependability. I really like things to be the same for myself. Yet, through my divorce and having kids, I’m welcoming all kinds of new variables into my life. Kids are not programmable robots. Actually neither is your spouse. And really neither are you. So maybe you should stop pretending that you are. Maybe ask yourself some hard questions about what you want. In other words, think about life as a series of choices that you make every single day. How do we spend our time? How do we relate to our kids? How do we relate to our partner? Sometimes we just repeat–copy-paste–the same template of a day over and over again. That can be a beautiful thing if the choices we’re making fit us, but it can be not so great if we’re copy-pasting a bunch of old choices that don’t serve us anymore. Sometimes we have to reevaluate and think about whether our choices serve us and our partners and our kids and our work.
Brianna Avenia-Tapper
All of which are changing all the time.
Maggie Smith
All of which are constantly changing! The way I parent my kids now isn’t the way I parented them when they were one and two and three. We are constantly having to recalibrate and make adjustments.
Brianna Avenia-Tapper
How can we improve our flexibility or decrease our resistance to that constantly changing situation?
Maggie Smith
For me, it’s pulling back on my life. Getting the bird’s eye view. Writing a memoir is very useful for this. Thinking about myself 20 years ago, it’s like, “well, no wonder I’m not making the same decisions now. No wonder I’ve outgrown some of these things.” We can cut ourselves some slack and see that not as failure, but maybe as evidence of growth and therefore positive. If the decisions you made in your early twenties aren’t working for you in your mid-forties, is that a failure? Or does that just tell you that you aren’t frozen as a 22-year-old?
NONFICTION
You Could Make This Place Beautiful
By Maggie Smith
Published April 11, 2023
Atria/One Signal Publishers
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