38. You Could Make This Place Beautiful featuring Maggie Smith

Maggie Smith joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about having and holding boundaries in our work and in our lives, trusting our instincts as writers, taking risks, telling the truth as we know it, allowing our material to dictate form, how our work changes over time, and her highly anticipated memoir You Could Make This Place Beautiful.

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Also in this episode:

-protecting our children in our work

-poetry’s possibilities

-why we can only speak for ourselves

Books mentioned in this episode:

Blow Your House Down by Gina Frangello

In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado

The Two Kinds of Decay by Sarah Manguso

The Chronology of Water by Kidia Yuknavitch

Safekeeping by Abigail Thomas

Maggie Smith is the award-winning author of You Could Make This Place Beautiful, Good Bones, The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison, Lamp of the Body, and the national bestsellers Goldenrod and Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change. A 2011 recipient of a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, Smith has also received several Individual Excellence Awards from the Ohio Arts Council, two Academy of American Poets Prizes, a Pushcart Prize, and fellowships from the Sustainable Arts Foundation and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She has been widely published, appearing in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Best American Poetry, and more.

Connect with Maggie:

Website: https://maggiesmithpoet.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/maggiesmithpoet/

Get You Can Make This Place Beautiful: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/You-Could-Make-This-Place-Beautiful/Maggie-Smith/9781982185855

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Ronit Plank is a writer, teacher, and editor whose work has been featured in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Writer’s Digest, The Rumpus, American Literary Review, Hippocampus, The Iowa Review, and elsewhere. Her memoir WHEN SHE COMES BACK about the loss of her mother to the guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and their eventual reconciliation was named a 2021 Best True Crime Book by Book Riot and was a Finalist in the National Indie Excellence Awards, the Housatonic Book Awards, and the Book of the Year Awards. Her fiction and creative nonfiction have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes, the Best of the Net, and the Best Microfiction Anthology, and her short story collection HOME IS A MADE-UP PLACE won Hidden River Arts’ Eludia Award. She is creative nonfiction editor at The Citron Review and lives in Seattle with her family where she is working on her next book.

More about Ronit: https://ronitplank.com

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Follow on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ronitplank/

More about WHEN SHE COMES BACK, a memoir: https://ronitplank.com/book/

More about HOME IS A MADE-UP PLACE, a short story collection: https://ronitplank.com/home-is-a-made-up-place/

Connect with Ronit:

https://www.instagram.com/ronitplank/

https://twitter.com/RonitPlank

https://www.facebook.com/RonitPlank

Background photo: Canva

Headshot photo credit: Sarah Anne Photography

Theme music: Isaac Joel, Dead Moll’s Fingers