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“Let’s let go once and for all of the idea of the tortured artist.”
That sentence from Maggie Smith landed with clarity and conviction. Speaking with Washington Post book critic Ron Charles, the poet and best-selling author offered a vision of creativity rooted in joy, play and self-trust. Her latest book, Dear Writer: Pep Talks & Practical Advice for the Creative Life, is built around 10 essential principles of the creative process, unfolds as both a practical guide and an invitation to live with attention.
“Creativity is our birthright as human beings,” Smith said. “Every conversation we have with another human being that is not scripted is creative.”
Throughout the evening, Smith shared stories that reframed the act of writing as a form of engagement with the world. Whether making poems, raising children or figuring out how to get across town during rush hour, she emphasized that creative energy flows through ordinary moments.
The book’s 10 principles — attention, wonder, vision, surprise, play, vulnerability, restlessness, connection, tenacity and hope — serve as a loose scaffolding.
“Isn’t it?” Smith replied when Charles remarked that they sounded like the principles of a good life. “That was my ulterior motive.”
Attention, Smith explained, is a form of love. “If you love the world, give it the gift of your attention,” she said. “And if you don’t love the world, why are you making art?”
She read from her poem “First Fall,” the first she wrote after the birth of her daughter:
“The first time you see something die, you won’t know it might come back. I’m desperate for you to love the world because I brought you here.”
Smith described walking through Schiller Park, carrying her daughter, naming the trees and ducks and stars. “It felt very different walking through it with somebody who’d never seen it before.”
That act of re-seeing the world is what she calls “the poet’s eye.” While teaching poetry to second graders, she encountered a lesson plan suggesting teachers wear oversized glasses to help kids “see like poets.” She chose another approach. “Everybody in this room was born with poet’s eyes,” she told her students. “They’re just eyes. But they see the world.”
Smith encourages writers to meet their practice with flexibility. “If you write for three hours a week and it’s never at the same time — so?” she said. “Whatever your rituals are, I totally support that.”
Her creative life makes room for family, unpredictability and the unscheduled moments where writing happens between everything else.
She also offered practical advice for navigating critique. “What you end up with is something I call the Franken-poem … pieces and parts of other people’s feedback that have nothing to do with your vision.” She urged writers to trust their instincts and keep their voices intact.
When writing about painful material, Smith turns to metaphor. “I use craft as oven mitts,” she said. “If memoir is the hot stuff, the stuff that you’re like — I don’t know how to write about that — how can you use craft choices to hold the hot material and then hand it off to somebody else without hurting either one of you?”
She spoke of using the third person or shifting tense to gain distance when a subject feels too raw. “I cry is a hot personal sentence,” she said. “She cried is cooler.”
That care also extends to others who appear in her work. “None of us lives in isolation,” she said. “You can’t actually write a book about your life and not involve other people.” When writing about children, she offered a personal guideline: “When in doubt, take it out.”
Vulnerability, for Smith, is not a flaw but part of the creative calling. “Look at me. Don’t look at me. I want you to read this — but let’s pretend you didn’t.”
She spoke of the tension between wanting to share and needing space to create, emphasizing the importance of protecting that early, generative stage from external judgment.
She closed by reading from a section of the book that expands her earlier declaration:
“Let’s let go once and for all of the idea of the tortured artist. Let’s let go of the idea that creative people are all depressed, locked away in their own minds, creating from torment. It’s a lie. Create a new model: the artist who plays makes mistakes, changes their mind, tries something different.”
Smith lives by that model. She writes, teaches and speaks with clarity, humor and a deep belief in the power of presence. “We are helping ourselves when we learn how to make things and make things better,” she said.
To see with poet’s eyes. To love the world enough to name it. To use craft to carry what matters. This is the creative life Maggie Smith invites us to build — and to choose every day.
To view the conversation, click below.