On Not-Knowing and Making This Place Beautiful

“When I sit down to write, I have no idea what the end result will be,” says poet and writer Maggie Smith. “I don’t know if it’ll be a poem, an essay, or a book. Deep into the process, I still don’t have a clear picture. And life is exactly like that.” In both writing and life, Smith finds this space of not-knowing to be fertile ground. “Things may not gel,” she says. “They may not work, and you may have to abandon the story you had in mind. Pick up another one. We have to be receptive and nimble enough to see what’s going to work and what’s not, and let things unfold from there.” 

Born in Columbus, Ohio, in 1977, Smith is a New York Times best-selling author of poetry collections, including Good Bones (2017) and Goldenrod (2021), and a best-selling memoir, You Could Make This Place Beautiful (2023). Her latest book, Dear Writer: Pep Talks & Practical Advice for the Creative Life (2025), explores creativity both on the page and in life. She contributes to the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Atlantic, and the Paris Review, among others, and is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship.

Smith and I talked about between-states as sites of possibility, why having your life implode can be freeing, and how, in this challenging time in America, we can make this place beautiful.

*

The Tibetan Book of the Dead guides us through bardo between-states, liminal periods of transition that are believed to hold great potential for insight. In Dear Writer, you discuss the role of liminality in the creative process. Can you talk a bit about how this works for you? Liminality is very much a part of the way I write. I’m the author, but I’m also receiving the piece. There’s an in-betweenness to being the maker and feeling like a piece of writing happens to me rather than I make it happen. I have to be comfortable existing in that intermediate state and not knowing what’s going to unfold. A lot of it is learning to be egoless in the composing process, where I just receive like a radio with an antenna, without making too many judgments. 

In terms of liminality in the work itself, when I’m writing a poem, I’m aware of the white space between stanzas as liminal space. It’s literal breathing room, a place for me to not only slow down and process but also to make a piece of writing more hospitable for the reader because it gives her room to move around and make connections. 

Is existing in between-spaces as a writer in dialogue with your day-to-day, nonwriting life? I like white space in my life the same way I like it on the page. My ideal day looks like a poem. I wouldn’t want to do the same thing all day—I love having a morning doing an hour of writing, then a walk, then reading. When I get up in the morning, if I have a to-do list, sometimes I get to half of it and sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I do quite a bit of writing, sometimes I end up weeding through my inbox. No two days look the same, and that’s the way I like it. I like that breathing space and variety. It feels more flexible and dynamic, with more possibility. 

Bardo can be a creative between-state, but it can also be a very unwanted period of loss. The bardo teachings say that when we die, there’s an initial period of denial: We hover around, wondering why all our relatives and friends have gathered in our house, and why everybody is crying. In a similar way, when something ends for us in the bardo between birth and death—like when we fall ill, or a loved one dies, or a relationship breaks down—we’re often loath to face the fact that we’ve lost the life we knew. In You Could Make This Place Beautiful, you write about how your marriage fell apart. What was the process of denial and eventual acceptance like for you? The idea of being a ghost in your own home is such a great metaphor. Hearing what you’re saying, I’m like, “Of course.” After my husband left, I was hovering around the life I’d had, a life that was over. 

But after a while, I discovered that having your life implode is freeing. We spend so much time worrying about worst-case scenarios, and when one happens, it’s devastating. Because I survived, though, I trust myself to handle whatever else may happen, however much it hurts: my kids leaving, the next relationship ending, losing my parents. Going through the pain of what happened with my husband was like walking on hot coals. Now I know I can do it. 

Did being a writer help you? Writing about such a wrenching experience—where one day my life was one thing and the next day, it was completely different—helped me a lot. People ask, “Were you crying every day writing your memoir? Was it the hardest thing you’ve ever done?” No, living was the hardest thing. 

We spend so much time worrying about worst-case scenarios, and when one happens, it’s devastating. Because I survived, though, I trust myself to handle whatever else may happen, however much it hurts.

Writing You Could Make This Place Beautiful was weirdly satisfying. Being able to find a form that felt true, to take everything from where it was swirling around and give it a place to live, helped me metabolize and accept what had happened. Even though the facts don’t change, the storyteller changes as she tells the story. And once the storyteller is transformed, so is the story. It’s a wild thing. 

That resonates with the bardo idea that we’re the artists of our lives. In other words, with our actions, we shape our path. When we accept that the life we’ve known is over, for example, we can move forward. Exactly. And in ways you can’t even anticipate, which is so exciting. 

At the same time, though, we’re influenced by the past. In your poem “Genetic Memory,” you talk about the things that have come down to you through your grandparents, like being able to “climb a telephone pole, shoe a horse, pray to saints, load a gun.” How influenced do you feel by your ancestry, whether individual or collective? I feel especially connected to my collective ancestry. Everyone talks about writing being solitary, but when I’m writing, it’s like I’m in this room full of all these poets and teachers and mentors who came before me, whispering in my ear. We’re never making anything alone, and I wouldn’t be writing if it weren’t for the poets I read obsessively in my teens and 20s. They showed me what was possible. 

Who are your literary forebears? Sylvia Plath, definitely. Her poems are astonishing—so strange, vivid, and visceral. When I started reading them, I thought, “Oh, people can do this! Women and moms can do this.” It was electrifying. Then there are the Beats, Anne Sexton, Donald Hall, Diane di Prima, Nikki Giovanni, Rita Dove, James Wright, Mark Strand, Jean Valentine. 

Reading all these poets put me on the path to finding living writers. I realized I could go to a bookstore or library to see them speak and ask questions. The first poet I ever had sign a book was Nikki Giovanni. I remember standing in line at a Borders bookstore in Columbus, Ohio, in the mid-nineties, holding her hardcover collected poems, totally starstruck. I’d never met a real poet before. It was so important for me. I was like, “Poets don’t just live in books, they’re in the world! They’re alive!” 

Until then, I’d had a hard time, like most people, seeing poetry as a living, breathing thing. I went to the dentist a while back and the hygienist asked me what I do. I told her I’m a poet, and she said she didn’t know people still did that. As if all poetry happened in the 1800s! I was like, “Yes, let me remove my giant Victorian ruff, because you’re cleaning my teeth and I don’t want to get water on it.” 

The real-world, present-day power of poetry is demonstrated by your poem “Good Bones,” which was shared by millions of people and read aloud by Meryl Streep in 2017 at an Academy of American Poets gala.

You write,

“. . .Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.”

There are so many difficult, tragic things happening in the world today. Do you feel that in your writing sphere, or in your larger community, you’re making this place beautiful? I’m trying to. I’d like to be putting things out there that make people think in different ways, appreciate beauty, take a minute to see or experience something through a new lens. I think people turn to “Good Bones” because it gives them hope that we can make this place beautiful, especially during what’s turning out to be a very tumultuous time in the world.

Where are you finding hope right now? In art. In other people. In community and connection. A lot of us have been toggling between hope and despair, sometimes multiple times in an hour, and one of the things that makes me feel a lot of hope is talking to people who feel the way I do, and seeing their actions. Borrowing courage from others, even when I don’t have a lot myself. There’s no creating without hope. Things feel unprecedented and chaotic, but I could name fifty other times in history when terrible things were happening.

We have to take the long view. Even just reminding myself of that wider perspective helps. Remembering that people have survived incredibly difficult times, that they made art, that they were brave. The stakes are so high that giving up is not an option.