The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison by Maggie Smith

'Columbus is a big city, so there are a lot of opportunities, but the arts community also feels intimate enough to make contacts, meet people across disciplines, and find ways to give back.' In some ways that book means more to me than the others because it showed me that the seemingly impossible is, in fact, possible.' But I will say that I could not be happier with my second book, *The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison*. 'I can’t choose a favorite book my other books might be listening, after all. I’m not always 'writing' either by hand or typing but I am always writing. It’s part of the way I think, part of how I process what I see and hear when I’m walking my daughter to school or driving to the dentist or sitting on my couch. I was driving the other day and in the daycare parking lot I realized I was saying a line out loud and fiddling with the rhythm and syntax. 'I love that, at this point, after so many years, I’m writing poems even when I’m not writing poems. 'One of the most important things I am constantly learning is that the work will come.

Introducing my children to the world has opened my eyes to parts of it I’ve taken for granted.' 'My kids inspire my writing all the time, especially now that both of them are talking (constantly) and asking questions like 'What is the earth for?' and 'Why is the sky so tall and over everything?' I find myself writing out of the experience of watching them read the world like a book they’ve just opened, knowing nothing of the characters or plot.

Like a magpie, a bird who collects any small, glittering bauble that catches its eye, I see or hear or read things that interest me all of the time.'

'My creative process is one of gathering and accruing. I tell students to trust themselves, to do their best to shake off doubt and insecurity as they draft, and to be careful not to revise the wildness out of their poems. 'I’m big on letting strangeness into your work. It sounds a bit counterintuitive 'you can achieve more by not doing too much' but often it’s true: if you tie up every loose end, if you scrub all the strangeness and wildness and ambiguity out of it, you can revise the life right out of a poem if you’re not careful. 'Sometimes the best thing I can do to improve a poem is to loosen my grip on it.

The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison by Maggie Smith