Maggie Smith and Kathy Fagan talk poetry & life

Mary Alice Casey:

Maggie and Kathy, thanks so much for joining us today. We’re really very grateful that you’re with us. So I was wondering if we could start off by talking about what your earliest connections were as a professor and a student? And if you recall those initial impressions you had of each other or the first impressions you do remember?

Kathy Fagan:

I remember thinking that this was someone who was going to make a mark in writing. Because you have to be sort of equal — and I mean this in the best possible way, and I mean this for all of the best students I’ve ever had — sort of equal parts, arrogant and humble in order to do this thing. I noticed that in her immediately and the kind of personable writer that we’ve all come to know and love over the years. So that’s my initial impression of Maggie. I’m not sure what your initial impression of me would’ve been.

Maggie Smith:

It was wonderful, of course.

Kathy:

Of course. You joined us.

Maggie:

I did.

Kathy:

So I must’ve done something right.

Maggie:

I did. I joined you, and I was sort of winnowing it down I think at that point and trying to decide whether I was going to stay in Ohio, effectively in my hometown, or go across the country because the other two places I was considering for my MFA [Master’s of Fine Arts] were Arizona and Washington State. So being really far away and that sort of call of adventure. And I just remember how, and you still are this way, what a calming presence you are. And then getting feedback on my first poem and workshop. I’ll never forget this. I remember the poem. It was “Delilah” from my first book.

Kathy:

The first book.

Maggie:

Yeah, from my MFA thesis, and you had asked me some questions. And I can still see your handwriting. I mean it’s unmistakable and —

Kathy:

And barely legible.

Maggie:

No, it’s quite legible to me. And you always gave reading suggestions on the poems and it was not prescriptive feedback at all. It was like, “Have you considered this?” All of that was, and I think this has affected my teaching a lot, an invitation to consider things differently, to reconsider things, to look at things from a new angle, to step back and widen the view a little bit. And that gave me so much agency.

Kathy:

I’m really glad to hear that that was your experience.

Mary Alice:

That’s awesome. Were there other things, Maggie, that made you choose Ohio State for your MFA in creative writing?

Maggie:

I received a fellowship. And that was the big. I mean for me, I am the oldest of three. It was, I still had loans that I had taken out from my undergraduate institution and it was poetry. It wasn’t med school, it wasn’t law school — although one could argue now that maybe those aren’t necessarily terrific investments every time either. But I knew I didn’t want to go further into debt to immerse myself in reading and writing and learning about poems for three years. I feel really lucky that during those three years in the program, I made a lot of close friends, people I still am in touch with now, including Kathy. But I also had a life outside of the program that was really rich. I still had Sunday dinner with my family and my sisters were around and some of my friends from college and high school. And so I feel like I got to have a really full life that was immersive but not narrow during that time.

Kathy:

It’s a really important point you made too, about paying for your education versus not paying. And we were very, as the only remaining-at-OSU co-founder of the MFA program, one thing that we very much were committed to was making sure that our students had three years as opposed to two, which is true in most programs, although more and more programs are catching on. And that they wouldn’t have to pay for those three years, that they would be supported somehow, mostly through teaching assistantships. And that’s made a huge difference, I think, also in the quality of the applicants that we receive.

Mary Alice:

How would you describe, Kathy, how your connections have grown through the years with Maggie?

Kathy:

Well, I can answer that I think best through a more kind of general question about how I feel about teaching and making relationships, lasting relationships with particularly my MFA students. I feel like the MFA students are my people. I know why they’ve joined the program, I know what they want to do with their lives. They’re committed and devoted to writing in the same way that I am. And so I understand that about them sort of flat out. Beyond that, I think the kind of relationships that teachers develop with students — and, Mags, I’m sure you’ve had this experience, too — it’s not unlike the experience we have with any friendship. There’s some kind of personal connection that’s made from the start. And teaching and learning are not one-sided exchanges. I learn from my students literally every week, and I learned a lot from Maggie and from her classmates.

Maggie:

Well, I’ve stayed here. And so we’ve stayed in touch. I mean, this is one of the gifts of staying put. I mean there are plenty of the sort of downsides to staying put, right? Like, “Oh, but you could be off doing X and Y and Z.” But for me, one of the real blessings of being rooted in a place is getting to continue relationships with other people who are still here. And so we’ve continued to — we see each other at readings or sometimes at concerts, I’ll run into you.

Kathy:

Yes, that’s right.

Maggie:

Because we like some of the same bands. And we’ll get together for dinner or happy hour once in a while if we can manage it and we text each other when one of us has good news.

Kathy:

And bad news.

Maggie:

And bad news.

Mary Alice:

Kathy, I noticed on your latest book, Bad Hobby, that the first endorsement on the back cover is Maggie’s.

Kathy:

Yes.

Mary Alice:

And she said, “I drank Kathy Fagan’s Bad Hobby down in one gulp as I suspect you will, reader. I can’t imagine that anyone could set this book down with poems still unread.” What does that mean to you?

Kathy:

It means everything to me because I respect Maggie’s work so much. I made a conscious decision with my publisher to ask only former students for endorsements for the book. And so Maggie is one of three, Yona Harvey being another, and Natalie Shapero being another — students with whom I have ongoing relationships and whose work I admire tremendously. I could have asked another two dozen, but I was so happy to read those words by Maggie and she didn’t hesitate. This is work when you endorse someone’s book. It means you have to read it in advance, you have to think about it, you have to think about what you’re going to say about it. You have to think about how a reader is going to respond to the words that you’re writing about the book.

Maggie:

I have to say though, you just said, “You have to read the book in advance” and “you have to think about it” and “you have to spend time inside it and think about what to say.” And of course, I’m over here thinking “you get to, you get to, you get to.”

Kathy:

Got you. Yes.

Maggie:

I mean, it didn’t feel like a favor to me at all. It felt like an honor and a gift to get to do it. I mean, honestly. And who do I ask when I need a letter for something or a blurb for something or just a piece of writing advice? I ask you.

Mary Alice:

When I was seeking perspectives for a story that I was writing about You Could Make This Place Beautiful, your latest book [said to Maggie], Kathy was the first person to respond when I asked for comments on the book, and she said, “In the wake of a painful divorce, Maggie Smith in prose both lyrical and uplifting, examines her marriage, herself and more importantly, her burgeoning sense of herself as an author able to touch thousands of lives and hearts.”

Maggie:

I mean, come on. What more —

Kathy:

It’s a mutual admiration society. What can I say?

Maggie:

Yeah, what more do you want from someone who’s known you since you — I mean, we say “baby poet.” — when you first start out. I mean, Kathy has known me since I was a baby poet. I was 22, 23 years old. I had just no idea really, what I was doing or what my poems were supposed to sound like or how to build them or what the possibilities were at all. And she was such a guide.

Kathy:

I mean, I do have a strong sense that we’re in this together, and since we’re talking about mentor-mentee relationships and teacher-student relationships: Again, I think the writing life is central to both one’s life as a student and one’s life as a teacher. And that brings us together and makes us in many ways equals. And I think that’s what you’re talking about, that kind of vulnerability that goes along with being a poet and sharing your work in a classroom. That’s extraordinary. And that’s hard work in and of itself, never mind the writing and the revising and putting the books together. That’s difficult. Not everyone can do it.

Mary Alice:

Does anybody else call you Mags?

Maggie:

Other people who love me call me Mags. Yeah. It’s funny. When I started at Ohio State, you started calling me Mags, which was perfect because a lot of my friends, friends from high school, if I see them, they call me Mags.

Mary Alice:

And so then Kathy was your thesis advisor, right?

Maggie:

That’s right. Yeah. Kathy was the person who helped me shape three years of poems and —

Kathy:

Very much that first book, right?

Maggie:

Yeah, it is. It’s my first book, Lamp of the Body. Is just a very slight revision of my thesis. I think I graduated in what? Spring of 2003, and I spent that summer revising it. I pulled a few poems out, I put a couple of new poems in. I maybe shuffled a few things just slightly around and then sent it out to book contests in the fall and it won the prize at Redhead Press.

Kathy:

It’s a beautiful book. Beautiful book.

Maggie:

Thank you. It feels ancient to me now.

Kathy:

It needs to be reissued, I think.

Maggie:

Okay. All right. From your mouth to the publisher’s ears.

Kathy:

Exactly.

Mary Alice:

I was wondering if you could take a moment and each of you read something from your latest books.

Kathy:

Do you have a preference as to who goes first?

Mary Alice:

No. Go for it, Kathy.

Kathy:

Well, since we’re talking about teaching, I’m going to read a poem from Bad Hobby called “School.” These days just before dawn, I find myself

asking mom if I can stay home from school.

I teach school now and mom is dead, but

when I was a kid and said I didn’t want to go,

she wouldn’t make me. She’d pass a cool palm

over my forehead and get on with her day.

Sometimes we’d nap together, but mostly she

went to her job and I’d be alone all day.

I don’t remember what I did, and she never

once asked me, never once asked why

I wanted to stay home, and so I didn’t ask

myself. She must have trusted me, or not

much cared, which may be trust’s result.

I stayed home because some days it felt

perilous to be seen, and other days it felt

perilous not to be, and these mornings, it is

so much both that I do not tell my students

or family because I think they must trust me,

and because I think they don’t much care

whether I’m alone all day with them or not.

Mary Alice:

Thank you.

Kathy:

Thank you.

Maggie:

How do I read something after that? I just want to — I’m breaking the spell of the poem.

Kathy:

Not at all. With that book, you couldn’t possibly.

Maggie:

I think I’m just going to read the first page of the memoir, which is sort of like the thesis statement.

Mary Alice:

Appropriately.

Maggie:

Yeah. That sort of tells you what to expect and perhaps what not to expect from this book. So this is the first page of the prologue: “Before we go any further together, me with my lantern, you following close behind, light flickering on both of our faces, I want to be clear about something. This isn’t a tell-all. A tell-all would need an omniscient narrator, God-like, hovering over the whole scene, seeing into the houses, listening to the conversations and phone calls, reading the texts and emails. I’m jealous of this all-knowing narrator, even though she doesn’t exist. I want to know what she knows. This isn’t a tell-all because all is something we can’t access. We don’t get all. Some, yes, most if we’re lucky, all, no. There’s no such thing as a tell-all, only a tell-some, a tell-most maybe. This is a tell-mine and the mine keeps changing because I keep changing. The mine is slippery like that.

“This isn’t a tell-all because some of what I’m telling you is what I don’t know. I’m offering the absences, too. The spaces I know aren’t empty, but I can’t see what’s inside them. Like the white spaces between stanzas in a poem, what is unspoken, unwritten there? How do we read those silences?

“The book you’re holding in your hands was many books before it was this one. Nested inside this version are the others, the version I began deep inside my sadness, thumbed into my phone in bed on sleepless nights, the one I scribbled out with sparks in my hair. You’ll see pieces of those books inside this one. Why? Because I’m trying to get to the truth, and I can’t get there except by looking at the whole, even the parts I don’t want to see, maybe especially those parts. I’ve had to move into and through the darkness to find the beauty. Spoiler alert, it’s there. The beauty’s there. I know the real people who are part of this story, the story of my life, may read it. Most importantly, my children may read this book someday. Hi kids, I love you. I share this story with them because we share the life. But this tell-mine is just that, my experience. There’s no such thing as a tell-all because we can only ever speak for ourselves.”

Kathy:

It’s exquisite. Such a wonderful and appropriate and poetic beginning, necessary beginning. That’s what I mean by poetic. Beautiful.

Maggie:

I love poetic and necessary as being like cousins.

Kathy:

I think they absolutely are.

Maggie:

I agree.

Mary Alice:

What do you admire about Kathy’s writing?

Maggie:

Oh my gosh, what don’t I admire about Kathy’s writing? There is something about her poems that balance clarity and mystery in such a way that I feel like I’m getting a kind of cleanness of thought, if that makes sense. It doesn’t feel muddy at all, but it’s also not plain. Something is handed to me so crystal clear, I can see right through the water, right down to the bottom. And yet I don’t always understand it. I don’t quite know what’s in the water even though I can see it.

And so what that means is, it’s her poems are the kind of poems I can go back to and read a hundred times and feel and see and sense something new in them every single time and learn from them. I mean, I still go back even to the earlier books and I read these poems and I think, how did she do that? When you see someone doing a sleight of hand trick and you think, “How did that person tie up all of those things in a page and a half in a way that feels so satisfying and yet doesn’t tie it up so neatly with a bow that I don’t feel like I have a place to enter.” So maybe that’s it. It’s, she hands you something and she makes room for you in it, which is like — she makes it look easy and it’s not.

Kathy:

Well, those are the poems I love. So that means a lot to me. And just if you don’t mind my sort of talking about my sense of Maggie’s poems in particular, I would first sort of note her fluency. I think her facility with language, again, it’s clarity and there’s a way in which she’s able to see — and I’ve noticed this again and again in Maggie’s work and in the prose as well — see through a narrative to a sort of core metaphor. And metaphor to my mind is both the affect and the effect of poetry. And you do that so incredibly well over and over again. You never miss. So yeah. She also, her work ethic is extraordinary. It would have to be in order to be as prolific as she is. It’s a rare thing to make a living as a writer. And Mags is doing that. I’m so proud of you.

Maggie:

Oh my goodness, thank goodness this is being recorded. So on a low work ethic day, if I’m having one of those, “I need chocolate in the fetal position,” days.

Kathy:

Likewise.

Maggie:

I can be like, “Remember that conversation I had with Kathy when she said those kind things?”

Mary Alice:

How does writing help you deal with hard things? Is that your go-to?

Maggie:

I don’t know how I feel about anything until I write it down, which is maybe a character flaw and not an approach to one’s work. But at least, in the case of the memoir, I sort of naively believed that if I applied enough thinking and that work ethic to my adult life and the end of my marriage, I would be able to solve it. I would have it figured out. And then if I wrote deeply enough into this experience, it would make sense over time. In lots of ways that did not happen.

There is something so contextualizing, I think, about writing about one’s experience. And there’s something about giving experience a shape, a form that feels good even if the experience itself feels bad. Like, “Oh look, I made this thing and I’m finally able to articulate something about this amorphous experience that feels like it’s been swirling around me. But here it is sort of captured in a way.”

Kathy:

Articulate it and discover it anew, right?

Maggie:

Yes.

Kathy:

I mean, you can cry to your friends about your divorce or a dying parent, certainly talk it through in therapy to process it. But when you write, it’s apart from you, you have to sort of create a persona, in my experience, apart from yourself, to write a thing down. And as you do, you learn things about yourself and about the experience.

Mary Alice:

I’m wondering if there was a moment after you’d earned your MFA, Maggie, that you felt like true partners and peers on a life level?

Maggie:

I’ll always look up to her as a mentor. But I remember seeing Kathy publish another book, another book, another book. And I was working on my first book and I just thought, “What does it take? That will never be me.” I mean, that was the sort of fear underneath it, was when you see your teachers doing these wonderful things and having this long career and frankly having each book be more exciting than the last book, and thinking, “How do I play the long game? How will I ever do that?” And so it’s been sort of personally exciting for me to publish more books that I feel like I’m doing more Kathy in my life than I thought was possible, if that makes sense.

Kathy:

I did not ever feel as if I was a voice of authority and Maggie was the youngin at all. I felt like we were sharing a common pursuit, period. I feel grateful that I had — I was able to participate in their growth. And that’s the way I think of it.

Maggie:

But that’s what makes you a great teacher, too. I’m sure you know plenty of people who would take credit or say, “Well, I made this person what they were.” Those people exist.

Kathy:

They exist, but they’re not telling the truth.

Mary Alice:

I’m curious about what advice the two of you might offer incoming students. Whether they’re first year students pursuing their undergraduate degrees or graduate students seeking an MFA or a PhD, what you might suggest as far as getting to this type of relationship that the two of you have enjoyed during Maggie’s years in school, but also then moving forward?

Kathy:

Well, Mags is closer to that age and experience than I am. But I would say right off the top of my head, don’t be me, don’t be the student I was and stay away from your professors out of some sense of fear or you might be bothering them. I will sometimes seek students out if I feel as if there’s a too-far distance between me and them. But I have found over and over — and I gave this advice to my nephew when he was in college, too — go see your professor during office hours. At the very least, drop an email and say, “How do you think I’m doing?” Or “I would like to share this excerpt, whatever, poem or story with you.” Or “Could we meet for coffee? I’ll bring you a cup of coffee. Could we sort of chat about my work, what I’m reading?” Whatever it is.

It doesn’t have to be an urgent request and it doesn’t have to be filled immediately. But I would say just lose your fear. Your professors want to know you. They can’t write you a letter of recommendation if they don’t know you, and you might want that letter at some point. And it just makes for a much more fulfilling experience for both teacher and student, I think, if the student has the courage — and I understand it takes courage — if the student has the courage to reach out. And I would give the same advice to teachers. If there’s someone who seems to be hiding in the shadows, why not send an email and say, “You want to pop in for office hours?” That’s totally appropriate, I think. What do you think, Mags?

Maggie:

I was going to say come to office hours, honestly. I was a pretty shy and reticent college student, and I think what helped me was that I went to a school that had fewer than 2,000 students. And so my classes were small. It was easier to get to know my teachers, also I would just see them in town because campus was so tiny. So for me, being in a really small environment was helpful. Although I will say, being in the MFA program at Ohio State felt to me like being in a small college. Because even though you are at a large university, you are traveling in the same buildings with the same people. So it’s sort of like a small college environment within a large university environment.

Kathy:

That’s true.

Maggie:

And so having close relationships with some of my undergraduate professors sort of gave me the model, I think, for what was possible for me in graduate school. So it felt natural coming from that environment to come to office hours or send an email or ask for literary magazine suggestions or suggest a coffee or a pop in.

Mary Alice:

So your latest accomplishments, a New York Times Best Seller, literally four weeks on The New York Times Best Seller list, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. I mean, those are amazing accomplishments. How do you feel about that? And how do you feel about that for each other?

Maggie:

I was going to say, I’ll tell you how I feel about Kathy’s Guggenheim, which is, it’s about damn time. I think I texted like, “You’ve deserved this for such a long time. I’m so glad it happened with this book, but you’ve deserved it for all of them.”

Kathy:

Thank you, Mags.

Mary Alice:

Well, tell us about what it feels like to be a New York Times bestselling author.

Maggie:

I don’t even know. I was folding laundry when I found out, and I just said, “What?” It’s a really strange thing, to be honest. I’m someone who refuses to be told numbers. I don’t want anyone on my team to tell me anything about how books are doing. And I’ve been like that on every book. I don’t want to know, it doesn’t help me make things, it doesn’t help me talk about things to know how many copies are in circulation or how it’s selling or how it’s ranking. I mean, that matters to people who are selling it, so I understand why it matters, but it honestly just makes me anxious. Whether it’s doing poorly or well, it makes me anxious to know how it’s doing. And so I refused to be told any numbers leading up to the book’s publication, so I had no idea how pre-orders were doing. And so I think actually everyone else on the team thought this was going to happen, and I didn’t because I didn’t know any of the numbers. So it was a huge shock.

Mary Alice:

What was the next thing you did after you sat down that piece of laundry in your hand?

Maggie:

I called my mom. Yeah, I called my mom. And she was like, “What?” I think we all had the same reaction. And then I told my kids, and they had no idea what that meant. But they were like, great. And I was like, “Let’s go out to dinner.” So we did.

Kathy:

I was on the phone with Express Scripts when I saw the email from the Guggenheim.

Maggie:

No.

Kathy:

And I was trying to figure something out with Express Scripts, and I just put my — and I could see that the email was looking a little different from the emails I’d received in the past from the Guggenheim Foundation. I just put my head down on the desk and laughed and laughed and laughed. Yeah, and I do want to say about that, that in academia, when you receive an award like that, you get a year off. And what that means is that the folks who are left behind have to do the heavy lifting and fill the space that you have left. And so I’m just so grateful to my creative writing colleagues and my students for being willing to do that for me and for being so generally supportive about the award. And I’m just hoping that with the year I can make some work that’s worthy of their attention and their sacrifice, frankly.

Mary Alice:

And with this year, you’ll be working on your next book?

Kathy:

Yes.

Maggie:

Hooray.

Kathy:

I’m not sure I’ll finish it, since Bad Hobby just came out in 2022 and it usually takes me four or five years, but I’m going to get closer. That’s my plan.

Mary Alice:

And how about you, Maggie? What’s next for you?

Maggie:

Oh my goodness. I’m sort of in a rest mode right now after the superhuman extroverting of writing, publishing and then going on book tour for the memoir. So I’m sort of in a restore and repair phase right now. But my next book is out actually on my birthday, which was an accident, in February next year. It’s a picture book, an illustrated picture book for kids. It’s called, My Thoughts Have Wings. So I’ll be gleefully going to library story hours. And I’m working on essays right now about creativity. So that will be the next next thing, is a collection of essays.

Mary Alice:

Just knowing that it’s an Ohio State community primarily that’s going to be listening to this conversation, is there anything else that you want to bring up?

Kathy:

I just want to shout out the English department, the Department of English. It is not always the case that creative writing programs — MFA programs in creative writing — are associated with English departments. I don’t think we would have existed, and Mags wouldn’t have been an MFA student here, had it not been for our English department, in cooperation with our English department. So I do think that’s very unique and super special. I also just want to remind our listeners that the MFA programs in the arts at OSU are spectacular in dance, in theater, in visual arts. I get to teach these students much too rarely, in my opinion, in special workshops. And they’re just so smart and so energetic and devoted to their craft and to their own teaching. So I just wanted to do a little shout-out there about that.

Maggie:

I love that. I love that.

Mary Alice:

And anything else you want to add, Maggie?

Maggie:

I think that’s a perfect way to end. I think ending with a shout-out is a wonderful way to end.