Literary Cleveland Presents: Ruth Awad & Maggie Smith

Ruth Awad (00:00:00):
How nice that I'm not just a work robot valued based on my production. No one cares if I wrote a couple lines of a poem. In the scheme of things, no one cares. Those couple words mean nothing. But for me, it was like I've stolen back a little part of my life.

Laura Maylene Walter (00:00:19):
Welcome to Page Count, presented by the Ohio Center for the Book at Cleveland Public Library. I'm your host, Laura Maylene Walter, and today we're excited to share a conversation between two outstanding Ohio poets, Ruth Awad and Maggie Smith.

Laura Maylene Walter (00:00:36):
They appeared together in a virtual event called Outside the Joy: Poetry and Possibility, which was hosted as part of Literary Cleveland's Inkubator conference back in September. This is such a fantastic conversation for poets and writers or just anyone trying to live and work creatively in today's world. And by the way, this isn't the last of the Inkubator that you'll hear on Page Count. Our first episode of 2025 will feature my conversation with Cambodian American author and activist Loung Ung. We spoke at the Inkubator about her memoirs, what it's like to see your book and life turned into a Netflix film, the novel she's working on and a lot more. So stay tuned for that in January. Finally, we'll cap off the year with an episode on December 31st that offers some New Year's resolutions for writers. So check that out if you're looking for inspiration for 2025. Until then, enjoy this discussion, which was held on September 18th, 2024 and is brought to you now thanks to Literary Cleveland. Enjoy.

Matt Weinkam (00:01:40):
Hello and welcome to Literary Cleveland's 10th annual Inkubator writing conference. My name is Matt Weinkam, I'm the Executive Director of Literary Cleveland. We're so happy you could all join us for our third event of the conference Outside the Joy: Poetry, and Possibility with Ruth Awad and Maggie Smith. Tonight's event is the last of our three virtual programs leading up to the big two day in-person conference at the Cleveland Public Library. And our goal over the next week is to advance the craft and careers of local writers, further artistic dialogue, foster a more connected literary community, and invite more people to create dangerously. I'm excited to introduce our panelists. First is Ruth Awad, a Lebanese American poet, a 2021 NEA Poetry Fellow and the author of the just published OUTSIDE THE JOY. As well as SET TO MUSIC: A WILDFIRE winner of the 2016 Michael Waters Poetry Prize and the 2018 Ohioana Book Award for poetry.

Matt Weinkam (00:02:39):
She's the co-editor of the FAMILIAR WILD: ON DOGS AND POETRY. She's the recipient of the 2020 and 2016 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Awards and won the 2013 and 2012 Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize and the 2011 Copper Nickel Poetry Contest. Her work appears in the Atlantic, AGNI, Poetry, Poem a Day, The Believer, The New Republic, Pleiades, The Mississippi Review, The Rumpus, many other places. She has an MFA in poetry from Southern Illinois University in Carbondale and lives and writes right down the road here in Columbus, Ohio. Ruth, thank you so much for joining us. We're glad to have you here. Next up, Maggie Smith is the author of seven award-winning books. DEAR WRITER: PEP TALKS & PRACTICAL ADVICE FOR THE CREATIVE LIFE, YOU CAN MAKE THIS PLACE BEAUTIFUL, LAMP OF THE BODY, THE WELL SPEAKS OF ITS OWN POISON, and GOOD BONES, named by the Washington Post as one of the five best poetry books of 2017. As well as KEEP MOVING and GOLDENROD. The title poem of GOOD BONES...

Matt Weinkam (00:03:38):
You all know this. The title poem of GOOD BONES was the official poem of 2016 by Public Radio International, has been translated into a dozen languages. Smith's poems have appeared in the New York Times, Tin House, the Believer, The Paris Review, Kenyon Review, Best American Poetry, and on the CBS primetime drama, MADAME SECRETARY, get out of here! Come on <laugh>. A Pushcart Prize winner, Smith has received fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Academy of Poets, the Ohio Arts Council, the Sustainable Arts Foundation. Maggie, thank you so much for spending time and being here with us. And here to moderate their discussion is Literary Cleveland's own program coordinator Danny Caine, author of the poetry collections CONTINENTAL BREAKFAST, EL DORADO FREDDY'S, FLAVOR TOWN, and PICTURE WINDOW. You may know him from his influential non-fiction books, HOW TO RESIST AMAZON AND WHY and HOW TO PROTECT BOOKSTORES AND WHY. His poetry has appeared in The Slowdown, Lit Hub, DIAGRAM, HAD, Barrelhouse, and many more. And he's the co-owner of the Raven Bookstore, which was Publishers Weekly's 2022 Bookstore of the Year. Danny, thanks for moderating this discussion.

Danny Caine (00:04:42):
Of course, it's my honor. Thanks so much Matt, and thanks to Ruth and Maggie. I'm really thrilled and humbledto be here, especially after listening to those bios and just familiarizing myself with your amazing accomplishments. I've been looking forward to meeting you for a long time. I think I would love to start with just hearing some poetry from both of youso we can get into that space. Maybe Ruth can go first in celebration of her very recently published book OUTSIDE THE JOY from Third Man Books, which is incredible. You should buy it. Michelle dropped the link. Yeah, Ruth, let's hear some poetry.

Ruth Awad (00:05:15):
Thank you. It's so, so nice to be here with you all virtually. I love virtual events, by the way, because of the chat. Like I keep up when I'm doing these so I can just see everyone talking to each other. Anyway, I'm going to read just a couple quick poems from OUTSIDE THE JOY, give you a little, little taste, a little morsel. Which I guess leads into this first poem called "Hunger."

Ruth Awad (00:05:43):
Imaginary, the value of the pound, and yet when it drops / like an apple rotted from its branch, my family may starve. / 1,507 pounds to the dollar. What that means if you're not / an economist: a kilogram of meat is now a luxury. A line / huddles outside a Beirut bakery though the price of subsidized / bread is up again. The worst financial crisis in 150 years, / the World Bank says. And I don't see the story anywhere / here. In my house with its lights on. Where I choose to skip / meals. Once we were stitched together by food stamps. / Dirt poor, my mother describes it, though land is more valuable / than almost anything. America and its incongruent abundance: / fields of corn and the hungry in the streets. The cattle well fed. / Security guards in grocery stores. If you die from hunger, the spirit / goes searching for food and the wanting never stops. Hard to say / what you'd do to live. My father picked an apple from someone's / tree, was chased until he dropped it. If you steal an apple, it's a crime. / If you withhold an apple from someone who's hungry, it's not.

Ruth Awad (00:07:17):
And the crisis continues in Lebanon as I'm sure you've all seen on the news recently with the terrorist attacks there. So this book is a lot of it is about my family, both my father and my mother's side. One of the main themes of the book kind of rotates around is my mother and her failing health. She has an aortic aneurysm on her heart and a valve that needs repaired. And that kind of starts the clock on how much time she has left with us. There's about an average eight year survival rate after you have an aneurysm repair, and it's just strange and surreal to have this, this visceral clock on our time remaining together once she has that surgery. So this next poem is about my mom. "The Chariot."

Ruth Awad (00:08:10):
About eight ounces, the weight / of the human heart, / and for all its galloping / my heart is neither the horse / nor the chariot / pulling me through the dead / Capricorn winter, / all tooth and nail, / past the stripping birches / in the failing light, / past the crying cockerels / and empty-bellied nests, / until it’s me and the bleating / wind and the wilting scarlet / runners – in the summer / you’ll tell me the aorta / is the size of a garden hose, / your aneurysm the size / of a fig. The future is / a season I can’t imagine.

Ruth Awad (00:08:57):
And then this is the last poem I'll share tonight because it was inspired by one of my favorite Ohio poets to be, Mary Oliver. Ever heard of her? The way that she wrote about nature so simply, and yet so profoundly, I think is something that I'm always just aiming for in my poems. "Reasons To Live."

Ruth Awad (00:09:20):
Because if you can survive / the violet night, you can survive / the next, and the fig tree will ache / with sweetness for you in sunlight that arrives / first at your window, quietly pawing / even when you can’t stand it, / and you’ll heavy the whining floorboards / of the house you filled with animals / as hurt and lost as you, and the bearded irises will form / fully in their roots, their golden manes / swaying with the want of spring— / live, live, live, live!— / one day you’ll put your hands in the earth / and understand an afterlife isn’t promised, / but the spray of scorpion grass keeps growing, / and the dogs will sing their whole bodies / in praise of you, and the redbuds will lay / down their pink crowns, and the rivers / will set their stones and ribbons / at your door if only / you’ll let the world / soften you with its touching. /

Danny Caine (00:10:30):
Wow, that's amazing, Ruth. Thanks so much. And now you all have evidence to believe me when I say that this book is amazing. Those are all from OUTSIDE THE JOY, really, really powerful. And I have lots of questions for you. We'll get to that in a minute. But first before thatwe got to hear some poems from Maggie Smith.

Maggie Smith (00:10:49):
Alas, I was muted. I was going to say I'm suddenly cranky because I was completely under a spell, as I'm sure all of you were. And now I'm breaking it by having to read my own poems when really I just wanted to sit here <laugh> and listen to Ruth.

Maggie Smith (00:11:03):
Oh my gosh, those poems, if you don't have OUTSIDE THE JOY yet, please remedy that. It will make your life better as poems do. But Ruth's poems are particularly magical in that way. I'll read a few poems from from GOLDENROD and the poems feel old to me now, which is strange. The book's only three years old. But you know, as a writer, like you're constantly, once you set one thing down you're picking up something else. So it sort of feels like revisiting an older iteration of myself to go back into these poems, even just from a few years ago. But I flagged a few that are very Ohio. It's honestly kind of hard to find poems that aren't very Ohio in any of my books, but these are all poems that kind of think, kind of think about Ohio and about home. The first one I'll read is called "Written Deer," and it has an epigraph by Szymborska, which is: "Why does this written doe bound through these written woods?"

Maggie Smith (00:12:09):
My handwriting is all over these woods. / No, my handwriting is these woods, / each tree a half-print, half-cursive scrawl, / each loop a limb. My house is somewhere / here, & I have scribbled myself inside it. / What is home but a book we write, then / read again & again, each time dog-earing / different pages. In the morning I wake / in time to pencil the sun high. How / fragile it is, the world—I almost wrote / the word but caught myself. Either one / could be erased. In these written woods, / branches smudge around me whenever / I take a deep breath. Still, written fawns / lie in the written sunlight that dapples / their backs. What is home but a passage / I’m writing & underlining every time I read it. /

Maggie Smith (00:13:16):
Well, two things. I don't know how to type. And I only use these two, these two guys, these workhorses. And I hand write everything first and my handwriting is atrocious. And so sometimes I misread my own handwriting when I'm transcribing a draft from a legal pad or a notebook into my laptop. And sometimes those accidents yield interesting results like misreading world. And word led me to think about what those two things have in common. And its possible erasure, which is not an upper of a thought, but it's where I went with that particular thought. Okay, I'm going to read one of the cento's in this book. There are a few I wrote more than I included here, but I only, I only put a few in this book. They're all called "Ohio Cento." And each line of these poems is written by a different Ohio poet, either a poet born in Ohiosome of whom are no longer with us, or a poet who is living in Ohio or was living in Ohio at the time that I wrote the poem and has kind of made a life in the state. "Ohio Cento."

Maggie Smith (00:14:28):
Today, summer is slang / a psalmist might have written. I cup in my hands / an idea of an idea / bordered by cornflowers and Queen Anne’s lace. / I wonder what this means. I rise into adult air— / the incredible bigness of, you know, all that sky / wealthy with rustling leaves / all over Ohio, gathering a reflection. Of what? Listen. / You hear that bird? Cardinal. Calling his wife / for something to happen. Nothing happens. / Life is funny but not. / The worst things are all true; I have been the girl, / a bird almost⎯of almost bird alarms, / and then again, and again, and then was gone.

Maggie Smith (00:15:30):
So the, the cento is a collage form that requires no writing. That's the trick of the cento. It's an assembly project, it's a collage. So I like to...I actually, I often have students write cento's because it's one of those forms where if you're not feeling particularly inspired and your your your own idea center seems to not be cooking up much, you can go to the library or turn around and go to your bookshelf and pull off a bunch of books of poems and then find a way to kind of assemble it all together to make a new whole.

Maggie Smith (00:16:05):
And it's really satisfying. Okay, last poem. A lot of my poems draw directly from my real life, and this one certainly does. I reached into my pocket once on a walk during lockdown when we weren't allowed to be with others at all. And I found these three objects in my pocket. That's a pink Mr. Potato Head ear. That's an old acorn, maybe you can hear it rattling around. And then this really smooth, shiny black rock. And my son had put them in the pocket of my coat and I found them out on a walk. And in that moment, it was March of 2020 and everyone was terrified and no one knew what was going to happen. They made me feel protected somehow in a way that makes no logical sense, but I still believe in. And so I wrote this poem based on those objects. It's called "Talisman."

Maggie Smith (00:17:12):
They look like gifts a crow might bring / a human girl, desperate to impress her. / In the left pocket of my thrifted emerald coat: / a scuffed acorn, a glassy black stone, / one pink Mr. Potato Head ear. / When I touch them, I can believe / almost anything. Who’S to say / they can’t keep me safe? Who’S to say / a bird can’t court someone’s daughter? / But in this life it’s my son who shows / his love like a creature that clever, / leaving treasures for my fingers / to worry against. I carry them like / anything I love—until they warm in my palm. / Until I believe. Walking alone at night, / the sky feathered blue-black and slowly / folding over me, I pocket my left hand / and tell myself a story about my life, / a story I call “Talisman,” a story / that might end well if I tell it right.

Danny Caine (00:18:21):
Thank you, Maggie. That was amazing. Really wonderful. Those are from GOLDENROD, which is an amazing book.

Ruth Awad (00:18:28):
Such a beautiful book, too.

Danny Caine (00:18:29):
I hesitate to break the spell of the magic we just witnessed from both of you, but this is the portion of the program where I asked you some questions. All right, I'm glad Ohio came up in both of your readings. Ruth, with a shout out to the perhaps the greatest Mary Oliver, Ohio poet. And Maggie reading one of the Ohio Centos. And it was actually the Ohio Centos that kind of inspired my first question. I moderated a talk with Hanif on Monday night for Inkubator, and I asked him a very similar question and it led to a really interesting discussion. So you get the question too.

Maggie Smith (00:19:04):
Oh, can we use his answer? <Laugh>

Danny Caine (00:19:06):
<Laugh> I'll let you answer first and then I'll tell you what he said. You're both Ohio writers. Can you talk about what being an Ohio writer or a writer in Ohio, if you prefer it means to you?

Maggie Smith (00:19:18):
Oh, well, I sort of think of myself as sort of an ambassador for writing that doesn't have to happen on the coasts <laugh>. You know, I mean, there's something to be said about staying put, as a model. You know, even for younger people who are, who are sort of growing up and thinking maybe I want to go into...whether it's writing or another art form and thinking like, do I have to go to LA, do I need to go to New York? Or even Chicago? Like, can I stay in the Midwest, but do I need to go to a larger city? And for me, one of the beauties of staying put and making it work is being able to say like, see, you actually don't need to leave to make things. You can do things here. I also think, you know, I've said this before, but I think taking care of yourself as a human being takes care of the writer in you.

Maggie Smith (00:20:14):
And so for me, I'm not living in Ohio because it's my favorite weather or landscape. I live in Ohio because I was born here and my people are here and I have strong roots here and I can't really imagine leaving because of the people. And so sticking around for me and being an Ohio writer is about taking care of me as a human. And when I feel grounded and peaceful and supported and loved as a human, it puts me in a head space where I can make things in a way that I don't know if I could make things if I were living and feeling lonely or stressed or like I didn't belong in that place.

Danny Caine (00:20:57):
I love that. I love how it kind of refutes the stereotype of the suffering writer <laugh>. Like actually, you don't have to suffer the right...Well, in fact, if you're taking care of yourself, you're a much better writer.

Maggie Smith (00:21:09):
Like, let's not if we, if we can avoid it.

Danny Caine (00:21:11):
Right. All right. Ruth, tell us about being an Ohio writer.

Ruth Awad (00:21:15):
Oh, you know, this is a complicated question for me because I feel like in a lot of ways I am of no states <laugh> and of Ohio. Like I was born in Virginia, we moved around a lot when I was growing up. So like all over the Midwest, I've lived in Indiana, do not recommend. I've lived in Wisconsin, Illinois, Tennessee. And then my family is from Tripoli, Lebanon. And my mom grew up in Du Quoin, Illinois. So for a long time it just had this sense of placelessness almost. And being of a, a hyphenated identity, Lebanese-American always puts you in this kind of weird liminal space where it's like, what is a country, what is a border? But Ohio, I will say is the first place to ever felt like home to me. And in part that's because it was my chosen home. I moved to Columbus, Ohio to go to undergrad and I got to study with incredible poetry professors who are actually like, love the reason why I decided to stick with this for as long as I have. So yeah, it's where I found my community. It's where I started to shape my voice as a writer, where I've connected with other people who were interested in saying something about the world and maybe trying to make it a little bit better or more understandable or easier to bear in some way with their small part with their words.

Danny Caine (00:22:41):
I love the idea of chosen home. And we might return to that later in the conversation. Okay. As promiseda quick version of what Hanif, how Hanif answered the same question while we're talking Ohio writers. He talked about the responsibility of all of us, meaning all of us Ohio writers, to like craft the narrative of the state that we want, which I thought was really interesting. Like we can work together to tell the correct, the true story of Ohio in opposition to whatever else other people are saying about it here. I, and I really love that too. But I think the real answer to that question is, you know, we each have one. I don't think there's one correct. But I I've loved hearing all three of your answers to that. Speaking of other Ohio writers, Ruth, you mentioned Mary Oliver influenced your book. I'm glad, I totally saw that, as I was reading it. Can you talk about other Ohio writers who have helped you along the path or inspired your work?

Ruth Awad (00:23:38):
This is going to sound like I'm sucking up, but I love Maggie with my whole heart. And even before we were thick as thieves...

Maggie Smith (00:23:48):
We're thick as thieves,

Ruth Awad (00:23:49):
Silver Dollar Ponies on the harvest patio together...

Maggie Smith (00:23:52):
We have a group text. It's scandalous.

Ruth Awad (00:23:55):
We do. It's where we gossip. You can't <laugh>. But truly, when I was at OSU for undergrad, Maggie, I think we just barely missed each other. Like you were toward the end of your time at the MFA at OSU.

Ruth Awad (00:24:11):
You gave a reading. It was in Denney Hall, it was the middle of the day. And I just remember you reading these poems. It's like, about apocalypse maybe?

Maggie Smith (00:24:22):
Oh yeah!

Ruth Awad (00:24:23):
And I was like, I want to do this for the rest of my life. I, and I felt that because of your poems. I, it opened up so much possibility for me. Because I had been reading mostly like white male poets, you know, the classic contemporary rotating crew of poets that everyone reads when their first starting their poetry education. And you like kicked open the doors in my brain and showed me what poetry can do and how personal and yet universal it can feel. It truly shaped my work. It's still shaping my work.

Maggie Smith (00:24:56):
Oh my gosh, Ruth, you never told me that before. That's wild. Thank you.

Ruth Awad (00:25:00):
That I held onto it until this moment.

Maggie Smith (00:25:02):
My gosh. You had that in your little pocket for when I'm on on a, a zoom the nerve <laugh>. That's so kind.

Ruth Awad (00:25:12):
I mean it...yeah. We are spoiled with incredible writing talent in Ohio though. Like.

Maggie Smith (00:25:18):
It's true.

Ruth Awad (00:25:19):
There's so many incredible writers here. Maggie and Will Evans both read at my book launch last week. Will Evans -- incredible, incredible poet. Scott Woods has a hand in shaping so many poets in Columbus specifically. And, moreover, I think teaches us how we can build community with our poetry. Which is really instructive for me. We have some folks here who have influenced my writing here from Ohio. Sayuri Ayers is incredible and love her work. She is always pushing the bounds of the lyric and some experimental sensibilities. Mandy Shunnarah is an incredible Palestinian poet and does an incredible job of embodying that hyphenated identity I was talking about that's really been nurturing for my work.

Maggie Smith (00:26:11):
Also, her new book on skateboarding in the Midwest is really cool.

Ruth Awad (00:26:15):
Such an advocate for the Midwest and all the cool stuff going on here. <Laugh>. Yeah.

Danny Caine (00:26:19):
I feel like Michelle is in the background scrambling to find all these links. I wanna give her a second to.

Maggie Smith (00:26:24):
Oh, it's called MIDWEST SHREDS. Mandy's cool.

Danny Caine (00:26:27):
Maggie, who are your Ohio.

Maggie Smith (00:26:30):
Ohio poets? Yeah. The poet that I worked with the most when I was at Ohio State in the MFA program was Kathy Fagan. And she's still a good friend of mine and her poems slay, like they just keep getting better every time she publishes a new book. It's better than the book before, which is exactly the model I think you want in your mentors, which is like, there's no softening, there's no resting on your laurels, there's no, like, well I can phone this one in 'cause I have a Guggenheim and seven books, and, no, it's just like she's just always pushing herself to try new things and I return to her work over and over again and also just lean on her a lot for just advice. You know, it's nice to have people around who will give you good professional advice. James Wright was probably the Ohio poet that I fell in love with as an Ohio poet, and who is still one of my very favorite poets.

Maggie Smith (00:27:33):
Like THE BRANCH WILL NOT BREAK is one of my top 10 books of poetry ever. One of the really positive things my now ex-husband did for me when we were married was find me a First Edition, and I kept that and I'm very happy I still have it. That book is just genius. It's like when James Wright started reading Lorca and the poem started getting really deep image surreal, but they're still completely Ohio. They're like very, very Ohio. Mary Oliver of course. Stan Plumly, the late Stan Plumly, one of my mentors was born in Ohio, and wrote these really beautiful poems that were sort of pastoral in nature but also so obsessed with memory and childhood and mortality. And I think I'm obsessed with all of those things too. So he's been a big influence I think up there. You guys have Dave Lucas and Phil Metres.

Maggie Smith (00:28:34):
I mean you guys up there have some really, really great poets too. I'm not trying to hog them all for central Ohio, but we do have, Ruth is right, we have an incredibly rich literary state and that is, I think due in part to the fact that we have more, I think this is still true. I'll say it as if it is and someone can factcheck me in real time, like a moderator. I think we have more universities and colleges per capita than any other state in the US. And small liberal arts colleges, private schools, state schools, community colleges, that's a lot of faculty, a lot of students, a lot of creative writing classes. And so we just have tons of writers here and it's brilliant. It means that you could live in a city and have a bunch of poets on a group text, and they might be willing to meet you for happy hour and talk about poetry and non poetry things occasionally.

Danny Caine (00:29:34):
Oh, that's great. I love that. Thank you for those, and thank you for helping me make a checklist of people to check out. So speaking of group chats, this question was kind of inspired by seeing like the pictures from Ruth's book launch a Two Dollar Radio and seeing Maggie there in Scott Woods. It seems like you're both really plugged in and nurtured by the poetry community, and I think that's evidenced by your answers to that question. So this is a two-parter. First just talk about the importance of community, of poetry community, to you. And second, one of the things we really think about a lot at Literary Cleveland is how we can have a role in helping people form that community. And I know it can be really hard and isolating to feel like you're not part of a poetry community yet. So I'm wondering if you have pointers for someone in terms of how to find that community and and get nurtured by it.

Ruth Awad (00:30:24):
Yeah, I think that the first step to finding a poetry community is to go to a poetry thing. Yeah.

Ruth Awad (00:30:31):
Go to a reading or visit, say, your local bookstores. If you don't know where readings are happening, there's like a hundred percent chance that your bookseller's gonna know a thing or two about a thing too. And just talk to people. No one's gonna think you're weird because A, all poets are weird. True. And, and B, like we're all just kind of lonely and looking for our people. So almost anyone that you talk to is probably starting out with a similar baseline where they're just like, I'd love to meet other people who like doing the things that I like doing or who think about the world in a similar way that I think about the world. Yeah, that's super helpful. That's what helped me even figure out that like OSU offered creative writing workshops. I didn't know that until I went to my first poetry reading and then a poet there was like, you know, you can study this, right? And I was like, what? What do you mean? <Laugh> I feel like everything that I've learned throughout my life has been because of the generosity and graciousness of someone else. And so, yeah, whenever I have a chance to help someone else out or like show them this, that or the other about poetry, I'm doing it because people did that for me. Not me ever got anywhere in my poetry career and what I've learned because other people have helped me.

Maggie Smith (00:31:58):
Yeah. Go to a reading or go to you know here in town like Two Dollar Radio has book clubs and workshops, Thurber House is here. There are so many things if you show up and become a regular right, like don't just show up one time. But if you show up multiple times and people recognize you, probably they're going to come and ask you sort of like who you are and what you do and you'll sort of find your footing that way. I know that is maybe daunting for those of us who identify as introverts, but writing is solitary enough. You know, I spend pretty much eight hours a day in the room I'm sitting in right now or like out on my back patio just listening to music and clacking on my laptop with these two fingers or writing in a notebook, which is faster for me.

Maggie Smith (00:32:48):
Let's be real. And so I'm so grateful to be able to go and support Ruth at her book launch and, frankly, run into Will who I haven't seen in way too long. I'm like... Your daughter is how old now or go to events that Scott Woods is putting on. Or when the poetry forum used to happen, going to those events or the Thurber House picnics or whatever they are it's so nice. If you pay attention, there's probably something going on nearly every day of the week, wherever you are or in driving distance to wherever you are. And if you pick a few things, you'll probably end up seeing the same people over and over and you might find your people that way. Yeah. And it's important I think because what we do is so much in our own heads, you know, I have plenty of friends who are not writers at all and what I do with my life is probably a little odd to them.

Maggie Smith (00:33:41):
Like my family, they're like, what? And you are doing what exactly. But it's so nice to have a group of writer friends, you know, like Ruth and Keith Leonard and Julia Dasbach and Saeed and we'll all meet and we don't meet as often as we should because we don't all have schedules that align and then someone gets sick or somebody has a thing. It doesn't happen as much as it should. Sometimes it's a group text. But if we can get together and sit down around pizza and drinks and just chat, it's a lot about just stuff that has nothing to do with writing at all. Right. Because we're human beings and we're supporting one another as friends and that's valuable. But it's also really nice to have people that you're close to who also get what you do. They get the anxiety of having a book on submission.

Maggie Smith (00:34:30):
They get the trepidation of, like, oh I have to go on book tour. They understand what it means to apply and wait to hear back from fellowships or to not know if you should have an academic job or not have an academic job or be self-employed or have a corporate job. Like these are all things that the people that you know who don't write might have a hard time parsing some of these issues with you. But it's really nice to have friends who get some of those pieces of your life in a really concrete way.

Danny Caine (00:35:02):
I totally agree. When I was just a poetry baby, I remember going to the Brews and Prose reading series.

Maggie Smith (00:35:08):
I love those.

Danny Caine (00:35:09):
There are parts again, like Literary Cleveland is working to facilitate that for people. And so I'll just like... I know you're all at an Inkubator event right now, but I'll plug our in-person conference this weekend. Like this is designed to help you find these people. So I really hope to see some folks reaching out for poetry and other what other writing community this weekend up in Cleveland. Maggie, you mentioned your family not really understanding what you do. I definitely feel that I read GOLDENROD and OUTSIDE THE JOY back to back, which I thought was actually really enriching and very interesting and I think they're very complimentary of each other. One thing that runs through both books is family Maggie, one of my favorite lines. You read it "What is Home, but a book we write." So family runs through both of your poetries. I would even argue it seems to be amused for both of you. Whether it's Ruth's parents or Maggie, your reflections on motherhood. Just talk about how and why family inspires you to write.

Maggie Smith (00:36:09):
Honestly, since I was writing my first poems, so many of them are about self and place and memory and identity. You don't really get at any of those even abstractions without going through your family <laugh>. So much of who I am as a person and therefore as a writer is because of the sort of air I breathe and the water I swim in, like my environment. And it's the Midwest, it's my family of origin and it's also my children. Those are the sort of constants in my life. So there are plenty of variables I like to write about the variables, but the constants are really this landscape of Central Ohio. My family of origin who I'm very close to and still see weekly whether they like it or I like it or not, like we are just very enmeshed and and my kids.

Maggie Smith (00:37:04):
And so I sometimes I think I'm not even writing so much about other people. I'm writing about what I'm learning about myself and being a human being in the world via my relationships with other people. It's really hard to know yourself in isolation, right? Like who am I? Well I am this to this person, I am this to this person. I am not this because this other person is this. So much of it is sort of in relief based on, on other people and my family. And, and so I find myself a lot going back in my mind and kind of drawing contours around those places and people and things that make me who I am. And I think I would be a very different person and therefore a very different writer if I had grown up someplace else or with different people. I mean even the way I talk, even my sense of humor, I mean so much of who I am is directly because of my, my Midwestern upbringing and my family that it's like inescapable. I couldn't sort of separate it from anything if I tried.

Danny Caine (00:38:18):
Yeah. So it's like you kind of write about family 'cause you have to.

Maggie Smith (00:38:21):
What else would I write about? I mean that sometimes, I'm like, oh, so people have other material. It's so funny to me because I don't, it's so, it feels like the air I breathe. It would take me a concerted effort to not write about the people who are on my heart all the time. It would have to be a project where I would be like, you're not allowed to write about these people. You have to do something else. And maybe that would be a fun assignment, a prompt of like erasure. Like you don't get to write about anybody in your sort of inner circle. And now what? Now what do you have, Smith? <Laugh> Save me.

Danny Caine (00:39:03):
I was just thinking it's so funny that you talked about that becoming a prompt, 'cause it's so "poetry teacher" view. I had this same thought. It's like here's an impossible thing. Let's turn it into an exercise.

Maggie Smith (00:39:13):
Yeah. Take you, now take everything away that makes you. You now write about something else. It's almost impossible because it really is. It's like the ground you grow up from. I don't know how, I don't know how to remove it.

Danny Caine (00:39:29):
Yeah. All right. Ruth, tell us about the relationship between your poetry and your family.

Ruth Awad (00:39:34):
Like Maggie said: inextricable. I think that so much of my poetry obsessions revolve around questions of self and belonging. And I think our first understanding of self and where we belong in the world is through our family. And so my poetry naturally revolves around my family. I did give myself a project and tried to <laugh> write more from the self. I really actually struggled to write from just my point of view without also incorporating family and then ancestors and rippling out and out. It's so hard. It's incredibly hard to just write from your point of view. And even when you're just writing from your point of view, it's been shaped by your family. Like their fingerprints are all over it. So it's really inescapable. Also, I'll just say that my family, they're hilarious <laugh>. Like so many of my poems are just inspired by my parents being characters and oddballs and just really good storytellers.

Ruth Awad (00:40:40):
Like one of my poems and my first book was almost verbatim just word for word, a story that my mom told about the first time she met my father when she was 19 and she was engaged to someone else. I hardly even had to "poem" that, you know what I mean? <Laugh>, I just like put some line breaks in her storytelling and added a couple metaphors, whatever. And then in OUTSIDE THE JOY, "All of the Oranges of Tripoli" is just like a retelling of something my dad did where he literally changed the Wikipedia entry for oranges to convince me and my sisters that oranges came from Tripoli. They all started there and I'm just like, I don't know. How are you not supposed to use that as subject matter? It's great. It's great storytelling and I think that makes for great poetry.

Maggie Smith (00:41:28):
Yeah. And I don't know that my children will become writers. They might just be like, okay, we're gonna go as far from what our mother does for a living as humanly possible. You know, I don't think very many children of lawyers wanna be lawyers, but I wonder sometimes I'm like, oh, what material am I like inadvertently handing them with all of my idiosyncrasies, which I'm sure are legion and I don't even realize that they're there. But I have to say, Ruth, I remember before your first book came out, you might remember this, you read at it wasn't at Larry's then it was at and it wasn't at the Rumba. Where was it? It might have been at Bossy Girls. Cause the poetry forum here moved a couple different locations and you read some of those poems from your first book. And I remember sitting at the bar there and listening to those poems a lot about your father and just again, just absolutely enchanted. And I think I like accosted you afterwards and said like, these are going to be a book like Christopher Walken, like my hand on your arm. That book is so beautiful too. I mean, this one is so, so beautiful. But your first book, please, if someone else had written that first book, you could just die happy, right? Like, that could be like the shining golden thing that existed in the world and then you have the nerve to come and do it again. Just the nerve.

Ruth Awad (00:42:54):
So sweet. Thank you, Maggie. I vividly remember that conversation because you actually gave me the piece of poetry advice that I tell to literally any workshop I do, any students I'm working with. And if they're working on a book-link collection, I tell them your most bangerest, best poem has to be the first one in the collection. And then your second best one, that's the last poem. And then find a pretty good one to put in the middle. And then you structure the collection.

Maggie Smith (00:43:20):
Start strong, end strong.

Ruth Awad (00:43:21):
I could have saved thousands in first book contest submission fees.

Maggie Smith (00:43:26):
<Laugh>.

Ruth Awad (00:43:27):
I mean I immediately took your advice and then it was a finalist at Four Way and then it got picked up. So everyone take Maggie's advice. Best poem first thing in the book <laugh>.

Maggie Smith (00:43:38):
Don't hide it. Don't tuck that thing away.

Ruth Awad (00:43:41):
Do you have like chronological ordering that you're gonna stick to? No, no.

Maggie Smith (00:43:45):
No.

Ruth Awad (00:43:46):
Scrap all of that.

Maggie Smith (00:43:47):
Give them an amuse-bouche. They need that right up front.

Danny Caine (00:43:50):
There's actually a question in the Q&A about structuring a poetry book. So there we go.

Maggie Smith (00:43:55):
There it is.

Danny Caine (00:43:57):
Ruth, I don't wanna put you on the spot, but I really loved "All the Oranges of Tripoli" and I'm wondering if you'd be willing to read it.

Ruth Awad (00:44:03):
I love that poem.

Danny Caine (00:44:04):
Just another chance to plug how great OUTSIDE THE JOY is.

Ruth Awad (00:44:07):
Thank you. I had been bookmarking this collection. This is off topic, but this is a postcard of my dog, Rosemary <laugh>. She is adorable. Anyway,

Maggie Smith (00:44:21):
I thought it was a small white pig. Like the view is not great on Zoom, I'm just gonna tell you. But that's not exactly what Rosemary looks like. She's actually very, very cute.

Ruth Awad (00:44:30):
She's cute, but she does look like a small white pig sometimes. Not inaccurate. All right, so this is the poem that I ripped directly from my father's story. Thank you to Hassan Awad. "All The Oranges of Tripoli."

Ruth Awad (00:44:50):
It is not enough for everything to stem / from Lebanon — no, my father contends, / it was Tripoli where oranges first originated, / and if my sisters and I had any doubt — / Just look at this Wikipedia entry for oranges, / my father says, his gap-toothed grin widening / not unlike an orange split open, just look — / and like magic (whose origins, I’m told, / are also Lebanese), there for the world / to see: unassailable proof that oranges / come not from South China nor Spain / but Tripoli. And I know oranges / belong to everyone and no one, / and I know my father / is not above editing Wikipedia — / did you know Wikipedia / may well have Lebanese roots? — / And his research may be scientifically / unsound, a story heard from an uncle or cousin, / but this is absolutely true: once / there were vast orange orchards in Tripoli, / and when they were in bloom / the whole city smelled like citrus / — it was like a beautiful woman’s perfume, / it was like you could smell sunlight, / and during the war and after / and every time Tripoli burned — imagine / the fruit peeled in your palm, / now imagine that fruit is a city — / It was unlike anything, he says, / I’m telling you, anything.

Danny Caine (00:46:31):
Thank you so much. I love that I heard you mention it and I just had to hear it because I distinctly remember it from my, my time spent with that book. Okay, I think I have two more questions and then we'll move over to audience Q&A. The panel is ostensibly about joy based on the description. So we're gonna end there. But first we're gonna take a detour into despair.

Maggie Smith (00:46:52):
Oh, good.

Danny Caine (00:46:54):
<Laugh> Because it's like it's, it's a difficult world. There's a lot of pain going on. And that enters, I think both of your booksIn GOLDENROD, Maggie, you write "America, you are grand in theory, poor in practice." and Ruth, you write, "I must love my country because I mourn it." Although it strikes me that it's unclear which country that is which part of your hyphenated identity. But you also say it is very American to be this sad on a Tuesday. So can you just talk about the perils and promise of writing poetry and times of political violence, terror, just all the horribleness.

Ruth Awad (00:47:29):
Where to start? I think that one of the gifts that poetry gives us is a way to begin understanding things that are otherwise incomprehensible. I think that I often turn to poetry to give me a language for things that don't have a language. And violence, I think is one of the realities of the world. And specifically America. It's an incredibly violent country founded on colonialism, white supremacy. And our ongoing commitment to imperialism has been the detriment of so many in the world, currently, very close to my heart, the genocide in Gaza with full U.S. Support and backing. And that violence is also being extended to Lebanon, and it's looking like a regional war might be imminent. So how are we supposed to live knowing these horrible things are happening and feeling helpless in the face of them? There are a lot of things that we've talked about tonight that thread into this building community, supporting each other, relying on each other, not relying on a state or a political party to be the thing that saves you. We have to rely on each other to save us. And if you are a writer, I think that one thing that you can contribute to your community is to help give language to some of these incomprehensible things. To give language to the sense of injustice and hopelessness that so many are feeling. And to give language to even give people hope, you know, to help people find the thing that makes enduring the unendurable possible.

Maggie Smith (00:49:17):
Ruth, that's it, period. I mean, honestly. Oftentimes it feels like playing with blocks to be a poet when terrible things are happening in the world. And I'm like, well, I, I'm not a first responder, right? I'm writing poems and I don't say, I don't mean to diminish the art of writing poems, but it can feel very frustrating to be toiling over line breaks when people are just dying needlessly here and in other parts of the world. And a poem is not a tourniquet, right? A poem is not that. A poem is not food. A poem is not water. And yet I do think poems can say the unsayable. And I don't know, I, I know I feel like I hear a lot of people talking about like going to poetry for comfort. I don't do that <laugh>. I mean sometimes I do like, it's nice to have a poem to read at a memorial service.

Maggie Smith (00:50:18):
It's nice to have a poem for certain occasions. But really what I go to poetry for is to be changed, to sort of crack open something in my own thinking, to have a different conversation with myself about something, to see something from a new perspective, maybe even to gain a little bit more of my humanity back as much as it starts to like kind of erode because of constant exposure to terrible news. And so spending time in a poem, whether I'm the reader or the writer, reminds me that I'm a human being on this planet and makes me feel closer to other human beings on this planet. And I think that helps us not be complacent about what is happening to other human beings on this planet.

Danny Caine (00:51:08):
Really powerful, both of you. And it feels very wise to me, and I'm sure to many others in the, in the zoom tonight. Okay. So that's what poetry can do in the face of despair. My final question is lifted directly from the description of the panel. How can poetry help us not just survive, but also to find joy?

Maggie Smith (00:51:29):
Nothing feels better than being for me, and maybe this is a character flaw <laugh>, but for me, maybe aside from like being deeply entrenched, very up close during a live performance of like a favorite band or snuggling my child, very few things can top the feeling of writing and feeling like it's going well. Like that is a real feeling of like pure joy. You know, when I start writing and then all of a sudden I look up and I realize like four hours have gone by and I haven't eaten and I don't know why I have a headache, it's because I haven't had anything to drink. That feeling of sort of being in communion with your creative self, I find that so like deeply joyful and inspiring to me. And it reminds me that no matter what else is going on in my life materially, that there is always this place I can go to that has nothing to do with anything else that's going on in the world.

Maggie Smith (00:52:30):
It doesn't matter what else is going on, it doesn't matter how much I have in my bank account. Doesn't matter. The argument I had with someone earlier, it doesn't matter if I got the thing or didn't get the thing. No matter what is happening materially in my life, that place is still there and I believe cannot be corrupted or touched. And so to me it's this like deep sense of self-trust, which is not the same thing as joy, but I think, I think for me, they're very close and that I'm just like, oh yeah, I can get there and no matter what else happens, I'll be able to go back to that special spot for me. And then the rest of it is bonus. Like the fact that I can get to do that with myself and then make a thing that I can share with other people, and then maybe they'll spend time with something that I've written and get something out of it. Some consolation or some change of perspective or just like a line they really like or something they can read at a memorial service or share with a friend or, or whatever that that kind of communion with others that making art mix possible is like an extra layer of joy on top of the just like, I got to do the thing. Joy. That's just me.

Danny Caine (00:53:46):
I love that. Thank you Maggie.

Ruth Awad (00:53:48):
I love that too. Maggie. I love that words invite a lot of play, you know, and when you put them in the just right order, it's like you've unlocked a secret code. Only you could unlock it. It is so satisfying. I will say though, for me, I don't get a lot of joy out of the actual writing. It's like I mostly hate it <laugh>, but I can't stop <laugh>.

Maggie Smith (00:54:14):
We have to talk about this the next time we hang out.

Ruth Awad (00:54:17):
Like I'm always trying to scratch an itch and sometimes I'll get the spot, but most of the times I don't. Maybe that's it for me, though. I feel like I'm mostly just missing the mark. So it's frustrating and stressful, but when you get it right, it's incredibly satisfying. But for me, like the joy of writing comes just from like carving out time to make something. There was a blank page and now there's not a blank page. And how nice that I'm not just a work robot valued based on my production. No one cares if I wrote a couple lines of a poem in the scheme of things, no one cares. Those couple of words mean nothing. But for me it was like I've stolen back a little part of my life because I've made time to create something just for the pure fact that I created it. And I don't know, that's one way I think that we can claw back a little of what capitalism takes from us.

Maggie Smith (00:55:15):
<Laugh>. Amen.

Danny Caine (00:55:17):
I was gonna say it's both a challenge and a huge blessing that poetry doesn't fit into the system with the capital S.

Maggie Smith (00:55:24):
Well, yeah, there's, there's plenty of supply and a lot less demand. Right?

Danny Caine (00:55:28):
You just can't make sense of it in economic terms.

Maggie Smith (00:55:31):
<Laugh> It doesn't work.

Danny Caine (00:55:32):
A problem for most of our bank accounts. But like, it's also a really beautiful thing. Okay. Thank you for that wonderful conversation and for answering my very hard questions. Let's turn to some audience questions. I got a couple really good ones here. The same person has two really good questions for each of you. So I'll do individual questions for the first time tonight. We'll start with Maggie. Your work seems to be a balance between poetry and prose. As someone who navigates both genres, how do these forms inform each other?

Maggie Smith (00:56:05):
I'm always writing as a poet. I don't know how not to, I mean, that's where my formal training is and, you know, my first three books are poetry. So when I started branching off into prose, I'm still writing those books as a poet. And believe me, my editor knows it too. Like I'm writing in vignettes because I'm a poet. I'm breaking up paragraphs into tiny chunks or having one sentence chapters because I'm a poet. Even when I'm writing prose, I'm a poet who's going to the right hand margin, or I'm a poet who's playing with plot and character, or I'm a poet who's telling a story in paragraphs. But I don't think I'll ever think of myself as a prose writer. I'm just a poet who sometimes writes books in prose.

Danny Caine (00:56:52):
I hear that from a lot of poets who have written prose books as well. And I think it's really lovely. So thank you and keep it up. And <laugh> for Ruth, I think one of the, the most tragic things about like political violence or these acts of terror is that they can often destroy archives or storytelling or the how culture preserves itself through words. So the question here is how do you write into an archive ancestral and familial that is incomplete? How do you navigate this uncertainty?

Ruth Awad (00:57:24):
Poorly? <laugh> Stumblingly? That's such a good question and I think it requires a level of analysis that I honestly have not applied to my work quite yet. I'm always trying to think, unfortunately. And fortunately, like sometimes you are put in an ambassador kind of position when you have identities that are marginalized or have been historically oppressed and feeling that weight on your shoulders can really get in the way of actually doing the thing. And just writing, I've come to terms with the fact that anything I write about, regardless of the subject, I could just be writing about my dogs, it's still a Lebanese poem 'cause I'm Lebanese and I made that poem and you know, my dogs, because they're mine, they're also Lebanese. So <laugh> it counts. But yeah, I do think that just like creating poems regardless of the subject matter that is contributing to the archive and hopefully, you know, will mean something to someone somewhere. And that has to be enough. I don't think that we ever get the certainty in life in anything that we do. And you just have to kind of trust yourself and trust your community and try to keep reducing harm where you can. And I guess that's why I try to focus on with my poetry and hopefully it matters one day.

Danny Caine (00:58:57):
Yeah. Well, you mentioned getting joy from creating a not blank page where there was a blank page and like in the face of people who are destroying archives, it's a really beautiful act to refuse to let that page be blank. So a really interesting question here, I think we're seeing you both tonight after releasing multiple wonderful books, you know, well on your way, you've put the great books into the world. But I wonder this question is kind of about where you were before all of that happened. "So I am one of those perpetually aspiring poets who can't seem to ever execute. How did you first start writing poetry and how has your approach to the craft evolved over time?" What's your poetry supervillain origin story? <Laugh>.

Maggie Smith (00:59:42):
<Laugh>. I started writing poems before I started reading poems, so I'm sure they were terrible because I didn't even know really what a poem was. When I started writing poems, I started writing as a high school student who was very obsessed with music. And so I would listen to my parents' record collection. And then later my own cassettes and CDs. Yes, this was the late eighties, early nineties. And transcribing song lyrics kind of showed me even though I was reading mostly fiction, because I think we all grow up reading mostly fiction, even though I was reading mostly fiction, thinking about songwriting actually helped me think about what language could do to kind of distill or crystallize a moment or describe a feeling using imagery or metaphor without there needing to be stuff happening. Like there doesn't have to be a plot, a story. It could really just be a speaker kind of emoting or thinking about something or seeing and processing something.

Maggie Smith (01:00:45):
And so I think most of my earliest poems were inspired by listening to song lyrics before I really knew what I was doing. And then not until I got to college and started taking intro creative writing and poetry workshops, you know, in my late teens, early twenties, that I start really reading widely, you know, and came across the poems of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton and James Wright and Mary Oliver, and Robert Frost and Emily Dickinson and saw all the different models and thought, oh, I can sound like any of these people, or I can sound like none of them, right? Like ideally none of them. That's, you know, we all kind of start out as cover artists. I think when we're starting to write, just like if you learn how to play guitar, you're probably not writing your own songs first. You're probably playing whatever your parents listen to or whatever your friends like.

Maggie Smith (01:01:40):
And then after a while you start to find your own voice and signature style. And I think the same is true probably for any art form, whether it's visual art or writing. You, you start by imitation and then over time you start to realize you sound more like yourself and you kind of find your own signature style. Like, I love a couplet, I love a mid-length line that goes about halfway across the page. If I had to count most of my lines probably have four strong beats aligned despite the fact that they're not metrical. It's a Midwestern kind of talky, which is, that's the rhythm. I love metaphor. And so all of those things, but it took time to kind of gel into what that was going to be so that I sounded more like myself and less like a Sylvia Plath cover band. And like that can take a long time.

Maggie Smith (01:02:35):
Like it's not like one day you start writing poems and then like the next week you're like, well, I've decided I have my signature style. And it evolves. I mean, that's the beauty of having a long life in the art, is that I wouldn't write the poems in my first book the way that I now, the same way I wouldn't lay them out on the page the same way. I wouldn't punctuate them the same way. I wouldn't title them the same way. It's not that I don't like that book, it's just that the writer I was at 22, 23 is not the writer I am at 47, 48. So we get to, we get to evolve, thank goodness.

Danny Caine (01:03:14):
And that perhaps explains why when you were reading poems from GOLDENROD tonight, they felt old in that short three years since the book came out. Right?

Maggie Smith (01:03:22):
Yeah. Right. Cause you keep going. It doesn't, it doesn't stay still. I mean, every book, every poem is a time capsule. It's like a record of the person you were at that time and the kind of thinking and crafting of language that you were capable of at the time and were drawn to at that time. And in three years you might be both capable of and drawn to different things. And that's not to ever discount what came before. It just shows you're growing. I think it's, it's actually a really good thing to like look back at earlier work and be like, oh, wow. I would not address that material in the same way.

Danny Caine (01:04:03):
Yeah. I think the hard part is doing it from a place of love and not from a place of cringe.

Maggie Smith (01:04:09):
Oh. Yes. Yeah. But cringe is okay too. It's like we look back at our, you know, I look back at like photos from, thank goodness there aren't that many of them 'cause it was pre-internet and pre-smartphone. But I look back at photos of myself in high school and college and I was like, that was an interesting outfit. Like, that was a haircut, you know? And it's okay. I say that almost with parental love to the person I was back then. And I feel that way about my early work. Like I have a kind of parental love and like grace that I can extend to those poems and that point.

Danny Caine (01:04:45):
Great. Ruth, what's your super villain origin story with poetry?

Ruth Awad (01:04:50):
Similar to Maggie, I was very much part of a Sylvia Plath cover band early on <laugh>. I love that. That's gonna live in my head forever. <Laugh>. I started writing poems when I was just a kid, like just repeating these sing-songy little lines and it amused my parents. So I kept doing it <laugh>. And then when I turned 12, my mom gifted me ARIEL by Sylvia Plath, and I was changed. I mentioned that I wouldn't be anywhere in the world without having so many different people throughout my life either keep like, encouraging me onward or teaching me the things that they know or, you know, pushing me in the right direction that could help me pursue this. And I've had incredible teachers my entire life. Just by luck, I guess, because we moved around so much, what are the chances? But in seventh grade, my now deceased teacher, Mr. Hanney, was one of the first people who realized that I was interested in poetry and like, would make special writing assignments for me so I could practice writing sonnets. So I started writing Shakespearean sonnets in seventh grade.

Maggie Smith (01:06:06):
I'm so behind <laugh>.

Ruth Awad (01:06:08):
It was so wonderful. That's so cool. I'm forever indebted to him because I don't know that I would even have pursued this without him. And then he told my eighth grade teacher about me loving poetry, and so she did the same thing, would give me like little special assignments on the side. And yeah, I just had such great teachers growing up who really nurtured my love for poetry, but still, I wrote bad poetry forever and just kept trying to write a Sylvia Plath poem. But I hadn't lived the life yet. <Laugh> So it's kind of hard.

Maggie Smith (01:06:43):
At 12. You're like, "the despair."

Ruth Awad (01:06:46):
I had a lot of sadness and not a lot of explanation for it.

Maggie Smith (01:06:50):
That's what being 12 is. <Laugh>

Ruth Awad (01:06:56):
Yes. But yeah, like the writing workshops I took in undergrad and in grad school really helped give me shape to my poems, helped me learn new techniques, new voices that could influence and continue to help me find my voice as a writer. So yeah, I guess my origin story is I've been so lucky to have so many great teachers in my life.

Danny Caine (01:07:21):
I love thatSylvia Plath at 12, Shakespeare sonnets in seventh grade

Maggie Smith (01:07:26):
Meanwhile, I was just like listening to Led Zeppelin. <Laugh>

Ruth Awad (01:07:30):
<Laugh> You're cooler than me, Maggie, okay?

Danny Caine (01:07:36):
Maggie, I'm gonna get back to listening to Led Zeppelin for our next and perhaps final question, but I do wanna know, I see a lot of questions in the chat asking about like, the challenges of finding a community. Say if you feel isolated or if you're in a rural area and you can't go to an open mic, and I just, I swear I'm not being paid to say this, like literary Cleveland, we have great teachers. We just have an absolute abundance of amazing teachers and many, many of our classes are online. And one of the things we've learned in the last four years is that online community is community too. So I really encourage folks to look at what we're offering. And you know, every couple months we have a full slate of dozens of great classes. And I myself in teaching classes for Literary Cleveland have added new members to my own poetry community. So again, I realize that's a little bit like a commercial, but you know, <laugh> it's true.

Maggie Smith (01:08:30):
I think that's so true. Like if we just all looked, probably just Google, like online, there are so many poetry and memoir and essay writing workshops. I know I'm teaching them. I have friends who are teaching them a lot of this stuff. And many of them are low cost, some of them are free. And sometimes yes, you can make friends in the chat on an online, in an online forum, you know, or if it's an actual workshop where you're on Zoom talking about other people's writing, you find your ideal readers, people who are, you know, particularly susceptible to what you're trying to do and seem to have good feedback for you. And then you reach out and you keep in touch via email or whatever. The thing is, I have a friend who I met in the fall of 2000, my first semester of graduate school.

Maggie Smith (01:09:22):
And I just sent her a revision of a poem today via email. We live in different states, it's 24 years later and we have continued to send each other poems. She's now the poet laureate of Mississippi. We send each other poems back and forth on the regular, like, and I'll just send like, Hey, I don't know what to do with this, or You looked at this last year, but I just revised it again 'cause I'm still sick of the old version. Does this help? And she bounced it back to me and said, I don't really think the ending is doing what you think it's doing. So I revised it today and I sent it back to her and I was like, is this doing what I think it should be doing? And I'm waiting to hear back. So just finding someone, even if you don't live with them or among them for a long period of time, a lot can happen via Zooms via emailing Word documents back and forth and turning on track changes. You know, it's, it's all possible.

Danny Caine (01:10:17):
Yeah. Thank you Maggie. All right. I think this is our final question. It is related to Maggie listening to Led Zeppelin when she was 12. The question as it's written is just for Maggie, but I'm gonna revise it so both of you can answer it. The question is about if there are any musicians specifically from Ohio that have influenced your work. Maggie, but I wanna broaden this question. I'm really interested in the interaction of poetry with other art forms. Like I'm very inspired by art photography. So can you talk about other artists who aren't poets or aren't writers that inspire you to write and bonus points if they're from Ohio?

Maggie Smith (01:10:53):
Does Guided by Voices count?

Danny Caine (01:10:55):
Yeah. Hell yeah. It counts

Maggie Smith (01:10:57):
<Laugh>. I listen to music constantly, so it's not just like, rest assured Bob Pollard's lyrics aren't like making their way into my poems. Although actually the last poem in GOLDENROD, the last sentence in GOLDENROD is "We must be coming to the chorus now," which is almost a direct lift of a Pavement lyric from Gold Sounds. So it's gonna be hard for me to think of Ohio bands in the same way that it's sometimes hard for me to even think of Ohio artists in any discipline, because now we all live so online that I often don't know when I'm friends with someone or I'm reading their book, I have no idea where to place them in the world. Like their words just sort of live or their music just sort of lives. I mean, like, I know Superchunk is in North Carolina. I know Old 97's started in Texas, but now Rhett lives in New York. Like I know roughly where some people are, but I can't say there's like necessarily a ton of Ohio specific artists off the top of my head. Now, as soon as we close out this Zoom, I will be ashamed because I will either start getting texts from people or I will be reminded of like 15 bands I love from or in the state of Ohio right now. And I already feel shame, like preemptive shame about this. And so I should just stop talking.

Danny Caine (01:12:29):
<Laugh> GBV counts always.

Maggie Smith (01:12:31):
Okay. Alright.

Danny Caine (01:12:32):
Did you have to clear the Pavement quote?

Maggie Smith (01:12:35):
No, it's not a direct quote. And I just figured like they're not gonna, probably not gonna come after me. It's fine. Actually, I think I, we sent the book to one of the band members and he was like, well, I really liked it, so I think that means it's fine.

Danny Caine (01:12:51):
And the drummer from Pavement is from Ohio. Bob, what's his name? Yeah. This bakery in Cleveland did like a pop-up pierogi sale where they made pierogis inspired by Pavement lyrics. And it was the whole thing. He came and kind of lorded over the whole thing. So I'm pretty sure Bob from Pavement is from Ohio.

Maggie Smith (01:13:11):
That's amazing. Yeah. Okay. So like, we're all good then. <Laugh>

Danny Caine (01:13:15):
Yeah, right. Okay. Ruth, talk about other artists from other mediums that inspire your work.

Ruth Awad (01:13:22):
This is gonna sound like cheating, but my younger sister, Sarah Awad, she's a visual artist. She paints and I am inspired by her all the time. And I love the way that she sees the world, she does a lot of kind of surrealist type of paintings. And I think that seeing her work has helped stretch my imagination more. I tend to be a very literal person. I do a lot of research before I write, so I'm like always mired in the concrete details. And her work kind of helps me imagine beyond the lived world. She's wonderful. I listen to a lot of Phoebe Bridgers, not from Ohio at all.

Maggie Smith (01:14:08):
But we love her and would claim her.

Danny Caine (01:14:12):
Can we look forward to a collaboration with your sister at some point in the future?

Ruth Awad (01:14:16):
I would love that. Honestly, the pressure might suffocate me <laugh>, but one day before we both die. Yes, definitely <laugh>.

Danny Caine (01:14:25):
Well, thank you both so much. This is really amazing. I've seen multiple times in the chat that the beauty of your friendship is just radiating off of the screen. So it's been fun to hear your wisdom, fun to watch you talk about this stuff with such love and grace for each other. And I really had an inspiring night talking to you. So thank you so much. And everybody, read their books.

Laura Maylene Walter (01:14:52):
Page Count is presented by the Ohio Center for the Book at Cleveland Public Library. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, rate, and leave a review for Page Count wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more online or find a transcript of this episode at ohiocenterforthebook.org, follow us on Instagram @ohiocenterforthebook, or find us on Facebook. If you'd like to get in touch, email ohiocenterforthebook@cpl.org and put "podcast" in the subject line. Thanks for listening, and we'll be back in two weeks for another chapter of Page Count.