505 - How Demystifying Your Craft can Enhance the Magic with Maggie Smith

27:50Like I think about that a lot. And I think about how being a normal, I'm not normal, but normal in terms of capabilities person actually gives me the taste of a lot of other people. And I can tap into stuff that's accessible to other people. And I thought about the prodigies and the savants that come to mind, a lot of those people aren't accessible. The stuff they make might be, you know, virtuoso might be impressive, but it's not always stuff that people relate to or connect with. And so that's another, a different challenge for them. The other thing I wanted to circle back on was this. So when you did the outline, that's after you already had written a version, right?

28:34So you, did you pants that version? The first version? Yeah, I totally pants the first version. So this is interesting. Like that's an interesting process of, okay, you did your thing, which is your nature. Yeah. And then after, and I like this idea. I've heard like creative researchers talk a lot about incubation as a core part, but I love that this was an old thing that, you know, you did reinvent, but it started. I just feel it feels really encouraging because I think, again, because of the economic forces and just the state of the world, artists, I feel like artists forgot that one of the aspects of great creative work is that it could have a quality of timelessness.

29:18Yeah. Because we live in this timely trend focus, these short form video, all of that kind of thing. And that mixed with just not having a lot of time means that we don't let things incubate. I've heard Taika Waititi talk about his favorite way to make a script is to write it and then forget it for a year. And he's like, I can't always afford to do that. But that is. And I'm like, there's so much like it's just really encouraging to me because there's this feeling of, oh, a book I wanted to write five years ago. Well, that moment's passed. No. You know what I mean? Unless it's I mean, really, there are so few things that are sort of time dependent.

29:58Right. Right. Like that book you maybe wanted to write about like the first months of lockdown, that moment may have passed. Sure. But maybe not actually. We're going to reflect on that time forever. That's history. I mean there are some things that, yeah, you have to strike while the iron is hot. Because if you're going to kind of ride that wave, you have to just do it in the moment. But that's not really how book publishing period works. I was going to say, I wish publishing just forgot about that completely because nobody talks about trends more than people in publishing that I meet. And I'm always like, you guys are in the wrong business.

30:30Well, a hundred percent because it's not even fast. No, it's not fast enough. You write a book and then it takes a year of production and then it comes out. Like, I mean, yes, some books are crashed, right? Like you write it and basically they publish it the same year. Like I have an anthology coming out in the fall that we are moving like hell to get through because it's absolutely about the current political moment. I'm crashing a book right now too. Right. So like it does happen. Even so. But those I think are rare moments. I think for the most part, I love that idea of putting something away.

31:06And I do that with drafts of anything, even just a poem. Like, A, time never made anything worse. Right. Yes. The lack of time has made lots of things shitty, but time never makes anything worse. And, and the second thing I would say about that is future, you will know better what to do with something sometimes than current you or past you knew what to do with it. And future, you could be two weeks from now or two years from now. But so often if I've got something and if I just let it steep, you know, and just let it breathe, just decant that sucker. just let it breathe. And then I will come back to that poem, essay, book draft, whatever it is, and look at it in two weeks or two years.

31:54And it's never fails. I may not know exactly what to do with all of it, but things will start to strike me like, oh, that's a false note. Oh, I don't need that. Oh, that's preamble. Oh, no, the reader is savvy enough. They don't need me to tell them X, Y, and Z. And even though how much have I aged in that period of time? Maybe only a month. But something in my experience or my mental processing has made it possible for me to be a better steward of that piece of work with a little bit more time. And so jamming things through instead of ramming them through the pipeline. I mean, even the word productivity that has the word product in it makes me super uncomfortable.

32:45Right. It's like the word content makes me uncomfortable. Like I just, I, I understand that this is my job and this is how I pay my bills. And so I can't be precious about it and just be like, I'll just make things whenever I want to make them. No, I actually do have deadlines and I need to keep producing things that are pretty regular clip because my kids aren't staying in the same size shoe for more than about a month at a time. Yeah, I know. So I can't be super precious. Like I do have to keep making things to make a living, but I don't want to get lazy or complacent about it. And rushing can lead you, I think, to both of those things.

33:23Absolutely. I love the term, you know, Cal Newport, he's great at coining terms. And one of the ones that he's coined is slow productivity. I just really love that approach. And I think it works really well with creative stuff. Slow core. Slow core. Yeah, I love it. Okay. Okay. I could keep going on a bunch of different directions there, but I wanted to ask you about a few of these phrases that you talk about in the book, because there are things that I have experienced in my own creative work, but I didn't have a framework or a lens to catch them and do it more intentionally. The first one is, I could be saying this wrong.

34:02I did look up pronunciation. Okay. But that's no guarantee because the two that I looked up said it differently. But ekphrastic. Yeah, ekphrastic. Yeah. Can you talk about that? Yeah. So like an ekphrastic poem is a poem that is inspired by a piece of art. It's typically visual art, but it could be music. Right. Or something else. Um, but yeah, so if, if you have a class full of students and you show them, um, a painting and then everyone has to write something from based on that, on that painting, that would be ekphrastic. Do you remember the example that you've given the book from your work?

34:41No. Okay. All right. I, I don't have it offhand, but I know that you were talking about this picture that led to poems and I just, I. Oh, I wonder. I wonder if it was when I was talking about, um, Kathy Fahey's cranky, like the puppet. It was that. Yeah. Yeah. The shadow puppets. And the really cool thing about this is, um, she's, she's doing my Baltimore book tour event and she's going to do the cranky. Can you talk about what that is? Yeah. So, um, Catherine Fahey is a Baltimore based paper artist. She mostly works with cut paper. She has done like music videos for Y Oak. She does all kinds of really cool stuff.

35:21And a cranky is, um, it's like an old fashioned device where it's like a box that has, um, little turning like a crank and these scrolls. And she basically puts, um, like a Tyvek scroll through it and then cuts, hand cuts these paper scenes onto the, and, you know, affixes them to the Tyvek and then makes these hinged also like shadow puppets that move with you know brads and sticks yeah and so she um will like sing and and talk and storytell and crank these scenes through the cranky device and it's backlit and there's all this beautiful color and every like every snowflake is hand cut all the mountain ranges are hand cut and then she'll have assistants who will work the if there's a scene that needs movement like a you know, a cow will walk through or a woman will be chopping wood or, or whatever it is.

36:18And in 2011, I went and did an artist residency at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. And that's where I met her. She had a studio not far from mine. I was working on poems for I think my second book at the time. I had a two year old who's now learning how to drive. And, and she was there. And I went to her studio visit and she did this performed this cranky and I went back to my studio that night and wrote a poem inspired by that cranky and a frastic poem and then wrote another one and another one and another one all based on this piece of art that she made and those poems are in my book good bones and they're kind of like um like a through line through through that book And then I sent them to Kathy and she made more paper cuts based on some of my poems.

37:13And so it's this whole idea of like art begets art begets art and this idea of cross pollination, right? That like I can listen to a song that gives me an idea for a poem and then I write the poem and then an artist might make a piece of visual art based on my poem that somebody might make a song. And it just sort of never ends. Yeah. That chain of making things. Yeah. Yeah, this like passing back and forth between you and her feels very like the snake eating itself. Yes. Yeah, the Ouroboros. It's so cool. So the fact that she gets to come to this event in her town, perform it, and then I'm going to read some of the poems that were inspired by it so we can talk a little bit about that kind of connectivity.

37:58I love this. And it's a great example of this takeaway that I got from the book, which is this, you're never bringing nothing to the table. There's always things to be in conversation with and participate in. And there's a real, for me personally, I didn't have that word, which I love. I love that word because it just makes it so solid in your brain and you can reach for it. And I, but I, uh, when I first started doing some of the work that became the books that I'm doing now, it started with trying to make illustrations that sounded like this playlist that I made and that, and I would listen to the playlist and I would go in my studio and be drawing and trying to capture what that felt like.

38:43It's like synesthesia. It is. It's this weird leap. And, uh, yeah, but I never heard that phrase and I thought that's a really powerful, uh, kind of prompt. The second one was, and again, this has appeared in my work without fully realizing it. I knew the word epigraph, okay? Yeah. I knew it. It's cool. I've heard of it. Not the same as an epigram, but it's an epigraph. I just, you know, I'd heard it. Epitaph. Yeah. Not the same thing. You're teaching me so much here. I knew of the word. I think maybe I could have come up with a definition, but I had never heard it explained this way. I didn't really know that how it related to poetry.

39:26Yeah. Can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah. So an epigraph, um, and, and lots of books have them. Lots of, um, individual poems have them. It's if you look at a poem and under the title, there's like a little line in italics, usually by another writer or sometimes. Yep. Yeah. Or have one on the poster. You can't see. Yeah. Or sometimes at the beginning of a novel or a memoir, there'll be, you know, a quote by another writer that sort of introduces the whole book. Yeah. And gives a kind of like a little bit of a framework for what the space you're about to enter. That's that's an epigraph.

40:01It's it's borrowing a line from someone else to kind of set the scene or the tone before they enter your piece of work. Yeah. And in poems, it's it actually appears in the poem, right? Yeah, like above it, basically. Yeah, usually with poetry, it's like you get the title and then you get the epigraph and that kind of white space and then the poem begins underneath. Yes. And we didn't actually print it in the book, Invisible Things, but for me, it was this quote that I have behind me, which is from The Little Prince. And it's, only with the heart one can see rightly what is essential is invisible to the eye.

40:39And that has kind of been the through line for the whole project. Um, but I, I didn't think of it as an epigraph. Yeah. Now I think the one, the poem that you share for that is the Ohio, Ohio, Ohio. Oh yeah. Yeah. Can you talk a little bit about that poem and then maybe I can link to it or something. Yeah. The, that, that poem has an epigraph from the poet William Matthews and the epigraph is Ohio, Ohio, Ohio. What is it? Sometimes I sing to myself all day. Yeah. Um, and yeah, I mean that sometimes I will get an idea for a poem because of someone else's line. Right. Right. And that is that case.

41:19So that poem uses the repetition of Ohio, Ohio, Ohio from the William Matthews line. So if I were to use that in my own poem and delete the epigraph, it would be acting like I came up with that repetition on my own. And so having the epigraph there was a way of acknowledging the wellspring of the idea and nodding to where that came from and giving credit where credit is due. and a lot of my poems have epigraphs because so often I get an idea again back to what we were just saying I get an idea for a poem of my own from reading someone else's yeah and that's not a dirty impure way to get to your own work yes but if you do get to your own original work via a line or phrase or image of someone else's, the ethical thing to do is to claim it and to cite it in one way, shape or form.

42:25And so an epigraph is a kind of, I think it's not very obtrusive, right? It lives at the top of the poem, but it's in italic. So it's got to kind of like, it's like it whispers at the top of the poem and it acts almost like a little umbrella under which the rest of the work falls. But it gives a little framework. I love that. And I kind of wish that there was more of a standard in different forms for that. I've thought about in the past, like how music has, we have so many bands that came from cover bands and there's this history and tradition of doing that. And, and I, and thinking about, you know, this idea that you spend the first part of your career, really obsessing over your favorite artists and trying to learn from them and be like them.

43:17Yeah. And I've thought for a long time, I wish in different mediums, we had standards like that or have ways of doing this. But I think that, you know, like, like I said, with the little prince, we've tried to plaster that everywhere we could. Uh, again, it's not really, um, it's not the language isn't directly in the text or anything, but that is the inspiration. And it's a celebration because it's so important to me. And it's not essential. Like it's not essential to understanding or, or gleaning everything you need to glean from invisible things, but it does for me now that I know that that is part of it, it makes it richer for me.

43:52It gives it a, like a broader context and, and as a, like a, a literature person, it feels richer to me knowing that that is where the phrase sort of was pulled from. Like I love knowing that. I mean, if you think about it, and I won't be able to think of any off the top of my head, but sometimes films use epigraphs. Like think about a movie when there's a quote at the beginning and then you get the film. So I think I feel a bit, I feel, especially in this time where we're like in this weird moment with, uh, AI and creativity and this, all this stuff, because, because that kind of breaks this feeling of, I, I'm not an economist.

44:35I don't know any of the answers about economy. Okay. I know some of the things we're doing now are not the way to do it. It seems bad, but I don't know how to fix it. Yeah. Okay. Um, so I always be, I'm real careful to talk about it because I don't really know. I'm not properly educated. I've tried to learn some, but, um, but I love that there's a community aspect and a participation aspect to this way of thinking about creativity and that for a long time I thought well the way that we organize ourselves economically really hurts that because we have to have so many like clear boundaries around this thing that is a spectrum it's not super clear how this stuff gets made but then now as we're And so for a long time, that's where I stood.

45:19Now that robots are getting into it, you're like, okay, now we have to really get the boundaries out. But it's super complex. Now that robots are getting into it, I'm just like, I'm imagining like the door busting open right now and a robot just like muscles in here and like a cool baseball cap is like, Hey, let me in there. Am I in here now, guys? Get an extra mic. No, we don't want you here. Sorry. Get out, robot. But yeah, I love that. idea of being, um, just participating, communicating the communal aspect of like making stuff. Another one that you talk about is odes. Yeah. Which I love. I love this idea.

46:02Can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah. I mean, an ode is just a poem of praise or celebration. Right. And so, um, we probably think about them in a sort of old fashioned way, like an ode. Everyone's going to be like, oh, Keats. No, no, no. Um, actually no, not everyone is thinking Keats right now. That's so everyone's like who, um, yeah, it's, it's not necessarily like a contemporary mode, but there are contemporary odes. Yeah. You list some that are really funny. There are some really cool ones and you can also write an anti-ode, which is, um, kind of like you might call it an invective, like a hate poem.

46:40Um, and that's a fun exercise. What that means? Yeah. That word? Okay. Yeah. That's another word. An invective, like a poem that's like an anti-ode, a poem about things you hate. Love it. And there are plenty of invectives to be written from our current - There's so much material. So much material. Yes. We're not running out. Like the robot who busts in here in a jean jacket and black denim trying to look like us right now. Yeah. Sorry, dude. No. Not going to happen. And so, yeah, but I think even even in sort of like a broader way of thinking about like what an ode is, right? Like, yes, it's a kind of poem, right?

47:15Like it's a it's a form of poem. Right. But but like what does that look like if we translate it into how we make art and how we see the world? Like if we're if we're making art that celebrates things, if we're making art from a place of wonder and curiosity, um anytime you've ever tried to capture the moon on your iphone yeah it's like an it's like an ode yeah right like anytime you see something and you're like oh look at that and you want to scream and like you want everyone to look anytime you're trying to record the sound of a bird anytime you stop in the middle of traffic to pay attention to something and people are honking at you like i would love my life to be filled with more moments that feel like odes yeah um fewer invectives if possible.

48:05Yeah. Yeah. But as a mode, right. Like as a mode of art making praise and celebration, you can't really go wrong. Yeah. I love that. I also love, I think a lot about how I read this thing from Austin Kleon a long time ago where he talked about this punk band that couldn't agree on influences. So they agreed on what they hated and weren't going to be. Yeah. And I just think that taps into, it's such a like reverse move on our negativity bias of like, I'll start with what I hate. So start with the invective, invective, is that right? Yeah, invective. And then flip it and then be like, okay, well, if you hate that, what is the ode?

48:47What's the reverse? Like what would be the opposite of that? And then create something from that. That's what you love, right? Like what's the opposite? It actually reminds me of that scene in Say Anything where - I don't think I've seen that. Oh my gosh. It's a great John Cusack movie from the eighties. Oh, okay. That's what the speaker. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The speaker that he's holding the boom box up, but he gives, I feel like I've seen like cuts of it on TBS stuff. I'm going to send you, I'm going to send you a clip on YouTube or something that some robot is aggregated that. And it's him sitting at the dinner table and the father of the woman he's in love with asks him what he wants to do with his life.

49:22And he basically is like, I don't know. I just know. I don't want to buy anything. I don't want to sell anything. I don't want to process anything. I don't want to buy anything, sold, bought, or process. Process anything, sold, bought, or process. I just want to hang with your daughter. That's totally what that reminds me of. Sometimes it is enough to get started to know what you don't want to make. Well, it's easier to grab because our brains are so negative. It's so easy. It's right there. Yeah, I definitely hate that. But then use that to kind of go somewhere. And I also love the ode. It reminds me of this advice I heard Mike Mills say on a podcast where he was - The filmmaker or the musician?

50:01The filmmaker. Okay. I didn't know there was a musician. Yeah. R.E.M. Oh, Mike Mills? Yeah. Oh, I didn't know that. He's also a graphic designer though. He used to be the filmmaker. But he said, I think it's on the best advice show just for the record. Wait, did he make Come On, Come On? Yes. God, that movie. I haven't seen that. Oh, maybe. Watch that movie. Okay. And if you don't sob like a baby, we're not the same. I think that might be his latest movie I haven't seen. I don't think I've seen that one. It's like from a couple years ago. Yeah. Black and white, Joaquin Phoenix taking care of his nephew.

50:36I do think. It's a heartbreakingly beautiful film. Yeah. I think it is too. I love his. If not, we'll just cut this part out. Yeah, sure. Yeah, I love. We need like, I don't have the budget to have a person like, we just need the robot in the corner to be the person. He can fetch. I'm like, you wear black denim. fact check. Um, but, uh, the, uh, yeah, he said that he just talked about when you get stuck creatively, start with just thinking about something that you desperately love and you really, and that just put that he, he was just saying that that space is so, uh, productive creatively, like it's coming from the same place and that's basically what an ode is.

51:17So I love all these things because they're all busting the myth of making something from nothing. They're all things that you can go do. I thought the thing we could end on, I always end with like a action that people can take. You talk about, I took inspiration from you saying sometimes before you write, you're just going to go read stuff that you love. Yeah. Yeah. Can you talk about that a little bit? Yeah. I mean, honestly, my favorite thing to do writing wise is either go to my back patio or go to a coffee shop. I don't know why I like to be in public. Yeah. And I'm listening to music. I'm not chit chatting, but there's something about having just like stimulus around me that helps me kind of hyper focus.

52:05I get it. Totally. Yeah. Okay. So, right. Like, you know, our brains, they just do funny things sometimes. But the thing that I almost always pack in my bag when I go to write, other than my notebook and my pen or my laptop and my headphones, are one or two books by other people. Usually poetry books because I can dip in and dip out, right? Like I don't need to get a chapter in. And the language is so rich and the imagery is so rich and the syntax, like the actual sentence structure can be so interesting. And so if I don't have an idea or a draft that I'm working on, I will get a cup of coffee, sit down and read a poem or two by someone else.

52:47And it never fails that someone's sentence or image or phrase or even misreading something. Oh, I've done that a lot. Like misreading something. I've even seen a thumbnail of an image thinking, oh, I know what that is. Yeah. And then blow it up and I go, it's not that at all. But that's kind of cool. Yeah. Right. And it kind of leads you off in your own direction. So again, sometimes I'll do that. And the poem that I'm reading, the line that gave me the idea becomes the epigraph for that poem because I want to give credit for the source. Yeah, that's so cool. And sometimes a line or a sentence or a title or something might get me off and running.

53:25And the poem goes so far in its own direction that that epigraph or that inspiration becomes kind of like a vestigial tale. And it can just be removed. You have so many good words. It is my business. I know it is. I know. Thank you. But you've given me so many good words in this. You know, like the thing that you evolve out of that you don't really need anymore. Yeah. It's almost like sometimes the inspiration is like the scaffolding outside of a building, right? So you see all of that framework go up and that might be the inspiration source work. But when you get the building built that is your real building, the scaffolding comes down.

54:03And oftentimes the reader, the viewer, the listener doesn't need to know that that scaffolding ever existed. They don't know how you got there, except if you read Dear Writer and then I will have shown you all of my scaffolding. Because I think seeing the structures that help get to the finished building is really useful. Definitely. But oftentimes when we're reading books and watching films and looking at art, we don't know all of the behind the scenes bits. Yeah. Yeah. You've got the images and the words. I love it. And the other piece of that, I heard – so when I'm making this book, that's one of the things I did, the book I'm working on now.

54:47I would go look at books I love and just like Pinterest and all the things I've saved. And really almost none of it is inspiring in a way of like an epigraph. It's more like getting into the state of romanticizing art and books. And I heard – It's vibes. Yeah. It's just remembering, oh, this is the thing I love. Yes. I love this whole – I love being a part – I get to be a part of that today. and said, if I got to make this page today, it's really powerful. I heard a designer, Jessica Hish say she would do that too. Like she would, if she would go to the studio and not feel it, she just look at design books.

55:30And again, not real, if, you know, something might inspire you, but really more about just the feeling of why do you do this? And what is so, what are you a part of? Transitioning into that headspace. Yes. Yeah. I think that's the thing. And, and maybe that's what, for me, listening to music and being in either fresh air or public space helps me transition into that sort of making headspace where I feel particularly receptive. Yeah. I was going to say open, like going out in open places. Like literally open. Yes. Yeah. I like that idea too of like externalizing, you know, again, Austin Kleon talks about having this like an analog desk and a digital desk.

56:18And I think of that like externalizing your brain. Yeah. Like, oh, I'm exiting that. I'm entering this. And I think, yeah, being in open space is going to open you up. You have this weird link between the internal and external. This is probably why I write so well on airplanes. Right. you're up there because you're in a literal liminal space. Well, I mean, also no one can like email you and you don't care if the laundry is like sitting in the dryer and needs to be folded. But I think, I think sometimes, um, we discount the power of being in like, I love, I write really well in the car. It's better if I'm not driving.

56:54Right. But sometimes you have to pull over or make, give a voice note or something because the landscape is scrolling by like a film, you know, like a film strip and it gets you an idea. So I love that. And, uh, I told you this when I was about halfway through your book that the other thing it did was, you know, we, we met through you doing the memoir and then doing this show. And I love memoirs. I'm really big fan of your book, but also memoirs in general. And, uh, but I told you then just kind of, I was kind of embarrassed to say, like, I never had a strong relationship with poetry. and this book also tricked me into liking poetry.

57:34And I think I didn't, like there were elements of poetry. If you read a good poem that I would be like, oh, I get this. Yeah. But generally entering in how to read a poem, I felt like I didn't know until I read this book. I'm so happy about that. I mean, honestly, that's part of my like secret, maniacal plan. Like I'm over here with people into poetry. I'm over here with like a V-shaped unibrow rubbing my hands maniacally together. Like, yes, my plan worked. Poetry propaganda. That's the, this is all a guys, but I mean, one of my goals, I realized that not everyone who picks up dear writer is a writer and I don't think it's just for writers, but I do think for people who want to enjoy maybe art forms more that they feel like they're on the outside of.

58:24Yeah. And if poetry is one of them. And I know for a lot of people, it is like a lot of people who read a lot like of novels and nonfiction. Maybe they even enjoy poetry, but they're like, I don't know why I like this. I don't know how to talk about it. I don't really understand the choices that made into building the thing. I don't quite get it. My hope is that this book would, for those folks, kind of demystify the process a little bit and make it easier to think about writing a poem if you want to, but also just make it easier to read poems and feel like you are inside of them instead of sort of like they're inside some sort of locked gate that you can't enter.

59:05I think poetry has done itself a big disservice in that regard and the way that it's been taught and talked about for centuries. Yeah. And that making it a little bit more accessible would be a good thing. So I'm so glad that you feel like you're maybe a poetry person now. Yeah, you're getting me into it for real. And I, I'd had encounters with poems, some, some of your poems that have, that are poignant and clever. And I really appreciate, like, I could be moved by that. Or I am, I really like, I really like comedy. I like the word economy. I love some like little pithy or like, I love that. That, so that's already, I'm, I'm into that, but I feel like I encountered one of your poems in the book in the way that I have heard people encounter a poem, but I've never experienced.

1:00:03And it was the Ohio one. And it really made me feel like a kid. Oh my gosh. That's so crazy. I got like moved by it because it did. And I didn't, I think it was like just learning how to read it. And I was feeling the, you know, the evening sun and just, and I was like, whoa, I just like really encountered a poem. I remember riding my bike around a cul-de-sac. It was that. Yeah. It was that line. Yeah. So thanks for that. Oh my gosh. No, thank you for that. Everybody should check out the book. I think especially if you're a writer, but if you're a non-writer, it's almost more powerful to come at it from an outside perspective and you'll start seeing all these things in your own practice that you're maybe too close to to see.

1:00:52but yeah thanks for this book I really love it thank you

1:01:13all right I'm back with the creative call to adventure today it is called make something out of something. You've heard this idea of make something out of nothing. You know, a lot of creative work isn't that. And a lot of times you're picking up pieces and being influenced by things in life and in work and art. And I want to give you three options to make a piece of work that is inspired by something else directly. They all come from the book, an ode, an epigraph, or an ekphrastic piece of work. An ode is take something that you're deeply inspired by and make a piece of work from it. My wife, Sophie Miller, is a fiber artist and a lot of her work falls into this category.

1:02:00She has work that's like, this is an ode to a mushroom or this is an ode to my childhood home. And it's just making work that's a celebration of something that you love. So it can be just like that. The second one we talked about was an epigraph. So an epigraph is take a line from a movie, take a line from a poem, take a line from a book, and then make something inspired by that. And you can actually share that. You can put that into the comments, the caption of the Instagram post, or you can actually letter it at the bottom like I did with one of my Invisible Things posters. One of the, what I think is kind of the spiritual epigraph of all invisible things, my picture book and the work that I do under that umbrella is this line from the book, The Little Prince, which is one of my all-time favorite books that says, it is only with the heart that one can see rightly what is essential is invisible to the eye.

1:03:04And so that is a kind of the true north of the project and the spiritual epigraph of all of that work. The third one is an ekphrastic piece of work. So an ekphrastic piece of work is taking something that you're inspired by from a different medium, like Maggie talks about writing poems based on this paper cut art that she loved from this other artist. And then that artist then making art about her poems. And it's like this ekphrastic snake eating itself or flywheel. And for me, this looks like before I go make a picture book, I make a playlist. And I want the picture book to feel and sound like this group of music.

1:03:53And so an ekphrastic piece is just being inspired by a different medium and trying to translate it into something else. I like, I think about dance as kind of purely ekphrastic as they're trying to interpret with the body a piece of music. And so there's, you know, a rich history of doing that. So that's your challenge. Do whichever ones of these sounds interesting and inspiring to you. Roll with it. Massive thanks to Maggie Smith for taking the time to come visit me in my studio. and have a chat. We're not going to have this one on YouTube because I haven't figured out how to record live podcast interviews yet.

1:04:28We might get there someday. So it's not on YouTube. Go get the freaking book, man. Dear Writer, it's a great read. I was so inspired. And it came, you know, what was really great is that she's coming at it from a writer and a poet. And, but she's applying it to creativity in general. So it's really coming from a practice that I don't know a ton about. And so a lot of it was fresh, but it all applied to all the stuff that I do. And so I highly recommend it. Massive thanks to Sophie Miller for editing, being the editor and producer on this episode. Massive thanks to Connor Jones for audio editing, video editing, and sound design.

1:05:16Thanks to Yoni Wolf of the band Y for our theme music. and soundtrack. And thanks to all of you for listening till we speak again. Stay pepped up.

1:05:48Okay. The podcast is over, so I don't know why you're still listening, but I am glad that you enjoyed it enough to stick to the end. I have one more thing for you. If you're in a place where you're feeling a lack of clarity and you want to figure out your industry market and niche and find the perfect strategic side project to do next, go sign up to our newsletter at andyjpizza.substack.com and you will get a confirmation email that will give you the download of our creative career path hand booklet, and the whole process is in there. And you might also get a few bonuses in there depending on when you sign up.

1:06:31But again, thanks for listening. Glad you enjoyed the episode and stay pepped up, y 'all. Hello, this is Jack Wilson, the host of the History of Literature podcast. For the past 10 years, I've been talking to novelists, biographers, and scholars about the greatest books in the history of the world and the men and women who wrote them. Like our recent episodes on Dante and Love, a starter pack of 10 Indian classics, the pop culture that influenced Sylvia Plath, and a talk with scientist and novelist Alan Lightman about the wonders of nature. Join us at the History of Literature podcast wherever you get your podcasts.