Poured Over: Maggie Smith on You Could Make This Place Beautiful

Jenna Seery

“I leave that book feeling less alone, because I’ve been welcomed into somebody else’s humanity, and I feel like they’ve shared part of themselves with me and that feels communal…”

Maggie Smith’s bestselling You Could Make This Place Beautiful transcends traditional memoir in a staggering take on divorce, motherhood and what it means to be a writer in a way only the poet could deliver. Smith speaks about the vulnerability of sharing your life through words, the freedom of nontraditional literary devices, healing through art and more with guest host, Jenna Seery. We end this episode with TBR Topoff book recommendations from Madyson and Jamie. 

This episode of Poured Over was produced and hosted by Jenna Seery and mixed by Harry Liang. Poured Over is brought to you by Executive Producer Miwa Messer and the booksellers of Barnes & Noble.  

New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional Saturdays) here and on your favorite podcast app. 

Featured Books (Episode)
You Could Make This Place Beautiful by Maggie Smith
Good Bones by Maggie Smith
Goldenrod by Maggie Smith
Keep Moving by Maggie Smith

Featured Books (TBR Topoff)
The Cost of Living by Deborah Levy
Broken Reverie by Elle Madison

Full Episode Transcript
Jenna Seery
Hello, I am Jenna Seery, I’m a bookseller and the associate producer of Poured Over and I am joined today with the incredible Maggie Smith, the poet. She is the award-winning author of Goldenrod, Keep Moving, published poems and just about everywhere where you can publish a poem and I know everyone remembers Good Bones. But today, we are here to talk about her new memoir, You Could Make This Place Beautiful. Maggie, I’m so excited to have you here with us today.

Maggie Smith
Oh, thanks for having me.

I think I want to start with just having you do a little explanation of this book; I think so many parts of this story could be conservatively called be called a doozy. There’s a lot in here, there’s a lot of emotions. So I just want to have you start and introduce the book for our listeners.

Yeah, there’s a lot of experience in in this book, I think maybe the best way to describe it is, it’s the book I wrote about coming home to myself, in middle age, sort of the opposite of a midlife crisis. So if you think of what a crisis is, it’s like an emergency, the opposite of a midlife crisis would be sort of like midlife recovery or return to self. And so for me, the crisis was the end of my marriage. And that became an opportunity in a way for me to kind of look at myself, figure out who I was what I wanted, what was important to me, and figure out a new way to move forward. And so that’s, that’s really what the writing process of this book was.

And choosing to write a memoir at any point is a pretty substantial undertaking. It takes a lot of guts and a lot of commitment to sort of get all that out on the page and to decide that that’s what you want to do. How did it come to you that this was the story that you wanted to tell? And that this was the time you wanted to do it?

Yeah, I mean, whenever I approach a piece of writing, personally, I always expect it to be a poem. So that’s my home genre. So when I write down with an idea, whether it’s a line or a metaphor, or something, something that is dragging me to the page, my instinct is poem first. I couldn’t do this in a poem, you know, there’s too much storytelling, there’s too much flashback, there’s too much needing to sort of think and talk my way through it. I knew that in order to do the kind of narrative work that I needed to do in this book, it was not going to be a collection of poems on the theme of divorce and recovering the self. But having said that, I did approach the process as a poet, right? I mean, the structure is the structure because I came to it as a poet.

In many ways, it felt like maybe you were writing sort of the book you wanted to read, or the book that you needed to read at that time, there’s so much conversation with yourself and with the reader in this book that I find so interesting and something that isn’t common in many memoirs, and sort of has a different tone. Did you feel any of that while you were writing? Or was it you know, something later, when you look back that you can think of it a little differently now?

Yeah, I think I knew if I was going to be as vulnerable personally, as a woman, and as a mother, on the page that I also wanted to be really forthcoming and vulnerable as a writer. And so if I wasn’t going to be hiding a lot of stuff about my life, I also didn’t want to hide the craft, of building the book for myself. And so yeah, I think I knew pretty early on that I wanted to be able to have this sort of intimate relationship with the reader and so made choices to make that happen.

One of my favorite things that you say sort of right off the bat is that this isn’t a “tell all” right, that this is many, you call it many, many other things, but a tell all is never one of them. Was it challenging to sort of find the parameters of what you wanted to say in this? Because there’s clearly so much that goes into it?

Yeah, I mean, I was thinking, you know, memoir is new to me, writing is not new to me and publishing books isn’t new to me, but this was a new project. And so I came to it thinking, okay, what are our preconceived notions about memoir, both as writers and as readers, like, what do we think is on the menu when we open a memoir, and it felt important to me to say in the very first sentence, like, if you’re expecting, a tell all, if you’re expecting my entire life laid out, it’s not on the menu. And here are some of the reasons why, actually, that’s not on the menu and any book because we can only ever speak for ourselves. So it wasn’t actually that difficult for me to sort of intuitively know what I felt comfortable sharing and what I didn’t I feel like boundaries in life and in writing are healthy things right.

And I think we sort of are used to these— if you hear oh, it’s a memoir, and the author’s talking about her divorce, you expect salacious, you might expect to have all these nitty gritty details. But who is that for, is that for an audience? It’s not for the writer. So to have this experience going in was so different, I think many readers will feel exactly the same.

Yeah, that’s a really good point. Like who is the salaciousness for? You know, why? Why do I want to click on that link with the click bait-y headline? Like, what is it about us that, that is so curious about other people’s lives and what happens behind closed doors. And so that’s part of what— I saw this book has an opportunity to even just have those conversations, and ask ourselves hard questions about like, what do we think we’re owed by another writer and their life? And as readers? Like, what do we expect? And maybe this is a conversation we should be having more?

I think that there, you know, when I picked up this book, I was familiar with your poetry and I became familiar through, Keep Moving with, you know, a lot of your other ideas. But you know, having read Good Bones, having read Goldenrod, this was so much more than, you know, you get to see you so much more than you can through poetry. It’s such a more exposing genre. Does it feel very different to put this out in the world than some of the things you’ve put out in the past?

Oh, yes. I mean, you’re right, it is more exposing, I think, by its very nature, like the form of poetry, but also the idea of the speaker, you know, the sort of like the narrator voice, in a poem allows you to kind of hold the stuff in a poem at arm’s length. So even if it’s a poem, like “Good Bones”, where there’s a mother with children, okay, it’s mostly me, right? Like, I’m writing that from my experience, but we’re taught and we know enough to be like the speaker of the poem, not Maggie Smith is saying, but in memoir, it just feels like that distance is largely collapsed. And so part of what I wanted to do with some of the choices I made in the book, was give myself a little bit more cushion.

I think readers will get a very good sense of knowing you, but not in a way that feels like you said, too open and the reader won’t know you, but through this, it will allow them to reflect a lot back even for people who haven’t gone through that exact situation. I think there’s so much in here that is very, it allows a mirror for readers to look back on themselves.

Oh, I love that. And I hope that’s right. I mean, I find that when I read memoir, that’s one of my favorite things about it is even if my life doesn’t have actually that many mirror touch points with the other person’s experience, somehow, I leave that book feeling less alone, because I’ve been welcomed into somebody else’s humanity. And I feel like they’ve shared part of themselves with me and that feels communal, as an experience, which is what I love going to books for period. And so yeah, I hope that that that’s an experience that people have with this book,

I think of all genres, memoir has the most sort of supportive and healing opportunities for both writer and reader. As you were writing, did you have any experiences of that? Did things surprise you, as you were working through things? You want to share any of those surprises with us?

Oh, definitely. I mean, off the top of my head, I couldn’t name one. But I definitely think that giving yourself the opportunity, or the project of writing about a sort of wide swath of experience, you know, really looking back at my 20s, my 30s, and my 40s, thinking about who I am as a mom, and who I was as a partner, and who I’ve been as a friend, as a daughter, and my writing life, I think we are often encouraged to think or write about any of those things, but maybe not between the covers of a single book. And so writing about all those things at once, invited me to see sort of correlations or echoes like, oh, this is what was happening when this poem was published, this is what was happening in my personal life. Like there’s a touch point, but you’re not necessarily thinking about that unless you are tasked with writing a memoir. Or, you know, me as a parent, some of these behaviors I see then reflected in who I was, as a spouse, who I am as a poet. And so the integration, I found really healing like the opportunity to really sit down and, and think okay, so who am I as a whole human being, not sort of compartmentalized into these different pieces of me.

I think that that’s something that, you know, writing a memoir offers that writing fiction, writing poetry may not but I think it also works the same way reading memoir, you know, it allows readers to stop and think especially with your format, the sort of short vignettes, these prose poems, whatever, you know, the different pieces are, it allows readers more time to stop in between and sort of reflect on those different emotions that come through, I found that very interesting and challenging. As I was reading, I had to, there were definitely points, I had to stop and be like, Alright, I’m gonna take five minutes before I go back in.

I love that. I mean, that’s the magic of whitespace, right? Like the magic of whitespace in a poem is that it’s literal breathing room on the page, it forces you to sort of sit with an image or word or line or phrase before you get to move on and read the rest. And so I really did, I mean, I approached this like a poet. So I wanted to use whitespace, in the same way to give the reader literal sort of like reflection time before moving on to the next the next bit.

And I think many, you know, there are some readers who won’t be used to reading something outside of a straight, you know, prose blocks of text. But memoir allows for so much room to play in form than many other things. It was so interesting to see all of your different influences come through. And like you had said, I had read Good Bones and was familiar with Keep Moving. And then reading in the book, kind of what was happening at your, in your own life at those times really just deepens the experience. I think that’ll give readers a lot to sort of look into if they’re familiar with your work and will make them curious to go seek those things out if they haven’t found them yet.

Yeah, maybe it will be sort of contextualizing in that way, oh, so this was what was happening sort of behind the curtain as this was going on. Yeah.

And I think there’s so often, we don’t have any sort of those connective tissues when we’re thinking about writers. And it sort of deepens the experience of knowing those things, when we can look and say, oh, yeah, I understand maybe now where that was coming from, it’s a very good experience to sort of dive into a body of work in that way. I love that, who if you had to sort of think of an ideal reader for You Could Make This Place Beautiful, who would you hope finds this book on the shelf and brings it home?

I mean, in some ways that someone like me who’s maybe like, in a in a place mid-life where they feel spread a little too thin, maybe they’re putting themselves last, they’re probably caretaking a lot of other people, maybe kids, maybe a spouse, maybe aging parents, maybe coworkers, and feel like they need to not get lost in the shuffle. But on the other hand, part of me thinks like maybe, maybe someone 20 years earlier would be the right reader for this book, who could see some of what could be coming down the road and maybe make some decisions differently. You know, maybe the ideal reader of this book would be Maggie Smith at 22. And it would have acted like a sort of a cautionary tale, like if you don’t be careful with the choices that you make, some of these things will come to pass, you know, like Dickens Scrooge getting to see the future on Christmas Eve.

I definitely have that written down in my notes. It’s like art as healing, art as cautionary tale. I think, wait, it’s both. What you bring to it definitely offers a lot of, of how you’re going to read the book. My second part to that last question is, how do you want readers to feel when they finished it?

Oh, that’s a good question. I suppose that answer is going to depend a lot on how closely their life experience mirrors mine, right, because I think if, if people have had some of the experiences I talk about in the book, if people have been divorced, if people have, you know, lost someone who was a long term companion to them, if people have suffered pregnancy loss, if people are, you know, parents of young kids, they will come to the end of this book with a different sense than someone who’s coming to it without having some or all of those experiences. But I think regardless, I would really love a reader to close this book, and feel seen, you know, maybe to take that a step further, maybe empowered would be a word I would want someone to feel at the end of this book.

I agree. I think that’s a great feeling to come away with from this. I had written down in my notes that it ultimately feels hopeful at the end. I think there’s a sense you know, of hope and progress and coming through all of the challenges but you leave us with something good something to look forward to. It’s not always a happy ending kind of thing.

All the wounds are healed at the end of the book. It’s not all tied up neat with a bow, alas life does not work that way. And therefore, writing about life cannot, not with honesty and authenticity, work that way. But I agree, I think it’s hopeful in the same way that the end of “Good Bones” is hopeful, you know, which and this gets its title from the end of “Good Bones”. There are hard things, and we can handle them. Things are improving, and things are getting better, and we have the power to make the life that we want through that difficulty. Yeah, I love that you came away with a sense of hope. That’s, that’s a good thing. I did, too. I mean, I’ve finished the book with a sense of hope. So I’m glad that’s coming through.

Right now that it’s about to be out in the world, and everyone is going to come to it with from wherever they’re coming from. Do you feel like, it’s going to be interesting to see the responses of what people bring to it? Are you excited to sort of see the reactions as you hear? Oh, I can’t I thought this I thought that is it sort of trickles back?

I don’t know if it’s, I don’t know if excited is the right word. I don’t, I don’t know exactly what it is. I think I’m sort of preparing myself for like, the range of emotions that people will feel through reading this book. Because I know I had a range of emotions writing. I think what’s been, you know, as people have read the early copies and I’m starting to get feedback, or you know, blurbs are coming back, and reviews are coming in, I’m getting like little nibbles and tastes of what’s resonating with people. And it’s been beautiful so far, honestly, to hear how people have been sort of touched by the book and how it’s resonated with them. Someone recently said, it’s weird, I don’t know that I could say I quote, enjoyed it. But they said, but it was a really pleasurable reading experience. And I said, okay, I can live with that. It’s a hard, sort of complex book, and it goes into some heavy places, but I’m glad it was a pleasurable reading experience.

No, I completely see where they’re coming from on that. I think something that’s so key in this book is even through all of the challenging emotions that are present, and all of the clear, emotional changes, ups and downs, the writing itself is so beautiful, that you can’t help but become immersed in those moments. I mean, it’s clear, you take the craft of creating this very seriously, I know that you have been writing, you’ve been editing, you teach writing. So those pieces all come very front and center. And so even when you’re writing about these things that are heartbreaking, we can’t help but keep reading, I can’t help but want to know more.

Oh, thank you, we’ll wrap a little difficulty in a in a nice package and hopefully that will make it a little easier to take.

While we talk about craft, I have to wonder when you’re writing something like this, these vignettes that go together, do you outline them? What’s the organizational process look like on that?

No, there was no outline. I wish I had handy this like giant color-coded Word document to show you because it really looks unhinged, the sort of process of, I will say assembling. The writing was one part and I wrote all the pieces sort of one bit at a time and the assembly process was something else. And it was much like what I do when I write a collection of poems, which is I write one poem at a time and I’m not really thinking about the other poems while I’m writing that one and then I print them all out and I shuffled them together in my hands and I think about what’s the natural order almost like making a playlist or a mixtape— what comes first, what’s the welcome mat then what naturally follows then what naturally follows and so I like literally printed drafts of this book out, hundreds of pages, laid them out on my living room floor, got out markers— like borrowed my kids colored markers. Thank you, Crayola and color coded the different strands of this book: the question strands, the quote strands, the forward spine of the narrative and then looked at all the colors and worked from there kind of assembling it by hand without anything that resembled an outline or Excel spreadsheet.

Just the vibes, just so many vibes.

So many vibes, guided by vibes.

That gives us all hope, the non-outliners out there who want to you know, imagine that you can Jigsaw something together.

Yes, or Tetris, that was that was my metaphor for myself is: we’re gonna Tetris this together.

Do you do a lot of revising on the pieces as you write them? Or do you like to go back and really rework something until it’s perfect.

Yeah, I am, I am a heavy reviser and I’m a wiggler. So that probably comes from my poet background. But when I revise things tend to shrink, so things get smaller as I refine them and sort of compress them and think about what is essential and what the reader needs. And what may be like, oh, I said this four sentences ago, in a less interesting way, let’s cut that out or combine. And so as actually, as I revised this book, it shrunk, it got smaller in page count instead of longer, because I kept thinking, no, I don’t need that, I want to be as close to the bone as possible. I really want to be as spare and concise as possible and let image do as much work as it can and not be long winded. Like I really wanted to offer some things to the reader and then step away and let you spend some time with it. And in some cases, come to your own conclusions about it, think about it, reflect on it, and then move to the next the next thing,

You kind of mentioned that the different threads that weave through one of the things that I found so enjoyable, and sort of like Easter egg hunting through this, sort of following your different framing devices, the different narrative devices, the quotes, in the questions, the sort of extended metaphor of the play that goes through this, can you talk a little bit about sort of crafting those different elements to combine to tell the story?

Yeah, I mean, I remember where I, where I was when I wrote the first bit of the play. And I just was, you know, free writing, like, literally free writing at a coffee shop in my neighborhood and I just thought, well, wouldn’t it be nice to write about this in third person, and not have to stand in the vulnerability of writing about it, as I said, what would that feel like to be looking from the outside in on some of the story. And so it was really just an exercise for myself and I had so much, fun seems like the wrong word, but it truly was, I had so much sort of fun, like it was intellectually stimulating and creative, that I was like, no, I don’t want to only do that once in this book, I want that to be something that that crops up. And the same thing with the thinking about plot and character and all of this sort of conventions of narrative. I didn’t really just want to dip in, bring that up to the reader, and then never mention it again, I really wanted to weave it all the way through. And again, not to belabor the point, but this is something I do in poems, right? Like I bring an image up early in the poem and then one of my favorite ways to pattern a poem or end a poem is to come back to an earlier phrase, or come back and sort of twist or transform, an earlier image that’s sort of like intuitive gut instinct poetry craft and I knew I would probably want to use that in this book.

And it adds just so many layers to the experience. When I finished it, I was like, I kind of want to start from the beginning again and look for those things that I missed. Because I know that there are things that I missed, especially, you know, not always paying attention to every single title, things like that. I feel like there’s so much depth to go back and find on a second, third, twelfth read.

I love that. And I have to say the writing experience was very similar for me. So writing the first draft, and then going back and reading it to revise, I realized connections between things I hadn’t realized on the first read. And that, you know, some of those chapters called “on second thought” came about in later revisions of the book, because I was starting to make connections between things that were happening at different times

When you talked about being able to write those sections in third person and sort of the play sections and have those be a little bit almost more fictionalized. Did you ever consider writing a novel out of this.

If only, if only I had, I think there’s a part in the book where I actually say like, why didn’t I do that? That would have been less personally vulnerable and complicated. Yeah, you know, I was thinking about Nora Ephron’s book Heartburn, which is sort of famously taken from her life, but fictionalized, at least even like loosely fictionalized. And that gives you just a little bit of cover, even if its cover, I knew I was going to write it as nonfiction, but I have the sort of kicking myself feeling all along like goodness, if I were naturally a fiction writer, I probably would have approached this material differently, but I’m naturally a poet and I naturally write about my own life in first person. This just feels more natural to me.

I think it probably works best as a memoir, especially for all those emotional pieces that come along with it as you were sort of Tetris seeing this all together and doing your revising and doing your rewriting, how did you know this is it? I’ve got it, this is the final form.

25:09

Yeah, that’s the tricky thing about any piece of writing. And the thing about memoir is like, the book ends, but the life doesn’t, you know, you close the book, but the person keeps living the life. So all sorts of things have happened since I said, I think this particular project, I feel satisfied that I’ve written my way deeply enough into it. I’ve answered some questions for myself, I feel kind of at peace with this, it feels done to me. And that’s never— my students are always like, how do you know when a piece of writing is done? And the real, honest, sort of unsatisfying answer is you don’t, you have like an intuitive sense or that you just don’t feel dissatisfied with it anymore or you feel like it’s doing the work.

Your editor says please stop.

Yeah, or you have a deadline, or yeah, your editor is like put down the pen. Someone just takes the pen and all the colored markers away from you and says, get off your living room floor. But yeah, I mean, I guess the real answer, I think, for all of us is it’s gut instinct. Like, when you feel satisfied with it, when you would feel comfortable showing it to a lot of other people who don’t know you, and also a lot of other people who know you, or think they know you, then it’s probably ready.

Definitely. That’s a good answer. Going back to your students, your teaching, that’s something that’s very important to you. How does that factor into your writing? Like, do you feel like you learn a lot from your students? What’s your favorite piece of advice to give to them?

Oh, yeah, I mean, the two things really feed each other. I really teach as a writer, when I’m showing up to my students, I’m saying here, I think you should try this because this is something that’s really worked for me, or have you ever thought about looking at it this way, because I’ve had some pretty big breakthroughs in my own work by approaching it like this. So I feel like I don’t necessarily teach as a scholar of poetry, I teach as a practicing poet. And then of course, when sometimes they’ll send work to me or the questions that they ask, even or so just inspiring and helped me kind of crack into different parts of my own creativity that I’m always really grateful for. So it does feel like a really healthy loop for me of writing and teaching. And it’s all about sort of talking about books, and pushing our craft further and being in community and helping each other.

For us here, that’s all we ever want to do is talk about books and talk about craft and doing that and expanding that constant knowledge. So yeah, it’s very interesting to hear you say those things and see how they sort of feed back into what your own work.

I mean, a life in books is the best life am I right?

It certainly is.

I’m sorry. I mean, No offense to anyone else’s existence, but I really do think a life where you get to spend time with other people sentences. It’s a beautiful life.

It’s a gift. It’s a gift, another gift that we have here and that I think is very important in this book is music. It seems there’s so many great references to artists and songs that sort of propelled through the book and sort of soundtrack different pieces. If you had to give us a couple of songs from the You Could Make This Place Beautiful playlist, what would you suggest?

Well, there are a couple of songs that have a sort of important role in the book and one of them is Mountain Goats “Picture of My Dress”, which was inspired by something I tweeted about taking my wedding dress on a road trip, which I never did, or I shouldn’t say never did, haven’t done haven’t yet. There’s always time, it’s still here. There’s still time for some sort of cathartic adventure. So yeah, I tweeted something about taking my wedding dress on a road trip and John Darnielle of Mountain Goats wrote the song “Picture of My Dress” that was then on their record Getting into Knives. And so that is on the playlist, and I talked about it in the book because who thinks that something they tweet is going to end up being written into a song by one of their favorite bands. No one believes that. I don’t think that Rainbow Connection is on the playlist but it probably should be and it would have to be the Kermit the Frog version. Yes, for reasons that will become clear when people read the book.

But there were definitely moments when I was reading through, I was like, I gotta look up some of these songs. I gotta make sure I know all the pieces. So to sort of set the tone for the different parts in the book.

Yeah, there’s a roller-skating playlist in the book, which is mostly 70s and 80s funk and then I am hopelessly Gen X. So there’s a lot of 90s sort of indie references, because that’s just that’s my era.

If readers or listeners want to get all those, they’ll just have to check out the rest in the book because it’s worth it. But my favorite question that I always ask to wrap things up is, who are the sort of literary influences of Maggie Smith, who creates Maggie Smith poet, writer, reader?

Oh, my goodness, I mean, not quite a literary reference. But a lot of who creates me these days as a writer are the two people that I live with Violet and Rhett, my children, I would say, primarily, poets tend to be my literary references, because that’s where I’m most comfortable. That’s the water I feel like I’m best able to swim in. But I read so much memoir and so many essay collections leading up to the writing of this book. And then during the writing of this book, just to kind of get examples for myself, you know, models and really permission slips, like who’s doing memoir differently, so that they can give me the courage and confidence to also tell my story but do it my way. And so a couple of people, I would say Lydia Yuknavitch without a doubt, Carmen Maria Machado, Gina Frangello. Emily Rapp Black. I mean, there are honestly there are so many but reading memoir, in particular that was structured in an inventive, slightly unexpected, unconventional way, with really like, clearly refined sentences that people really spent a whole lot of time on, that was my sweet spot. So as many books I could read like that, I was just devouring them.

It’s great, this sort of allowing them more to play with form. That’s my favorite thing. If you ask anyone, that what I read it, what does it do with form, that’s always what I want.

Yes, you’re my people.

Yes. And so this was just top to bottom great. What’s next for Maggie Smith poet, I know you have a sub stack that I am very fond of.

I’m so glad. Thank you. I’m having a lot of fun with that. Yeah, I mean, social media seems like a slightly unstable and unreliable space in which to have a relationship with readers and teachers and writers and having like a home base where I can do some writing and be in community with people seem like a good idea. So yes, that also I’ll continue doing I’ll be over it For Dear Life on sub stack. My next book after this one is a picture book and that’ll be out in 2024. I, mercifully for readers, did not illustrate it, the amazingly talented Leanne Hatch did, which is why it’s so gorgeous and charming and not, you know, pencil drawings of stick people.

You didn’t break the markers back out for this one?

No one wants my marker people in this, just stapled notebook pages. We’ll just go back to the old elementary school chapbook, zine style.

There’s a market for everything.

I did not DIY this, it will be gorgeous and not because of me, it will be gorgeous because of Leanne. So that’s called My Thoughts Have Wings and it’ll be out in another year.

How exciting. Another thing to put in and another sort of interesting adventure, a new form a new thing to experiment with— so that’s very exciting.

My thought, exactly.

I think that all of our listeners should really go and get You Could Make This Place Beautiful. It’s out now. I can’t stop talking about it. I want other people to talk about it with so thank you, Maggie Smith for joining us today. It’s been such a great conversation and I can’t wait for everyone to read this book.

No, thank you so much. It’s been a joy.

Poured Over