Here’s a writing tip from Maggie Smith: You don’t have to travel far for ideas. Some of the best material is close to home.
The poet and memoirist — not to be confused with Maggie Smith, the Dowager Countess of “Downton Abbey” — has built a career on inspiration from her neighborhood in Bexley, Ohio, just 25 minutes from her childhood home in Westerville. “I don’t live here necessarily because of the place; I live here because my people are here,” she said in a telephone interview. “My parents are here, my sisters are here, my aunts and uncles are here. We have dinner every Sunday at my parent’s house.”
In her memoir, “You Could Make This Place Beautiful,” which debuted at No. 3 on the hardback nonfiction list, Smith takes readers inside the 1,500-square-foot periwinkle and white home she shares with her daughter and son. Her husband also lived there; the dissolution of their marriage is the basis of “You Could Make This Place Beautiful” and Smith’s latest volume of poetry, “Keep Moving.” (The walls and roof of both are a composite of creativity, motherhood, and determination.)
“The biggest stressor in my life was how I was going to stay in this house, in this neighborhood, in these schools, with these people,” Smith said. She writes in her memoir, “I kept us here with words” – particularly the advance for “Keep Moving”.
The place has 35 windows, give or take, and lots of natural light. Smith’s office faces the street, with views in all directions. She said, “I’m literally the last person my kids see when they go to school. I see them coming home because I sit in this office and watch them walk up the front door.’
Smith acknowledged that she “lives in a glass house in plenty of metaphorical ways,” but the visibility seems to be working. Friends leave flowers, cakes and books on her porch. A neighbor obligingly turned off his chainsaw when he found out she had a Zoombook event.
“It’s really what it feels like to be held in this place,” Smith said.
Would her Kerouac-loving 16-year-old self be shocked by the prospect of a future in Bexley? Possible. “I planned wild capers,” Smith said. “I couldn’t wait to get out there and have my big adventure.”
But, as she writes, “Living all my life in Ohio, in the heart of the heart, and living in the same house where we once lived together is like living in a repetitive poem – a pantoum, a villanelle, a ghazal. There are always words and lines that repeat, go on, insist on themselves.
Elisabeth Egan is an editor at the Book Review and the author of “A Window Opens.”
