I'm Maggie Smith, and this is the slowdown.

If you've had a good teacher or mentor in your life, even just one, you're lucky.

I still carry the words of my teachers and mentors with me.

Even though some of them are gone now from this earth, I hear their voices.

They're still guiding me, telling me to slow down,

to trust myself, to protect my inner life, to get out of my own way. So much of my teacher's

advice about writing is also applicable to other areas of my life.

I've been teaching creative writing for 25 years.

There are many ways to be a teacher, and all of them require us to be students forever.

Part of being human is that we remain lifelong learners.

We never have it all figured out. Thank goodness for that. Life would be incredibly boring if we did.

One thing I've come to know, as a teacher and as a lifelong student, is that language is incredibly powerful.

It can transform the way we think and feel and experience the world.

But another thing I've learned about language is that it has limitations.

It's often woefully inadequate.

Sometimes I can find the just right words. Sometimes I can't.

I know I'm not the only one who's experienced the inadequacy of language. I know I'm not the only one who's struggled to communicate something I've been thinking or feeling.

But maybe you've experienced the magic of language. Maybe you've read something that articulated

what you felt or experienced but could never describe yourself, or created some of your

own artful language that gets across what you couldn't say

literally. It feels like a miracle, and it's why, I think, we turn to poems, because they often say

the unsayable. I feel both sides constantly, both the miracle and the inadequacy of language.

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