I'm Maggie Smith, and this is The Slowdown.

You've probably heard the adage, write what you know.

I remember as a young writer feeling limited by that.

I remember thinking as someone who grew up in the suburbs of central Ohio,

but nothing interesting has happened to me.

Nothing about my life seemed worthy to write about.

One of the things I've done to combat that feeling is to revise the advice.

Write what you know is fine, and sometimes it's just what the piece of writing calls for.

But most of the time, I prefer write what you can imagine. The assignment is to think bigger and wider,

to think beyond your own experience. If you think about it,

your imagination actually knows quite a bit. And however much you write from your own experience,

the speaker of the poem is a creation. I think we're accustomed to this idea and fiction.

We know that the narrator of a story is not the author herself, but the same goes for poetry.

Even if I write, I walked my dog in a poem, the reader shouldn't assume that the I is me, Maggie Smith, the poet.

The reader shouldn't even assume that the dog in the poem is Phoebe, my incredibly cute, and slightly ornery Boston Terrier.

No, there's at least some artistic distance between speaker and poet,

even when we know that the experiences and details are semi-autobiographical.

To take the imagination even further, we call the persona to the stage. The word persona is from the Latin for mask, and it refers to a character

taken on by a writer to speak or narrate a poem. When I write a persona poem,

I'm writing in first person from the point of view of someone or something other than myself.

My goal is to say something fresh and unexpected to shed new light.

Maybe in the Greek myth, Medusa is deathly afraid of snakes.

...