Welcome to GabFest Reeds for the month of April.

I'm John Dickerson, one of the hosts of Slate's Political GabFest.

My guest today is Maggie Smith, the author of Dear Writer, Pep Talks and Practical Advice for the Creative Life.

Maggie draws on her 20 years of teaching as well as her life as a poet and author to break down creativity into 10

essential elements, which are to my mind the 10 essential elements of life. Wonder, vision,

play, surprise, vulnerability, restlessness, tenacity, connection, and hope. We talk about Maggie's

creative process, the importance of staying porous, and a great deal more.

So here's our conversation. I hope you enjoy. So Maggie, I've been a longtime fan of both your work

and also just the way you move through the world. So I'm delighted to get a chance to talk to you.

Let me start with the choice you made in Dear Writer to break it down by or divided into sections based on attributes.

First, that choice and then the ones you chose.

Yeah, it's actually funny.

I think I'm walking the walk because I wrote an earlier draft of this book

a few years ago that didn't have those 10 ingredients at all. And then when coming back to the draft,

I looked at it and I thought, oh, three years later, I wouldn't write the book this way. I would

re-envision it entirely.

And so after getting a lot of questions over the years that basically boil down to how do you do what you do,

like what's the secret sauce, I thought, well, if creativity had a recipe, and I realized the recipe is different for all of us, but for my

recipe, what would the ingredients be? And so I made a giant list on a legal pad of like every

word I could think of that came to mind when I thought about what it means to make a thing

and then to shepherd it into the world. And I ended up boiling it down to 10,

but I think each of them has a lot of words kind of tucked inside of it. Yeah, definitely,

...