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Welcome to GabFest reads for the month of April.

I'm John Dickerson, one of the hosts of Slate 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

...