It’s a bit of serendipity that one of our esteemed StoryBoard faculty, Maggie Smith, just released a widely praised craft book earlier this month. Lucky us and lucky you, writers!
Maggie’s craft book, Dear Writer: Pep Talks & Practical Advice for the Creative Life, guides writers through pragmatic, sensible, and fun strategies to create and maintain a writing practice. The book lays out 10 essential elements of the creative life and provides generative prompts to help get the writing flowing. Readers have called the book “an incredibly kind book that gently nurtures creativity” and a “well of knowledge for writers and other creative individuals.”
Maggie has been teaching writing in various forms for more than 20 years, so there is A LOT of writing knowledge captured within Dear Writer. The book is also basically an extension of her hugely popular Substack, “For Dear Life with Maggie Smith,” in which she imparts advice for writers to hold on “to the good, the real, the true” in their writing lives and beyond.
Maggie is teaching this year’s in-person Poetry cohort for StoryBoard 2025 and we can’t emphasize enough how excited we are to have her teaching for us.
Her workshop is titled “Line, Sentence, and Stanza” and will explore the interplay of the poetic line, the sentence, and the stanza, paying special attention to rhythm and pacing. As we engage with one another’s work, we’ll discuss the ways in which line breaks, syntax, and the use of white space are working with—or against—each other.
Here’s a bit more bio on Maggie: She is the New York Times bestselling author of eight books of poetry and prose, including You Could Make This Place Beautiful, Good Bones, and Goldenrod. A 2011 recipient of a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, Smith has also received a Pushcart Prize and numerous grants and awards from the Academy of American Poets, the Sustainable Arts Foundation, and the Ohio Arts Council. Her poems and essays have appeared in the New York Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, TIME, The Nation, The Atlantic, and The Best American Poetry. She lives with her two children in Columbus, Ohio.
Apply for Maggie Smith’s poetry workshop at StoryBoard 2025 now!
