Editor’s Note: Maggie Smith is a poet, writer, editor and teacher. Her latest book, “Dear Writer: Pep Talks & Practical Advice for the Creative Life,” which comes out next week, is a how-to book about the craft of writing. But Smith also makes the case that many of the lessons that are essential for creating are as essential for living. Creativity and life, she explains, require imagination. She offers pep talks about both topics on “For Dear Life,” her Substack column. We’ve republished one of those pep talks below. 

On Tuesday, April 1, Cog will host Maggie Smith in conversation with fellow award-winning poet Saeed Jones, currently an artist-in-residence at Harvard Medical School, at WBUR’s CitySpace. You can buy tickets here. — Kate Neale Cooper

Hi, Friend.

Today I’m here with the tiniest pep talk, in case you need one. This one’s as much about saying no as it is about saying yes. In my memoir “You Could Make This Place Beautiful,” I wrote, “Life, like a poem, is a series of choices.” The choices we make in a poem — line length, tone, diction, point-of-view, etc. — are the poem. Together they make the poem what it is, so that changing one thing changes everything.

The same goes for the choices we make in life. As I confess in “Dear Writer,” it’s impossible for me to talk about writing without talking about living. It’s all connected. Collectively, our choices make our lives what they are. Who do we love and spend our time with? Where do we live and with whom? What is our work? What do we spend our days doing?

Changing one of these things changes everything. Changing one of these things changes your life.

On a long walk, I realized that my life is like a poem in another way, too: My life, like a poem, is small and enormous.

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Let me explain. In a poem, counterintuitively, compression creates expansion. A single image or metaphor opens up into a wide open space. Less is often more. The more I edited down my life to the essential elements, and the more I revised away the extraneous, the bigger it got.

It occurred to me on this walk that for me, this is happiness: being clear about what matters and taking my red pen to the rest of it. It amazes me now to think about how simple my life is right now, and by simple I don’t mean easy; I mean pared down. It’s people I love, work I love, and experiences that excite and inspire me. Love. Art. Community. That’s it.

The people that don’t bring me joy or peace? Edited out of the poem that is my life. The work that felt like it was not the best use of my time and talents? Edited out. (As my dear friend Saeed Jones says, “If it’s not a hell yes, it’s a hell no.”) All of this editing means setting good boundaries, and not making decisions out of fear, anxiety, or a scarcity-based mindset. It means taking risks and trusting my gut. If I feel negative or even just “meh” about something, I let it go.

In my experience, the risk is worth the reward. I’m living the most compressed life I’ve ever lived, but it’s the biggest and best life I’ve ever lived. The smaller I made it, the bigger it grew. It feels like magic. One of our family mottos is “Risk it all.” It started as a joke with friends of ours in Chicago, but it stuck. It’s not unusual to hear one of my kids say “Risk it all!” when I’m trying to figure out what to do in a situation, whether it’s making a work-related decision or just trying to fit my car into a probably-too-small parking spot on the street. I love it. At the core of the motto is this directive: Live.

I have a feeling that there are so many hell-yeses just ahead. I want this for you, too. Red pen time.