New Book Announcement!

Dear Writer, coming April 2025

Hi, Friend.

I’ve just returned home from my paperback book tour, which was wonderful: fun cities (New York, Boston, Austin, Portland, Seattle), great turn-outs at the events, inspiring conversations, and lots of time chatting with readers and writers. The week was a beautiful whirlwind.*

One of the questions people love to ask during Q&A is, “What’s next?” So…this is what’s next! Dear Writer: Pep Talks & Practical Advice for the Creative Life will be out April 1, 2025.

Yes, it’s April Fool’s Day. No, this is not a prank!

Here’s the official description:

Drawing from her twenty years of teaching experience and her bestselling Substack newsletter, For Dear Life, Maggie Smith breaks down creativity into ten essential elements: attention, wonder, vision, play, surprise, vulnerability, restlessness, tenacity, connection, and hope. Each element is explored through short, inspiring, and craft-focused essays, followed by generative writing prompts. Dear Writer provides tools that artists of all experience levels can apply to their own creative practices, and carry with them into all genres and all areas of life. 

Cover designed by James Iacobelli , who also designed the covers for Keep Moving, Goldenrod, and You Could Make This Place Beautiful.

Preorders are so important, as you probably already know. I preach the gospel of preorders! When publishers and retailers see that a book has significant interest early on, they devote more energy and resources to that title. They stock more inventory. They invest in ads. They give it a little extra love and attention. I’d love that for Dear Writer, so if you are able to preorder, I hope you will. (You can also request from your library, which costs nothing and is so appreciated!)

Here are the preorder links for the US edition and for the UK edition.

As with You Could Make This Place Beautiful, One Signal/Atria is publishing the book in the US, and Canongate is publishing it in the UK.

At the core of this book is a belief that creativity is our birthright as human beings. Yes, all of us. Our lives are expandable, endlessly expandable, and creativity is the great expander. When you read a poem, or listen to a song, or watch a play, you’re not the same person afterwards. You’re slightly rearranged. Your DNA is still the same, your fingerprints are still the same, you look the same in the mirror, but you aren’t exactly who you were. Be careful, I might tell someone when handing them a book or a record, you won’t be the same after this.    

In Dear Writer I’ve compiled and collected twenty years of teaching and writing: what I’ve learned and what I’ve taught, but also what I grapple in my own writing, what I talk to friends about over (preferably spicy) margaritas, and what I think about while spending with my with my children or walking my dog. Some of the most important lessons I’ve learned about writing I’ve learned by living.

The book is full of pep-talks, craft tips, writing prompts, and revision strategies inspired by these ten principles of creativity. You can apply them to art-making—if you’re a writer, or a painter, or a filmmaker, or a musician. But I’ve found that anything that applies to writing also applies to life. Problem-solving is a creative act. Conversations are creative. Parenting is creative. Falling in love, leaving your job, changing your mind—all creative acts.

Creativity isn’t just about making art. It’s about how we live. Making your life is the ultimate creative act.

I love craft books and books about creativity, and my shelves are full of them: Body Work by Melissa Febos, The Art of Memoir by Mary Karr, Craft in the Real World by Matthew Salesses, The Art of Recklessness by Dean Young (really Graywolf's whole "The Art of" series), Refuse to Be Done by Matt Bell, The Creative Act by Rick Rubin, Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert, Still Writing by Dani Shapiro, and so many others. I return to these books again and again, teach from them, refer students to them, and now I've written one of my own. I can't wait to share it with you. 

With gratitude,
Maggie

*I read a lot on on flights while I was on tour, and I have two novels to heartily recommend: All Fours by Miranda July and We Were the Universe by Kimberly King Parsons. Happy summer reading!