Salon Maps Maggie Smith's Road to Publication

Dan Kois writes about poet Maggie Smith's new prose volume of "literary self-help" Keep Moving (Simon & Schuster, 2020), at Salon. A mile-marker on the book's journey to print occurred in 2018, following Smith's divorce, when, in Kois's words, "she started posting daily encouragements and affirmations on Twitter." More: 

“Today’s goal: Stop rewinding and replaying the past,” she wrote in one representative tweet. “Live here, now. Give the present the gift of your full attention.” She ended that tweet with the same two words that ended all the tweets, clearly a message for herself as well as for her then-16,000 followers: “Keep moving.” Now, in 2020, the worst year yet, comes Smith’s commercial debut: not a collection of poems but a quirky quasi-memoir called Keep Moving, which intersperses those affirming tweets with personal reflections on the hardest days of Smith’s life and features blurbs from the inspirational blogger Glennon Doyle and the singer Amanda Palmer. Four years after “Good Bones” went viral, in the midst of an even grimmer moment in American history, this new book feels like a clear bid to transform Maggie Smith from a famous (for a poet) poet into a guru of literary self-help.

Read more at Salon.