Today's guest, Maggie Smith, makes her home in Wisconsin, land of the three seasons—summer, fall, winter. (For some reason, spring usually passes us by). When her husband starts to lobby for them to move to a warmer climate, she points to fires, tornadoes, and rising sea levels as the reason to stay put in the middle of the heartland. She doesn't mention how she likes the crunch of freshly fallen snow beneath her boots as she trudges to the mailbox. But the main reason she stays put are the great women friends she's made here. With age comes wisdom about what’s truly important, and they are.
She writes full-time after a short career as a psychologist and a much longer one as the founder and CEO of a national art consulting company. If she's being honest, she's a writing conference junkie, having penned her first published short story as a result of a stint at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival and she regularly attend several events each year when a pandemic doesn’t get in the way. She's had many mentors along the way, and her way of paying that forward is by supporting fellow authors, particularly those just starting out, through podcast interviews, teaching, speaking gigs, and through shout-outs and posts on social media.
She came to writing through her first love–reading. Yes, she was one of those kids who grabbed a book as a toddler and read it until the cover fell off. Now that she's got the luxury of a home office, she's lined it with bookshelves—three shelves with short story collections, twelve for novels, five for books on writing. When her husband was wooing her, he presented her with a box filled with every Agatha Christie mystery ever published, which he’d scoured used bookstores for months to find. That collection sits alongside the Sherlock Holmes canon and Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe novels. And yes, she decided to marry him shortly after. Not just because of the books, but she admits, it helped.
Another passion of hers is movies, from the classic noirs of the forties through modern-day classics. She's decorated one hallway with lobby cards from her favorites, including Vertigo, Silence of the Lambs, and Chinatown. And has been known to throw elaborate Oscar parties with champagne and door prizes.
On a personal note: her debut novel TRUTH & OTHER LIES, is at its heart about how, at a formative age, young women often pattern themselves after someone older and seemingly wiser and how that choice can affect the trajectory of their lives. That theme resonated with her because of her own experiences growing up in Oklahoma until she left for college in Chicago. She describes having a prickly relationship with her mother, that they were strangers to each other, shouting across the great expanse of changing women’s roles. Her mother was a product of the Depression and a world war and thought her daughter's dreams of a career in journalism were cock-eyed and unattainable.
In many ways, the scenes between Megan and her mother in her debut were easy to write because she'd lived them. She never had a role model like her famous journalist, Jocelyn Jones. And she never mended her relationship with her own mother, who died a decade ago. So in some ways writing this first novel was her attempt to come to terms with both those facts. To write a story where her 25-year-old protagonist was able to achieve what she could not. To give her own life story a better ending.
You can learn more about Maggie at her website www.maggiesmithwriter.com and connect with her on Instragram at https://www.instagram.com/maggiesmithwrites/
To purchase her debut, Truth and Other Lies, follow this link:
(https://www.amazon.com/Truth-Other-Lies-Maggie-Smith-ebook/dp/B09BDHHZP2)
or
Support your local bookstore & this podcast by getting your copy of Truth and Other Lies at https://bookshop.org/a/
A little about today's host-
Shawna Rodrigues left her award-winning career in the public sector in 2019 to consult and publish her first novel Beyond the Pear Blossoms. Her desire to connect and help others led to the launch of her podcast The Grit Show shortly thereafter. When she learned women host only 27% of podcasts, her skills and passion led to the founding of the Authentic Connections Network. She now helps mission-driven entrepreneurs better connect with their audiences by providing full-service podcast production and through a community for Entrepreneurs & Podcasters – EPAC. Podcasting is her primary focus, so she continues to support the writing community through this podcast, and her writing time is mostly focused on anthologies.
She offers a free 7 Steps to Perfect Your Podcast Title to anyone interested in launching a podcast. You can also follow her on Instagram-@ShawnaPodcasts, and learn more about the network and community at https://linktr.ee/37by27.
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