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Maggie Smith is a poet and a New York Times bestselling author of eight books of poetry and prose. Her poems and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Best American Poetry, The Paris Review, The Atlantic, and many other journals and anthologies. Whats the big idea? We are all creative beings because making your life is the ultimate creative act. For those who choose to tune their senses as artists, there are 10 key principles to improving your craft. The societal value of dedicating oneself to a life creating art rests in our essential human need for hope, healing, and a search for answers about our world and ourselves amid a sea of ambiguity. Below, Maggie shares five key insights from her new book, Dear Writer: Pep Talks & Practical Advice for the Creative Life. Listen to the audio versionread by Maggie herselfin the Next Big Idea App. 1. Creativity is our birthright as human beings. I think everyone is born a poet. Years ago, I agreed to visit my childrens elementary school for a few days to talk to second graders about poetry and preparation. I got a sneak peek at the language arts textbook they were using in the poetry unit. The authors described poets as having a special ability to see the world in a poetic way. Poets eyes, they wrote, even suggesting that teachers wear an oversized pair of silly glasses during poetry lessons. On my first day, I told the kids that theres no such thing as poets eyes. Every child is born with poets eyes. We all have them. Poetry comes naturally to children because they havent been estranged from their imaginations and their sense of newness in the world. As we age, we can become distracted and desensitized. We have to pay better attention, but more than that, we have to find ways to make the familiar strange again; to see the extraordinary tucked inside the ordinary. Poets eyes are for all of us. After all, everyone is creative. Even if you dont make art, even if youre not a writer, photographer, or musician, you are creative every day in your work and in your life. Problem solving is a creative act. Conversations are creative. Parenting is creative. Falling in love, leaving your job, and changing your mind are all creative acts. Creativity isnt just about making art. Making your life is the ultimate creative act. 2. Attention is a form of love. What we turn our gaze to feels that warmth and light. What we dedicate ourselves to feels cherished. And conversely, what we ignore feels slighted, neglected, and devalued. This essential part of creativity requires no pen, no paper, no paints, no canvas, no nothing, only your awareness. Your hands can be empty, but your mind should be open. As I was thinking my way into how to write Dear Writer and talk about creativity in a way that makes it accessible for everyone, I sat down and made a long list on a legal pad. That list included words like curiosity, courage, trust, patience, gumption, improvisation, love, and so on. Looking at this unwieldy list, I started winnowing it down, prioritizing the terms that appealed most to me and seemed the most expansive. I eventually narrowed the list to 10 principles of creativity. 10 Principles of Creativity Attention Wonder Vision Surprise Play Vulnerability Restlessness Connection Tenacity Hope All 10 are essential, but attention comes first for a reason. I cant think of anything more important for a writer or artist than to be a sensitive, finely tuned instrument in the world. Keep your antenna raised. We need you to be all in. Lifes everyday activities create statica constant hum of responsibility, news, reminders, and encounters. Our work is to dial past that static to hear the quiet voice inside us. Some artists call this voice the muse. You can call it whatever you like. For writers, the quiet voice inside might whisper a line of a poem or a bit of description or dialogue, but that voice has things to tell us about our lives too if we tune in and listen carefully. The world is a complicated place full of both beauty and horror. But even when the world lets me down, even when it isnt what I want it to be, I find things to love and to be grateful for. I pay attention. My kids and I do our best to focus on beauty. In our house, its not unusual to hear one of us shout, beauty emergency! A beauty emergency is what we call something that stops you in your tracks, something you have to look at right away before its gone. It might be a fiery pink and orange sunrise or an albino squirrel in the sycamore tree or snowflakes that seem to be falling in slow motion. If you take your time getting to the window, the sunrise might be pale peach. The white squirrel might be gone. The snow turned to sleet. Wonder is the opposite of cynicism. The wonder is the key here. Theres no creativity without it. Wonder is the opposite of cynicism. Its warm and enthusiastic. While cynicism is chilly and bored, wonder is shushing everyone. Wonder says wow, and cynicism replies so what? Creativity requires us to pay attention and approach the world with wonder. Many of my poems were made possible only because I took the time to look at my surroundings: listen to the wind and the birds, touch leaves to know their textures, breathe deeply to describe what the autumn air smelled like. Being sensitive, attuned, and observant. These things dont just improve your writing. They improve your life. 3. Art changes us. Above all, I think we come to art to be changed. We come to books, films, music, and visual art to be expanded. Unzipped like a suitcase made larger on the inside, able to accommodate even more living. Creativity is the great expander. When you read a poem or listen to a song or watch a play, you are not the same person. Afterward, youre slightly rearranged. Your DNA is still the same. Your fingerprints are still the same. You look the same in the mirror, but you arent exactly who you were. “Be careful,” I might tell someone when handing them a book or a record, You will be different after this. Years spent with art are years spent in cocoon after cocoon, always emerging changed. Books are community gathering spaces where connection is inevitable. When I read a book, I enter a place another writer has made. I can leave, but not entirely. I take the place with me when I go. Once a piece of art is inside you, it will continue to do its work on you for the rest of your life. Think about the music you listen to, the films you return to, how they move you, help you see things in a new way, or just make your day better. Imagine if those musicians, actors, artists, and writers never shared that work. You would be different. Your life would be smaller, less vibrant. Without their art, your life would be diminished without the transformation that their art made possible. 4. Every no makes room for a yes. Once upon a time, when I first began submitting poems to journals, rejections arrived in the mail. These days, its usually animpersonal email that an editor selects from a dropdown menu in the journals online submission system. Working for a literary magazine has helped me see rejection in a new way. I know how much stunning, worthy work is in that submission queue, and I know how little room we have to publish it. The decisions are sometimes excruciating. A no is a subjective no to one specific batch of work at one specific moment in time by one particular reader for a variety of reasons. A no is not a blanket rejection of you. Its not even a rejection of your work as a whole or your worth as a writer. Its not a no to your talent. Every no makes room for a yes. I tell my students that almost all of my poems were rejected before they found a home at a magazine. Good Bones, my most famous poem, was rejected by the first few print magazines I sent it to before it was published by the online journal Waxwing. Those early rejections stung, but those early rejections were a gift. If Good Bones had been published in print, it wouldnt have gone viral. Meryl Streep wouldnt have read it at Lincoln Center. It wouldnt have been featured on the CBS show Madame Secretary. It would have had a much smaller life. A no is not a blanket rejection of you. We are all playing the long game, and the only way to fail at the long game is to give up. We keep going and remember that sometimes failures clear a path for something better. 5. Creating is inherently hopeful. I think of each poem, each essay, each book I write as a message in a bottle. I dont know when I toss it into the waves, what shore it might wash up on, or when, or who might be standing on the shore to receive it. I dont know if theyll pull the message out or if theyll overlook the bottle altogether. If they do read it, I dont know what theyll think. Will they understand? Will they receive the creation in the way I hoped anyone would? To make things that dont exist yet and dont need to exist is the very definition of art, and to send them out into the world is wildly and practically and gorgeously hopeful in harrowing times. And what times have not been harrowing? Sometimes I ask myself, what can a poem do? A poem isnt a tourniquet when youre bleeding. Its not water when youre thirsty or food when youre hungry. A poem cant protect you from violence or hate. It can be difficult to createto paint, to sculpt, to composewhen your work feels like its not doing enough, when it cant do the real, tangible work of saving lives or making people safer. But art can do real, transformative work inside us. Think about art that has become an important part of your life: the songs you love, the books you treasure, the films you quote line for line. Art isnt extra. Its necessary. Art can do real, transformative work inside us. Art isnt lifes decoration, but its framework. I know what some people would say: Wow, she really thinks being an artist is as important as being a doctor, a farmer, a firefighter. But I have been fed and healed and saved by art, by someone elses hope sent out into the world, when it washed up on my shore. This is not hyperbole. Art is essential. Our work as artists isnt to solve the worlds problems, but to articulate the problems. Not to answer every question, but to use wild hope to ask and keep asking. Only by engaging with ambiguity can we make art that feels true. This article originally appeared in Next Big Idea Club magazine and is reprinted with permission.
Category:
E-Commerce
President Donald Trump signed a cluster of aviation-focused executive orders on Friday, clearing a path for commercial flights that travel faster than the speed of sound. The White House seeks to establish the U.S. as the undisputed leader in high-speed aviation, according to a summary of the order, and specifically seeks to repeal the ban on overland supersonic flight, which has been in place since 1973. The order also instructs the Federal Aviation Administration to repeal other regulatory barriers blocking supersonic flight and to create a noise certification standard that accounts for community acceptability, economic reasonableness, and technological feasibility. Noise concerns over supersonic booms have plagued the promise of supersonic travel since the technologys early days. After the advent of supersonic flight, Americans filed tens of thousands of complaints citing disruptions from the noise and property damage, eventually leading to the ban. NASA, which has pushed for a repeal of the ban, set out to engineer a low-boom supersonic jet that flies quietly to resolve noise nuisance concerns. After years of development, the X-59 has cleared key tests and is on the way to its first test flight. On the private side, aerospace company Boom recently conducted a test flight of its own quieter supersonic aircraft. For more than 50 years, outdated and overly restrictive regulations have grounded the promise of supersonic flight, stifling American ingenuity and weakening our global competitiveness in aviation, the White House wrote in a summary of the order, which follows proposed legislation introduced in Congress last month that would allow supersonic civil aircraft to fly as long as no sonic boom reaches the ground in the United States. Adjacent executive orders also signed on Friday seek to boost domestic commercial drone development and bolster U.S. defenses against the threat posed by unauthorized drones, citing safety concerns over critical infrastructure and large-scale events like the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles.
Category:
E-Commerce
Used car prices ticked down slightly last month in spite of uncertainty around tariffs, but buying a new old whip still costs more than it used to. In April, the average cost for a used vehicle shot up as consumers raced to lock in purchases ahead of potential price hikes driven by Trumps ongoing trade wars. The Manheim Used Vehicle Value Index from Cox Automotive, which tracks used car sales in the U.S., showed a 1.4% drop in prices last month, but prices are still up 4% compared to the same time last year. In April, used car prices saw their biggest spike since October 2023. While the market continues to digest the impact of tariffs, we could see a bit higher levels of wholesale depreciation over the summer, Cox Automotive Senior Director of Economic and Industry Insights Jeremy Robb said in the report, while noting that low inventory could act as a counterbalance, driving prices back up. Compared to a year ago, luxury cars saw the biggest price increase at 6.5%, with SUVs close behind with a 5.2% year-over-year increase. Electric vehicle prices were up 3.1% compared to the same time last May. Used car prices in the U.S. have been a telling indicator of market forces in recent years. In the pandemics early days, supply chain issues constricted the availability of new cars, driving more buyers to the used market. That demand sent used car prices up, and they mostly stayed that way. In March, President Trump announced a 25% tariff on imported cars and car parts, sowing fresh inflation concerns and sending supply chains into chaos again. Trump later eased tariffs for vehicles assembled in the U.S. using foreign parts a reprieve intended to give U.S. automakers a break while they scramble to determine the feasibility of building domestic supply chains to replace parts sourcing abroad.
Category:
E-Commerce
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