We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Colby Cedar Smith a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Colby Cedar, thank you so much for joining us. You are such a positive person and it’s something we really admire and so we wanted to start by asking you where you think your optimism comes from?
Some days I am filled with optimism, and some days I lie awake at night crippled by anxiety and fear. But I have learned that there are several things that bring my life great meaning: the pursuit of joy, a devotion to curiosity, and a commitment to building community through the arts.
I am an observer. I walk through clothing stores and feel every fabric. I sit on trains, close my eyes, and lean into the rocking sway. I take long walks in the woods every day and breathe with the trees. I love watching my dog’s ears flap as she runs. I savor sleep and waking from a dream. I take pleasure in watching my husband make me food and follow a recipe with scientific precision. I love listening to my children sing when they do the dishes together.
A poet friend of mine calls me “notice-y” and I completely agree. To me, these details bring me immense happiness. These small movements and interactions add up to a meaningful life. My brain is a living journal constantly trying to take in as much as it can, so that I can put all these details and moments into my writing.
As a writer, I work to capture the ethereal, describe the magnificence of nature, and write the music of the everyday life. I think great literature asks us to enter the experiences of others, invites us to feel the complex emotions of the narrative, and in the end leaves us thinking about our own lives.
My greatest joy would be to have one of my readers put down my book and ask themselves, “What do I notice? How do I feel joy? Who do I love?” I would love if a book of mine could inspire this type of reflection. This is what inspires me to keep noticing the world around me and trying to capture it on the page.
The second thing that brings me great joy and makes me feel optimistic is art-centered learning opportunities. During my twenty years of working as a teaching artist, I have come to believe that every time people gather with the arts at the center of the discussion, it is an opportunity for community building.
Art is transformative. Art is healing. Art is a human right.
I have noticed whenever I teach poetry it increases my student’s ability for deep listening, reflection, and empathy. As soon a poem is read in a group, something shifts, people lean forward in their seats. The environment becomes crackling with excitement and power. This level of attention leads to deep listening, which creates trusting relationships.
Our culture effectively teaches us how to rip things apart, tear them down, and find fault, but it rarely teaches us how to love, how to admire, how to find glimmers of hope and joy, and delight in each other and the beauty we can create.
This is my goal for my students. Lift each other up, give each other respect, a feeling of pride, and the will and motivation to create something new every day.
In the end, I think listening to each other’s stories is the greatest gift we can give to one another.
Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?
I am a poet, novelist, and educator, and I’ve spent the last twenty years teaching creative writing and storytelling workshops in elementary schools, high schools, universities, art museums, community centers, and corporations.
I started out as a poet, and I’ve had the honor of publishing in some lovely literary magazines. My first full-length manuscript, A Year of Salt, was a finalist for twenty national book prizes and then never published. At the end of that run, I was so tired of almost making it. I cried for six months, and I decided to shelve the manuscript. I decided I wasn’t a writer.
When my youngest child went into full-day kindergarten, a friend asked me, “Have you ever thought about writing a novel in verse?” This question changed my life.
The first verse novel I ever read was Thanhha Lai’s, Inside Out and Back Again. I finished that book and starred at the wall for a full hour. I had never realized a book could be so beautiful, poetic, fast-paced, narrative, and engaging. I followed that up with Jason Reynold’s A Long Way Down, and Elizabeth Acevedo’s Poet X, and many, many more.
During this time, my grandmother died of Alzheimer’s. I was bruised and swollen with grief. My grandmother was a fabulous storyteller. She was funny, charming, and lively. I spent my childhood sitting at her feet listening to stories about her childhood in Detroit, Michigan in the 1930s. She was Henry Ford’s elevator girl, and she loved to tell stories about conversations with him and growing up in a Greek American household with her four brothers.
As the great Patricia Smith says, “Poetry doesn’t cure grief––but it understands,” so I started writing. I felt like it was my responsibility to tell her stories. I was left holding a string in my hand, and I had to weave the unraveling tapestry of her life back together again.
Eventually, with the help of my fabulous agent, Allison Hellegers, my first novel Call Me Athena: Girl from Detroit was published and has been chosen for many honors including an American Booksellers Association Indie Next Pick, a Goodreads Choice Best Poetry Nominee, a Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection, a Michigan Notable Book, and The Midwest Book Award.
While I’m thrilled with the attention Call Me Athena has garnered, I often go back to those many years of crying, thinking that I was a failure, and more importantly the moment when I decided to pivot.
I tried something new, changed my writing completely, took a chance, and without that hard left turn, I wouldn’t be an author.
I’m happy to say, my second novel, The Siren and the Star will be published in Fall 2025 with Simon & Schuster. It features a vocal protégée who enrolls at the New England Conservatory of Music and is inspired by Barbara Strozzi, a prolific female composer in 17th-century Venice. It’s a book about power, ownership, gender, healing from trauma, creating lasting art, and connecting with the ghosts of the past.
I loved every moment researching the history of Venice and Baroque music. I can’t wait to share the story of Strozzi’s remarkable life with the world.
If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?
Chin up
This is something I really stress with my students. If you are making a living in the arts, you’re going to receive a lot of rejection. You need to keep your chin up.
For the sake of this interview, I counted all the rejections in my Submittable account. It’s 159. That’s how many times I have submitted full manuscripts or individual poems and been told that I’m not good enough.
Even though, I like to think about myself as a poetic rhino with very tough skin that can withstand many arrowheads and keep charging––eventually these rejections start to sink in. And one day you find yourself staring in the mirror, brushing your teeth, telling yourself, I’m not good enough to be a writer.
And that, my friend, is treillis breillis (pardon my Irish.)
To give you an example of the perseverance it takes to be a writer, I will tell you that I have been submitting to POETRY magazine since I was 18 and I have received countless rejections from them. Last month, I received an acceptance letter––a poem of mine is going to be published in their January issue.
Please use me as your underdog example. Big dreams can come true.
Find your people
What I’ve come to realize is that many rejections are all about personal taste.
There are aesthetic bubbles. Magazines that love narrative poems, or the odd and bizarre, or poems that leverage structure, sound, and sporadic visual images, or political poems. There are folks who really love poems about cars and cigarettes and cowboy boots.
If you are submitting creative work, read the literary magazines that you really admire. Then flip to the back and see where else the contributors have published poems. What you’ll find is that a lot of these people have published in the same 10 magazines, because those editors like the same type of work.
Also, find a good writing group. You need critique partners. I have a solid group of 4-5 people who read everything that I write. And rewrite, and rewrite, and rewrite.
Lean on your community and trust expert advice.
Find people who are in your aesthetic bubble and believe in your work.
Write like you’re lying in a ditch
One of my favorite movies is Walk the Line. There’s a scene in that movie where Johnny Cash and his rag-tag band finally get their big break, and they meet with a record producer. They play him a whole bunch of sorry, used up tunes. Songs everyone knows.
And the record producer, Sam Phillips says,
“If you were hit by a truck and you was lying out there in that gutter dying, and you had time to sing one song. Huh? One song that people would remember before you’re dirt. One song that would let God know how you felt about your time here on Earth. One song that would sum you up.
You tellin’ me that’s the song you’d sing? That same Jimmy Davis tune we hear on the radio all day, about your peace within, and how it’s real, and how you’re gonna shout it out?
Or… would you sing somethin’ different. Somethin’ real. Somethin’ you felt.
Cause I’m telling you right now, that’s the kind of song people want to hear. That’s the kind of song that truly saves people. It ain’t got nothin to do with believin’ in God, Mr. Cash. It has to do with believin’ in yourself.”
Every time, I think about this speech, I tear up a little bit.
I want to write like I’m lying in a ditch.
What’s been one of your main areas of growth this year?
I’m a forty-six-year-old woman, and I recently learned that I don’t want to be like everyone else.
I know that sounds silly, but it’s true.
I spent my college years trying to write a specific type of poem––intellectual, witty, funny, obfuscated. I was told once by a professor of mine, “There are poets of the mind and poets of the heart. Poets of the mind must try to use their heart. Poets of the heart must try to use their mind.” He was labeling me as a poet of the heart, which was considered…not good.
Initially I thought this was fabulous advice: build your skills, try to lean into the unknown. Try to make your heart-filled, emotional poems something smarter and more palatable.
In the 1990s and early 2000s, I was taught that the confessional women poets of the 1960s were considered not academic enough. So called, “Kitchen Poets,” which is a phrase that still makes my toes curl. At the time, the structuralist movement and language poetry were en vogue. I was told that I was talented, but that poems written from the first-person with a concentration on story and meaning were unpopular. This tethered me to my master’s arm. I wanted to published, but I also wanted to write about my experience as a woman. I wanted to write about my body, mothering, nature, cycles and seasons, magic, cyphers, and mystics, but I was afraid to use my wings.
After giving several readings in front of live audiences, I realized when I read my intellectual, well-crafted workshop poems, people nodded and approved. When I read my gut-wrenching, personal, emotional, honest poems, the audience cried. They would come up after the reading and want to share their own stories with me. This made me over-joyed. Isn’t this the point of art? To share our humanness? To build community? But I realized the poems they loved most were the poems that I was told not to write, and the poems that were changed in class. This was a disconnect for me.
As poets, I think we are indoctrinated with the idea that we must be the most intellectual version of ourselves. Poets often shun writers who are popular––who are read by the masses. We are encouraged to fit into the academy, we must create something odd, unusual, artsy, whimsical, abstract, language based, and difficult to decipher. Often, I find these poems rather cold.
Recently, I realized I was tired of limiting myself.
Why write a work of genius that’s read by 500 people? Why write for one age group when you could write a book that could be read by anyone from age 12-99? Why write a novel in prose when you could write fiction in a mix-genre poetic form with a lot of white space on the page?
Freedom feels so liberating! And when I started giving myself permission to be me, that’s when I started getting poems published in journals in magazine, when I found my agent, and when I was finally able to get a book published. I had stopped limiting myself, with rules that didn’t even exist.
In the end, I just want to write good books and I want them to connect with people. I want my readers to laugh and cry and feel something. I want them to finish the last line, close the book, and then want to start the whole book over again. I want to create a story that’s cherished, beloved. Someone’s favorite.
With all the noise and critique out there, it took me a while to get here.
But, when I damper the chaos, work on centering my emotions, walk with my dog, spend time with my family, it makes my work stronger and more grounded. I know who I’m writing for, and why I’m writing.
I finally know the kind of writer I want to be.
Contact Info:
- Website: colbycedarsmith.com
- Instagram: @colby_cedar_smith
- Linkedin: Colby Cedar Smith
Image Credits
Benoit Cortet, Nic Robinson, Helen Corveleyn, Arts Council of Princeton
