You Could Make This Place Beautiful

by Maggie Smith

thought about Kathryn, the emotional alchemist, who described this as her work—helping people metabolize their experiences. What happens if you don’t process what has happened to you, what you’ve done, what you didn’t do? It sits inside you. It can make you feel like you’re choking, like you can’t take a full breath.

I remember something the poet Stanley Plumly said to me about poems: “They begin in the middle and they end in the middle, only later.”