Taking Flight: Author Maggie Smith Discusses Her Children’s Book, ‘My Thoughts Have Wings’

Like many of her poems, Maggie Smith’s latest project started with her kids and a metaphor. “There’s an essay in the back of [‘Keep Moving’] called ‘Nesters,’ ” Smith says of her 2020 book. It’s based on a bedtime conversation with her then-preschool-age daughter, Violet, “about how some thoughts fly away like birds and some thoughts nest in our heads.” 

The metaphor returned nearly a decade after that conversation, in early 2020. Smith’s son, Rhett, was in early elementary school and also struggling with bedtime, thanks to stress from the pandemic and Smith’s recent divorce from her children’s father. 

“Even for me, I can busy myself all day and push whatever is troubling me to the back of my mind,” she notes. But at night, “the space opens up for all that stuff to flood in. I remember Rhett said something like, ‘I’m trying to think good thoughts, but the bad thoughts keep pushing them out of the way.’ Which is … exactly what happens to all of us.” 

To help Rhett, Smith developed a bedtime ritual of listing good thoughts to crowd out the bad. Eventually, she realized this idea could work as a children’s book, a longtime literary goal for Smith. “I thought … this conversation is absolutely something that I could build and give to other families to use in their homes,” Smith says. “It’s a conversation-starter kind of book.” 

“My Thoughts Have Wings”—a collaboration with illustrator Leanne Hatch, which comes out Feb. 13—centers on a bedtime discussion between a mother and her child, told from the child’s point of view. After talking through some of their worries, the child and their mother come up with happy thoughts to nest instead. 

Ultimately, Smith hopes this book will ease bedtime struggles for families. “This seems like a small hope, but if you are a parent of a child who's having anxiety, it's not a small hope,” she says. “It makes a big difference.” 

Smith will celebrate the book’s launch with a free, family-friendly event at the Bexley Public Library, in partnership with Gramercy Books, on Feb. 25. Meanwhile, in June, she’ll release the paperback version of her New York Times best-selling memoir, “You Could Make this Place Beautiful.” 

But Smith has no intention of resting on her laurels. “I would love to do more writing for kids,” she says enthusiastically. “It's just a matter of, I never want to force anything. I have to find the right idea.” 

In addition, Smith is working on an essay collection, which she expects to publish in 2025. And, she adds, she has a fiction project that she describes as “the thing I’m most excited to get back to after I finish my next book that’s due.”  

Fans of her poetry needn’t fear, though. “I’m a poet, no matter what I’m writing,” she says. “I [am] still a poet first and foremost. … I’m always writing poems.” 

This story is from the February 2024 issue of Columbus Monthly.