SongWriter Season 6 Continues with Maggie Smith & Kat Edmonson

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SongWriter is a podcast that turns stories into songs, featuring David Gilmour (Pink Floyd), Joyce Carol Oates, Steve Earle, David Sedaris, Susan Orlean, Craig Finn (The Hold Steady), and Questlove.

Like any rock star and their big hit song, poet Maggie Smith has mixed feelings about her viral poem “Good Bones.” It’s not just that Maggie feels obligated to recite the poem at every reading she gives. It’s also the way that the poem has become her own personal disaster barometer. Anytime something bad happens—a school shooting, a concert bombing, a disaster of whatever kind—the poem gets shared on social media.

“If it were any other poem and I saw people sharing it, I would be retweeting and sharing, and that would be a really exciting, great day,” Maggie says. “Instead, my instinct is to go to a news website and find out what happened. The poem being shared, for me personally, is a signal that something bad has happened. It’s like smoke in the air.”

Like much of Maggie’s work, the poem focuses on parenting, especially the challenges of caregiving for young children. Maggie is fascinated by the ways that technology increases pressure on parents to talk with kids about hard things.

“They have access to the same information that we have access to,” Maggie points out. “They’re getting our news. It’s not a lower grade, kid-friendly, radio edit. They’re getting the “E” explicit version.”

Child psychologist Dr. Chrissy Salley at Courageous Parents Network has spent her career helping parents talk with their children about hard things. She says that no matter how hard a parent tries to avoid subjects like death, the world and its suffering will eventually intrude. Dr. Salley works with children and families who are facing life-threatening illnesses, and these moments are a particularly difficult time to begin the conversation.

“It is our natural instinct to protect our children, and that often includes this sense that we need to protect our children from really hard feelings.” Dr. Salley says. “It is useful for families to develop the muscle for having open and honest conversations with their children very, very early on. Like from birth.”

For the song written in response to Maggie’s work, jazz songwriter Kat Edmonson chose “What I Carried.” The poem describes a parent who is overwhelmed by fear, and in response Kat wrote what she describes as a horror movie soundtrack. Using a trick employed by her favorite mystery writers, Kat constructed the song in the form of a child’s nursery rhyme.

“I have a junk tooth for mysteries, particularly Agatha Christie,” Kat says. “I wanted to present it in this universal way that would immediately impose this sense of danger.”

Kat was particularly drawn to the helplessness of the poem’s narrator, who tries to warn her children about the dangers of the world. Though talking about hard things with young children is a good idea, Maggie’s poem suggests that parents should also prepare to be ignored.

“I’ve done this many times with people I love and care about—I try and make them fearful of something I’ve experienced, to warn them,” Kat says, adding with a laugh, “And nobody wants that.”

Season six of SongWriter is made possible by a grant from Templeton World Charity Foundation.