“[Art] brings out the best parts of us and asks us to be bigger than we realized we could be”: An interview with creative writing instructor Maggie Pahos

“Art has always been a place I turn to when I feel scared or unsure or need to be lifted.”

For Maggie Pahos, writing and travel go hand in hand. For well over a decade she’s been doing both, taking inspiration from the wider world and capturing it on the page. In addition to travel and writing, she’s also a committed teacher. She’s taught in the Allegheny County Jail, the Orleans Parish Prison work release program, and Our Clubhouse, a cancer support center in Pittsburgh. In the summers, she leads trips for Putney Student Travel and National Geographic Student Expeditions.  Her work has been featured in Medium, The Rumpus, Brevity, Bark, Nowehere, the Pittsburg Post-Gazette and elsewhere.  Click here to learn more about Maggie. And write with her next summer!

1.)   Tell us a bit about your “art origin story”?  When did you first fall in love with your art? 

I had always been a nonstop reader, but I think I fell in love with art, without realizing that’s what it was, in 4th grade. My family had just moved towns, and it really freaked me out. Instead of going outside with the other kids during recess and making friends (which would have arguably made the whole process less freaky), I sat inside and wrote poems about nature. The poems rhymed, and I penned them in washable marker. Color-coded them, actually. And stanza by stanza, I made it through that first year until I felt at home where I was. Art has always been a place I turn to when I feel scared or unsure or need to be lifted. I feel lucky I could sense that early on.

2.)   What role have teachers played in your development as an artist?  Any one stand out?

I’m grateful to my 4th grade teacher, Ms. Kosco, who let me sit inside and write poems instead of forcing me to go to recess.

My undergraduate nonfiction professor, Cassie Kircher, took me seriously from the minute she met me, and that has always stayed with me. My mom died from cancer when I was twenty-two, and I have since written a books-worth of pages about that. But Cassie was there when I wrote my very first essay about my mom’s illness and how my family was coping, when my mom was still alive. It was published in my college’s literary journal a few months before she died. Having Cassie guide me through revising that essay from both an emotional and a craft standpoint showed me that I had the power and ability to make art out of the hardest thing. Her belief in me and my work gave me the fortitude and courage to keep writing about it.

3.)   Can you share a bit about your pedagogical approach?  How do you create a supportive and creative atmosphere in the classroom. 

To me, teaching is a conversation. Sometimes, in the same classroom, in the same day, I’m a teacher and also a student. Hopefully, that’s the case. I bring what knowledge and experience I have to facilitate discussions and to open avenues in thinking, but to me, teaching is a collaboration between everyone involved. A successful teacher is someone who empowers her students, and that is my primary goal.  

4.)   What excites you most about the Midwest Artist Academy?

What excites me most about the Midwest Artist Academy is the potential to create a community with students who share a passion for the same things. There is a kind of magic that happens when you connect with a stranger about something you both care about. Multiply that times a hundred given all the amazing people who will be there and the activities we’ll participate in throughout Eau Claire, and it’s possible this will be the best week ever.

5.)    How can art make the world a better place?  Can you share a personal example?

I read about a challenge recently in an article that discussed the way-too-low wages that most artists make: Imagine going an entire year without any art. No movies, no books, no podcasts, no paintings, no tv shows. No commercials, no music, no dancing, no photographs, no theater, no beautiful buildings, no flower gardens, no graffiti on the underpass on your way to work. What if all the artists just quit one day? What would the world look like then? What would be the point? That’s how I feel about art. It is part of the entire point of being alive.

And perhaps it’s greatest quality is that it can create empathy and a path to connection between people who would have no other way to connect. Anyone who has ever made art has felt empathy before. Anyone who has been moved by art has felt empathy. [Art] brings out the best parts of us and asks us to be bigger than we realized we could be. Almost nothing else on the planet has that power.