Episode Details

We were so delighted when former Montana Poet Laureate Mandy Smoker agreed to sit down with us for an interview.  Mandy is the living embodiment of "pay to forward" with deep involvement in education for the underserved, her deep feeling poetry and now children's books.

She describes the transmission of a poem as “rigorous juggling.” Carefully, she twines language, fuses vocabulary and in the process of enlightenment, words are threaded, deleted, stacked, and rotated. Bit by bit, a full, rich poem of understanding, love, and freedom prevails.

“I’m hard on my poems and I’m a pretty vigorous reviser,” says Smoker who often writes under the moniker M.L. Smoker. “I’ll begin to write a poem and after it emerges, I’ll go through them line by line. I don’t feel as if I’m constructing a poem. At first, it’s more like the words are coming out. During the revision process, I will go back and wear a different hat and a different set of eyes and see it all through a different lens.”

Poetry, she says, is like a spring, the watering of seeds of joy, an escalating connection that is alive at the moment in the world with her, a pattern of life that radiates out in all directions.

“I never really know when the feeling will come to put a new idea out in the world. There’s never been any expectation, and it could be sporadic. There are times when I will write poetry because I’m feeling stable and grounded, and other times where there has been heartache and difficulty in my life.” Expression and Empowerment

A member of the Sioux and Assiniboine tribes, Mandy was born in 1975 on the Fort Peck Indian Reservation and moved to California when she was in elementary school, graduating from high school in the San Joaquin Valley. She describes her earliest memories of writing as analogous to the sound of a bell penetrating deeply into her cosmos.

“Since I was young, I’ve kept a journal… I’d write stories and create plays in elementary school. I loved writing as an expression of myself. It’s always felt like the right thing to do and has made me feel empowered. In fourth grade, I wrote a play and had my best girlfriends come over and we set up a stage and had props and we rehearsed our lines, and we won the school talent show. I felt strong and capable – and it was fun.”

One of her earliest primary writing influences was California-born Nobel Prize winning author John Steinbeck (1902-1968).

“I was introduced to John Steinbeck in middle school, and I made such a surprising connection to him and his voice. His style was unique to me. As I got older, I realized that my father’s side of the family from was Oklahoma and my grandparents left town and came to California during the Dust Bowl. ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ became personal to me, a connection to my grandparents’ migration, and their transition, and it gave m