Talking Creativity and Collaboration with Author Mike Maggio
By Norah Vawter
Mike Maggio has been publishing fiction and poetry since the 1980s. He is the author of three collections of poetry and five books of fiction. His latest book—Letters from Inside, published October 2019—is a short story collection that spans 30 years of writing. His work is full of quirky intellectualism, commenting on our broken political and social system, or just the human condition itself, without becoming preachy or polemic. But what really sets Maggio apart—and what, I think, makes his prolific creativity possible and his work so full of energy and life—is a spirit of collaboration and an intense devotion to our local writing community.
Maggio doesn’t want to be a lone voice in the wind. And so he reaches out. As we head into the holiday season, I’m reminded of how relevant and timely this theme of community and collaboration is. Mike Maggio makes me think about what we can accomplish collectively, how we can root ourselves in our communities, and what we can give to those communities. I was able to sit down with Maggio, to talk about his new book, his writing, and his passion for community. When I asked the author why collaboration with other artists is so important to him, he told me, “It’s what feeds me, what keeps me alive.”
Maggio has lived all over the world—including New York, Los Angeles, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan. Upon returning from the Middle East in 1993, he settled in Northern Virginia and has lived here ever since. He has deep ties with the D.C. literary community, many of which were forged during the years of protest against the Iraq War and the Bush administration. Maggio has a B.A. in English with a concentration in creative writing from Queens College, an M.A. in Linguistics from the University of Southern California, and an M.F.A. in creative writing from George Mason University. By day, he works in IT, but in the early morning, evening, and night, he is a writer, an activist, and a champion of the arts.
I met Mike Maggio about a decade ago in a fiction writing class at Mason, while we were both graduate students. Over the years, we’ve kept in touch, and I’m always amazed at his provocative thoughtfulness, how his questions and answers make me think about literature and/or the world in new ways, and also how busy he is.
Maggio’s involvement in political activism stretches back to the 1970s when he was a student at Queens College. “It was one of the active colleges in the anti-war movement,” he tells me, referring of course to Vietnam. “I remember relatives telling my parents, don’t send him there. It’s a communist school. It wasn’t quite communist, but it was very liberal, and it really formed the basis of who I am as a writer. ... I went there for the creative writing concentration, which was rare at the time, but [because of both activism and my studies] I learned how to think.”
In the early 2000s, when the U.S. invaded Iraq and a new war sparked new protests, Maggio became involved with D.C. Poets against the War, which later morphed into Split This Rock. This sparked all sorts of connections and new involvement in the activist and literary communities. Later he joined the Poetry Society of Virginia, where he is now the Northern Regional Vice President. But he’s also found ways to collaborate with other artists. His collaborations Springtime in Winter and cloudism bring writers, musicians, actors, and visual artists together to create work they couldn’t accomplish on their own. He was one of the organizers of another artistic collaboration, Peace and Identity, created by Antonella Manganelli.
“What I learned from cloudism and Springtime in Winter is that collaboration is inspiring. In those two events, it was my idea. But they would’ve never come to life without these other people participating and giving their ideas. ... Without [for example in cloudism, Graham Pilato and Allison Clapp Fuentes and cellist Tina Hughes], it would’ve been nothing. So collaboration is really something that feeds my own inspiration.”
Maggio also finds that his writing is affected by the place he lives. “Wherever you live informs your poetry, informs your writing. My writing in L.A., it was during the punk era, the punk scene, it was much more frenetic. When I went to the Middle East, when I went to Jordan, my writing became a lot ... calmer. The environment really had an effect on it. And I think D.C. has hit kind of in the middle of that, between being calm and being upset.”
The politics of the time also have a big impact on his work. The Bush years produced a collection of activist poetry called deMOCKracy, published in 2007. “My mother read it and asked me, why are you so angry? That was all written here, in the D.C. area during the Bush era, and of course I was angry. ... The funny thing is that I’m even more angry about Trump, and yet I haven’t written [more than about two political poems].” Under Obama, he continued writing, but not about political themes, “The Obama years to me were magical. ... I felt proud to be an American. ... I think maybe the problem [for political writing] is that somebody like Bush inspires. Whereas somebody like Obama, there’s no drama. [I don’t think] I wrote any political poems in the Obama years.”
Now, under Trump, he’s having a hard time addressing, in his writing, these political issues he’s so concerned about. He thinks he’s “too angry.” Elaborating on this, he explains, “I feel like everything that I believed in has been stolen. I grew up to believe in the Constitution. Republicans, as much as I disagreed with them, were supposedly the party of law and order. And I feel like the whole thing was revealed to be a lie. So I keep thinking I need to write something about this, [but] I don’t want to write something polemic [to be simply making a political point]. I want it to be a story.”
He may not be writing politically right now, but he is definitely addressing a myriad of issues in society, underscoring the effect that the world has on us, and that we have on the world. “Key Bridge,” a recently written story in his new collection, Letters from Inside, speaks to racism and other social issues present today. It’s also firmly rooted in the D.C. metro area. “Key Bridge” is a very D.C. story. Maggio told me that this story was inspired by Nikolai Gogol’s 1836 short story, “The Nose,” but also “directly from living here, loving the Key Bridge, and Georgetown. ... [This bridge] is what’s bringing together this metropolis, people from Virginia, D.C., all over. ... But other than that, it’s a story about racism, social profiling, racial profiling.”
Digging into the idea of telling a story rather than just hammering in a point, Maggio explained, “I think a lot of new writers make the mistake of becoming polemic. You address the issue head-on. [Some of the poems in deMOCKracy did this], where the poem was not really a poem as much as a reaction to something happening politically. There may be something good about that because it gets people interested, but ultimately that’s not the way to do it. The way to do it, at least in fiction: you have to have a character, you have to have a story, and all the political stuff has to be the backdrop.” We discussed his 2014 novel The Wizard and the White House, which is a favorite of mine. The book overtly comments on the Bush White House and makes use of fantasy and archetypes, but ultimately succeeds in being a character-driven story. I felt an awful lot of sympathy for the character based on George W. Bush (who magically loses his whole mouth) because he is painted with such humanity. I could relate to his feelings, to his suffering, despite the ridiculousness of the situation. Maggio says, “I really want there to be that level of sympathy. Because that’s what makes him real, as real as he can be. ... I said, these characters can’t be caricatures.”
But as devoted as he is to his individual work, Mike Maggio is always forging connections, always collaborating. When I asked if he could imagine a world where he was just doing his own thing and not working with others, he smiled and said, “That’s what I do daily, my fiction, my poetry, and I get a lot of pleasure out of it. But that other element is really important to me. I can’t imagine living without it.”
Meet the author. Mike Maggio has a book signing coming up on December 21 from 1-3 pm at Books and Other Found Things in Leesburg, VA.
Read our contributor Lauren Woods’ review of Maggio’s new book, Letters from Inside.
Letters from Inside is available for purchase from Vine Leaves Press or Amazon.
Mike Maggio has published fiction, poetry, reviews and Arabic translations in journals and anthologies in the United States and abroad. Currently, he is the Northern Regional Vice-President for the Poetry Society of Virginia. He is also an associate-editor at Potomac Review and recently served as a judge for the Oregon Poetry Association’s annual poetry contest. He is the author of Your Secret Is Safe With Me, an audio collection of poems, Oranges From Palestine (and other poems), two collections of short fiction, Sifting Through the Madness and The Keepers, and a full-length collection of poetry, deMockracy, a hard-hitting, poetic critique of the Bush administration. He has also published a full length novel, The Wizard and the White House, a novella, The Appointment, and most recently a collection of short stories Letters from Inside. Find him online at www.MikeMaggio.net.
Norah Vawter is DCTRENDING’s Local Authors Editor. She earned her M.F.A. in creative writing from George Mason University. She has published articles, fiction, and poetry in The Washington Post, Healthline, Scary Mommy, The Nassau Review, and Stymie, among others. Norah is querying her first novel, an excerpt of which was shortlisted for the RopeWalk Press Editor’s Fiction Chapbook Prize. She lives in Northern Virginia with her husband and son.
Check out more reviews and author profiles of D.C. area authors here.