What is human, and what is holy, if holiness even exists? Is it possible for the human to move closer to the holy? And if so, how? In her debut collection, Saints of Little Faith (Four Way Books, 2024), Megan Pinto wrestles with these questions, navigating between the divine and the daily, the intensely intrapersonal and the interpersonal, in search of grace. These poems are spiritual meditations on the strength of the self in the midst of suffering. “The world is wild!” Pinto writes, “But it tries to persist.” They are also meditations on moments where persistence and diligence are all but impossible; interestingly, these are the moments that connect the human and divine through shared experience.
Pinto’s unflinching honesty reveals the transformative nature of admission in two senses of the word: one, in confessing difficult truths about one’s self and history, and two, in the sense of letting in difficult ideas and realizations, such as the fact that traumatic moments are never merely moments. Ultimately, the most vulnerable moments are the most transformative and offer glimpses of something larger to believe in. These skillful poems are themselves acts of grace. Pinto shows that even if trauma can’t be escaped, it can be eased, that hope persists even in the face of great pain, that “[m]aybe like everything, healing has a season, dormant, but rooting.”
I spoke with Pinto via email about writing into grief, God, and bearing witness to suffering—both one’s own and that of others—on the page.
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The Rumpus: Saints of Little Faith works beautifully as a coming-of-age book. Can you speak a bit about that?
Megan Pinto: I have always loved coming-of-age stories! Two of my favorite novels in high school were Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise and Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. I have always wanted to understand why people live and love the way that they do, and the coming-of-age story lends itself to this exploration, often depicting the protagonist’s first forays into romance and the trials and tribulations they must endure to come to some deeper understanding of themselves. I mean, why else are we here, if not to better understand ourselves? Those books, and many others, educated me in the art of feeling deeply, in allowing all of my experience onto the page.
Rumpus: Most coming-of-age books seem to be about learning something—whether it’s a truth about the world or revelatory information about the self—but a lot of this book is about what one doesn’t know. Is that part of moving into adulthood? And how does that change the meaning of growing up, adulthood, and maturity?
Pinto: In my experience of adulthood, acknowledging the limits of my own knowing, the holes and chasms, is a kind of wisdom. When we allow for the unknown and do not struggle to pin it down, we allow for mystery to unfold. I have also found that the answers I am supposed to have reveal themselves to me in due time, and I imagine that the things I am not supposed to know or do not need to know will be kept from me and thus preserve my sanity. Those answers are for someone else, perhaps. I used to think adulthood was about certainty. But as a writer, I am most interested in the shifting graduation of perception. Now I think adulthood means keeping an open mind.
Rumpus: I noticed a particular emphasis on the unknown in relation to your father, particularly in “Seascapes with Father.” At the same time, much of the book is about your father. Part two consists entirely of a powerful sequence about your father’s illness. How did you approach writing about someone you knew so intimately and yet didn’t know? How did you balance that knowing and not knowing in the work?
Pinto: When I first started this manuscript, I thought I was going to sort out my relationship with God. But very quickly, I saw that the poems also wanted to explore my relationship with my father. That relationship, in large part, consisted of the many questions I gathered throughout childhood. In writing the poems, I did not want to speak for my father, so I allowed the unknown to become a formal constraint. In writing, I kept the focus on my own experience, and when I encountered a void, I tried to state it in one way or another—through image, an associative leap—something that felt true to my emotional experience. Ultimately, I think the formal elements of poetry helped me balance the known and unknown elements. I wanted the poem to become its own art object or experience, not a transcription of diary entries mashed together. Through revision, I let the poems show me what they needed more of or less of, and then I re-wrote accordingly.
Rumpus: That middle sequence feels so vulnerable and emotionally honest, laying the entirety of your experience in caring for your father bare, from your desperation over his condition—I’m thinking of the section that repeats “what should i do” over and over—to the way caretaking affects how you feel about yourself. Can you talk about the experience of writing that section?
Pinto: I actually wrote the first draft of this section when I was in the hospital with my father. The only things that comforted me during that time were reading The Butterfly Lampshade by Aimee Bender—who writes so beautifully of psychic rupture and illness—and writing these little vignettes, which later became the lyric essay at the center of my book. At the time, I believed my father was going to die. Because Raleigh’s medical system separates psychiatric care from medical care, he would be checked into a psychiatric hospital, but then after a few days of refusing to eat or drink, be put back into an ER, where the cycle would repeat itself all over. I was totally powerless and feeling a lot of grief and despair. But something about reading and writing brought me immense comfort. It brought me back into the present moment, where I was sensing, perceiving, [and] feeling, as opposed to just caught in an endless thought loop of rumination and fear. Writing that sequence offered me a way through when I had no other tools available. In other words, the experience was exceptionally difficult, but the writing came easily. When I looked at it after some time and revision, I felt that it was true.
Rumpus: How did you navigate the difficult task of writing about family, especially in such a vulnerable situation?
Pinto: At first, I wrote the poems I needed to write without thinking about publication. Something that has taken me years of study—and therapy—to come to is that I have a right to my own experience. And I’ve also learned that if I don’t follow my impulses, I stifle my whole creative process. It’s best to just get something out on the page and then decide what to do with it. In my revision process, I aim to center the poems on my own experience without speaking for someone else. I also intuitively tend to blend stories together, distilling them into one narrative or “character,” for lack of a better term. In the end, it was imagination that saved me. It allowed me to deconstruct and reconstruct my material like clay so that I could make something new that resembled my subjective experience.
Rumpus: You often write about suffering, both your own and the suffering of others. How does your approach to writing about the personal experience of suffering and the witnessing of suffering differ?
Pinto: In journalism, there is a term called “restorative narrative,” which is strengths-based storytelling. Essentially, the storytelling focuses on the strengths and resilience of the subjects rather than on just the tragedy or catastrophic event at hand. It confers dignity where it would otherwise be taken. I love this idea and, in my own way, hope to write a restorative lyric. I hope to imbue the subjects and concerns of my poetry with dignity and grace, not by erasing suffering but by allowing it to be seen and felt. I also think suffering shows us just how thin the veil is between two lives. We’re all so fragile, vulnerable, and a great deal of our lives are decided by circumstance and luck.
Rumpus: How do you care for yourself as a person while writing about such difficult subjects?
Pinto: One boundary I have is that I will not publish something I am not okay with talking about conversationally with an acquaintance, which would mean I have processed and integrated the difficult subject matter to a degree that it does not trigger me. I also have a daily journaling practice, which lives alongside my creative work—a place for me to put down my feelings, questions, insecurities. Plus, outside help, therapy and sometimes bodywork, which help me move the emotions around on a psychological and somatic level. I also love a nap and a walk after a writing session and then doing something silly with my friends or my boyfriend. But mostly, writing is its own kind of care. I feel better after writing, even when the subject matter is difficult. For many of these poems I had the sense that they wanted to come out, and all I had to do was get out of the way and write them down, and then revise to the best of my ability. My job was to honor the material by transcribing it and shaping it.
Rumpus: Speaking of suffering, Catholicism, and the link between Catholicism and suffering, appears as a repeating theme in this book. I was particularly struck by “Cityscapes” and its depiction of how suffering is sometimes the measure of your devotion, which feels like a main theme in catechism class. Could you talk a bit about how Catholicism affects and influences your work?
Pinto: A few years ago, I became fascinated with The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels, which explores papyrus scrolls discovered in 1945 Egypt that describe a vastly different view of the life and teachings of Jesus Christ—joyful, trickster-like, intuitive—and contextualize the kind of Christianity we have today—martyrdom, life is suffering, the next life will be better. It helped me see some of the historical roots for my then-unquestioned beliefs that suffering equated to meaning. But growing up in my childhood home and going to Catholic school from K–12 really solidified the idea that life is suffering. I think my writing in this book is a way to engage with that idea, question it, and ultimately try to make meaning of the suffering I have been witness to.
Rumpus: And speaking of Catholicism, some of these poems feel like confessions, as if you’re telling the reader a long-held secret. I’m thinking of “The Unfolding,” with its stunning first line: “I let a boy lick my paper skin because he told me I was pretty.” Do you consider your work confessional? Why or why not?
Pinto: I’m glad they read that way! I think that conveys the urgency I felt while writing. I don’t particularly think of my work as confessional, only because my poems equally pull from experiences I have had and experiences I have heard about, read about, or experienced in some secondhand way. In terms of the narrative impulse of the book, I do collapse these stories, taking and weaving what I need to make a poem. It all happened intuitively. I suppose that is the difference between a collection of poetry and memoir. I’m prioritizing emotional truth over factual truth.
Rumpus: You often move between prose-style blocks and stanzaic structure with defined line breaks, sometimes in the same poem, as in “Anonymous City” and “It Was the Winter of My Life.” I’d love to hear more about this formal choice. Do you consider your work hybrid? How would you define hybridity—if, of course, it can be defined?
Pinto: I thought a lot about line breaks as I worked on this collection. Where was I breaking my line, and why? For further investigation, I highly recommend starting with The Art of the Poetic Line by James Longenbach. I guess I became interested in allowing moments that felt more prosaic to exist as they should, in prose. Visually, prose tells us that we’re moving through time, through narrative or rhetoric, and visually, poetry tells us we’re moving up and down through lyric, feeling. Putting those moments together in a poem felt like a formal way to reflect the emotional experience I was trying to convey through the images and content of the poem—sometimes our feeling is transcendent, sometimes we’re just slogging through. Oftentimes, these happen concurrently. In that sense, I think my work is interested in hybridity, bringing multiple modes and registers to the page. I will say I love reading hybrid work and hope in future projects to bring other visual elements, like photographs and audio clips, into my writing.
Rumpus: I was moved by how the poems worked so beautifully together, both in terms of building an overarching narrative of personal evolution and in terms of linguistic connections, with words and images that repeat and accrete meaning from one poem to the next. What’s your approach to structuring a collection?
Pinto: Thank you! I spent a lot of time getting to know how the poems spoke to each other. I spent a long time ordering and reordering the collection. I taped the whole manuscript up to the wall multiple times. I printed the manuscript out on notecards and took it with me on the subway. I laid the manuscript out on the floor. I went through the manuscript and tagged all the “God” poems, all the “father” poems, etcetera. I also sent the manuscript to a few trusted friends to get their feedback on what was working and what was missing. During this process, I moved from being super intellectual to more intuitive about the book’s ordering. I also had the good fortune of being selected for AWP’s Writer to Writer program and worked with my mentor, Neil Aitken, on ordering. We would pick a writer I had not read, and Neil would send me the first ten or so poems of the collection out of order, and my job was to read them and order them. We would then talk about my ordering choices versus the poet’s ordering choices. This was immensely helpful in thinking through how to build tension and emotion over the course of multiple poems.
Rumpus: One image that threads through the book is the image of light, which appears in the first poem, “Solstice,” and the final poem, “Harvest.” What does light represent in these poems, and how does that evolve through the book?
Pinto: So much of this book is about suffering, but I could not write about suffering without a kind of reprieve. Even in my darkest of times, I have always found immense comfort in nature, in the shifting of light among leaves, swans on the lake, dusk falling upon the neighborhood. And I’ve always noticed that my ability to perceive this beauty, to make myself available to it, corresponds with my ability to move through suffering. I suppose the light in this book is a reminder, to myself and to the reader, to allow all of experience in—the good and the bad. What I really want to communicate exists outside of language. I hope the light allows some grace to get in.
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Author photograph by Beowulf Sheehan
