12 or 20 (second series) questions with Megan Pinto

Megan Pinto is the author of Saints of Little Faith (Four Way Books, 2024). The winner of the 2023 Halley Prize from the Massachusetts Quarterly Review, Megan’s poems can be found in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Ploughshares, Lit Hub, and elsewhere.  She has received scholarships and fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Martha's Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, the Port Townsend Writers' Conference, Storyknife, and an Amy Award from Poets & Writers. Megan lives in Brooklyn and holds an MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

Saints of Little Faith is my first book! I have always dreamed of having a book out in the world. Achieving a dream is life changing in and of itself. Now I know it is possible.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

I read Anne Carson’s The Beauty of the Husband, in my first college English class and was forever changed. Before that point, I knew I wanted to be a writer. But after reading Carson, I knew I wanted to devote myself to studying poetry, and learning how to write beautifully.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

In the beginning, I am following little curiosities. I tend to let the poems accrue, and not worry too much about the larger architecture . About every 6 months or so, I like to print out everything I have been working on and tape it up on the wall. I leave it like that for another month, and revisit it frequently. I start to see how the poems are talking to each other, and my deeper interests and themes begin to reveal themselves to me. Then I go back to generating new work. 

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

Poems usually begin for me with a musical phrase or an image. A rhythm that stays in my mind, and propels me into the draft. I would say I write musically, imagistic ally, and instinctually at first, and only later after many drafts I start to ask myself “what is this poem trying to say?”. I am mostly going poem by poem. Only toward the very end, once the manuscript has started to become clear to me, am I writing more specifically into the holes in the manuscript.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

I see public readings as a parallel practice. I read my poems aloud in private while revising, but public readings are different. They sometimes reveal to me what I want to revise, if I falter over a line or verbally edit a phrase mid-reading, but mostly they teach me about my own vulnerabilities. What I’ve processed enough to share with others, and what still feels tender to me. 

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

In terms of my own work, I’m less interested in theory and more in beauty. I hope I make something that allows other people to feel deeply. 

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

To listen, not just hear. To look, not just see. 

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

Essential! I’m not too precious with my work and I always appreciate the extra eye of a trusted editor. Sometimes things that make sense to me inside my head do not totally translate. Four Way has been so wonderful with edits. Hannah Matheson (my brilliant editor) is so thoughtful and kind. Editors make me feel confident about releasing my work into the world.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

After college I read Twyla Tharp’s The Creative Habit, and she talks about leaning against a problem or idea, instead of forcing a solution. I love that verb in this context. To lean against the idea. Keeping contact, but not forcing. Sharing some weight.  

10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

I tend to have writing heavy months and reading heavy months, and these alternate due to the demands of my day job (I work in advertising) and personal life. That being said, I can write whenever, wherever. If it’s a writing month, some days will have 5 minutes of writing, some will have hour long stretches. It depends on what I’m working on that week. If I’m generating heavily or revising. A typical day begins with some movement, coffee, and breakfast. Hopefully I have a little time to read something that is inspires me.

 

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

This is such an important part of the writing practice. For me, I’ve learned that whenever my writing is stalled, it means I’m not reading something that speaks to me deeply. When this happens, I’ll either turn to some of my favorite books, or I’ll start a new novel. This gets me connected with language again, and I can start to fill the well.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Honeysuckle. 

13 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

I think everything influences my art. My engagement with writing is a byproduct of my engagement with living in the world.

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

So many. But to keep it brief: Larry Levis, Susan Mitchell, Bhanu Kapil, Anne Carson. These are writers I can always turn to when I am feeling lost. 

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

See the northern lights. 

16 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

I would be a therapist. And I think I would be an excellent therapist. 

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

I love writing. Writing has led me to everything that is good in my life. It has guided me, shaped me, changed me. I don’t think it is possible to be bored if you’re a writer. At least not for long.

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

Animal by Lisa Taddeo. And I just re-watched Moonstruck and fell in love all over again. 

19 - What are you currently working on?

Resting. It’s so easy for me to be in motion. Lately I’ve gotten much better at saying no and taking time for myself. I’ve noticed this has benefited my writing immensely. I would like to continue finding balance between being in the world and cultivating solitude. 

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Daisy Atterbury, The Kármán Line

 

The Kármán line is the altitude at which the Earth’s atmosphere ends and outer space begins. The Kármán line is the edge of space, as opposed to near space, the high altitude region of the atmosphere. When they say altitude they’re thinking in terms of the human. What is measurable from the ground. Beyond the Kármán line the Earth’s atmosphere is too thin to support an object in flight. (“after star death.”)

I’m struck by Santa Fe, New Mexico-based poet, essayist and scholar Daisy Atterbury’s The Kármán Line (Chicago IL/Cleveland OH/Iowa City IO: Rescue Press, 2024), a hybrid/lyric memoir around space travel, cosmology, planetary bodies and the logic of landscape, all wrapped around the impossible abstract of the Kármán line, that edge between earth and outer space. As she writes, mid-way through: “We become identified with a wound, you said, and I am like sure, let me. I persist in autobiography.” Set in the nebulous between-space of prose poem and essay/memoir, Atterbury weaves her narratives around what is difficult to precisely capture, allowing for the betweenness to capture betweenness in startling ways. Writing of asteroids in a piece titled “Binary Asteroids,” she offers: “Perhaps like people in my life, these stones can be classified as falls or finds: falls, seen falling to the Earth and then collected; finds, chance discover with no record of a fall. In 1492, a large stone meteorite fell near Ensisheim, Alsace, one of the first known recorded falls. In 1895, my grandfather’s family left Alsace-Lorraine after it was annexed from France by Germany. When my mother was forced to enlist in the German army, they fled to the United States.” Opening with a list of “places (in no particular order).” Atterbury’s The Kármán Line is constructed via a sequence of sections, most of which are composed via prose—“after star death.,” “troposphere.,” “stratosphere.,” “mesosphere.,” “thermosphere.,” “exosphere.” and “epilogue.”—as she works through the layers of this particular line, attempting to discern the threads that accumulate into that single line of thought. And, oh, what distances she travels, even as she focuses on such intricated detail. As her piece “Roads of the Dead” reads, in part:

The Severan Marble Plan of Rome is a carved marble rendering, a map of ancient Rome based on property records. Its size complicates its ongoing digital reconstruction.

The marble map is a blueprint of every architectural feature of the ancient city, from buildings to monuments to staircases. The map’s carved blocks once covered a wall inside the Templum Pacis, but all surviving pieces have been shipped to the floor of a Stanford University warehouse to be scanned and catalogued. The 1,186 surviving marble fragments make up only ten percent of the original marble plan. Using 3D modeling, the Computer Science department is digitally reconstructing the whole.

The Severan Marble Plan project is a study in method. Virtual teams of engineers, archaeologists, and researchers from the Sovraintendenza of the City of Rome solve the puzzle by using shape-matching algorithms to digitally construct the jigsaw based on matching forms. That the process is “painstaking and slow” is no deterrent.

The original plan is detailed, accurate, and consistent in scale because it was copied from precise contemporary surveys of the city of Rome, produced from cadastral records. Carving mistakes and small irregularities remain in the original map. Its reproduction is made all the more difficult because of this lingering trace of the hand.

In the 1750s, a European mapmaker cut a wooden map of the British Empire into pieces as an educational tool for the children. In the 1990s, puzzle-making attained status as an aristocratic pastime.

I’m going to Spaceport America.

What becomes interesting, also, is how her sections of pieces, set more traditionally into the shapes of poems, suggest themselves as asides to the main narrative as variations on the Greek Chorus, offering an alternate perspective on the main action, otherwise tethering together those elements of narrative.

You cant rely on
structure these folded
matchbooks I take one
greased packet of fire sauce
This makes a very large
salsa verde, ten calories

The way you discovered
money, you pissed me off
when we touched, I sort of
peeled back, a paint strip falling
from the pole. But we keep
contact. I muscle myself
into a tight shirt, press my face
against a glass pane, make notes

Towards future health
wondering if the problem is lack
of calories or ritual
lack. Dry as a bone
and full of vacancies

 

Toronto International Festival of Authors’ Small Press Market (part two, : Conyer Clayton + brandy ryan,

[left: Gary Barwin, signing his new selected fiction collection with Assembly Press : see part one of my notes here] Here are some further notes from my recent participation at the Small Press Market that Kate Siklosi and Gap Riot Press organized and hosted through the Toronto International Festival of Authors. Hooray small press!

Toronto/Ottawa ON: The latest from Kentucky-born Ottawa poet Conyer Clayton (following two trade poetry collections and six prior solo chapbooks) is the chapbook KNEELING IN OUR NAME (Toronto ON: Gap Riot Press, 2024), a chapbook-length sequence the acknowledgements offers as “the first of a three-part series of interconnected poems.” The poem, the poems, here are evocative and visceral, writing grief and loss and enormous love. “My mother’s name is mine and buried in my throat.” she writes, to open “iv.,” “Her name is buried in my throat. / You scratch at her when you call to me. / When I kneel on the carpet. / When I stretch my neck to reach her. / When I reach into my throat to touch her.” Set as an expansive sequence, Conyer moves from short lines to lyrics set closer to prose poems and scatters of lyric clusters set across the page, offering a narrative that writes parental loss as physical, interconnected and devastating. “But I couldn’t do a damn thing to help. It hurt / right here, pointing, right here, kneeling. / right here, still.”

Browned edges.
Water droplets

on the corners
of the windows

I wipe
like a sermon.

Every day
like a sermon

The temperature
drops.

I kneel
to stretch my neck.

Every day
like a sermon

I kneel
to stretch my neck.

Like a prayer to
something

Toronto ON: It was very cool to watch brandy ryan work on further erasures throughout the fair, sitting at the Gap Riot Press table next to mine. The author of three previous chapbooks—full slip (Baseline Press, 2013), once/was (Empty Sink Publishing, 2014) and After Pulse (w Kerry Manders, knife|fork|book, 2019)—ryan’s latest is the visual erasure in the third person reluctant (Toronto ON: Gap Riot Press, 2024). There is a curious blend of erasure and visual collage in ryan’s pieces, offering full-page reproductions of prose pages (a paperback of some sort; google doesn’t provide easy answers as to what this book might be) with the bulk of the text excised via coloured marker, overlayed with what appear to be full-colour glossy magazine images. ryan works an overlay across pages (and what might be ‘chapter headings’—“LITERARY DIVERSIONS,” “LITERARY CONSUMPTION” and “LITERARY POSSESSION”) with a text that suggests a commentary on gender, body autonomy and agency, and rage. “uncomfortable in ///// anger / the object of / her / housewifely / high profile,” ryan writes, mid-way through the collection, “display / a performance / a sharp observation, /// put on / like a ‘mask’ / they are ‘putting on their face’) […]”

 

Amy De’Ath, Not a Force of Nature

 

No community is to me
            as I once
caved in to you I said
beware! the Diversion of the Populace
            who were think is nice, maybe
unscrolling after death

and shut out of a more
            screen-time time
a common day of breathing
            the cacti the glass windows
and through them our lungs.
And through them all ways
of unseeing ourselves

            and through them (“That Well of Tears is Mine”)

The author of a handful of smaller titles over the past fourteen years, the full-length debut by Suffolk-born UK poet, critic and editor—she co-edited the anthology Toward. Some. Air. (Banff AB: Banff Centre Press, 2015) with Fred Wah [see my review of such here]—Amy De’Ath is Not a Force of Nature (Brooklyn NY: Futurepoem, 2024), an expansive collage of lyrics set as moments, declarations, expositions and accumulations. “It’s a good night to stay home & work a delivery tread / on the yeast farm,” she writes, to open the poem “Force Of Nature,” “then pour oneself into a plaster-of-Paris / model of our own activities. It’s a fine night to entertain!” Her poems are incredibly smart, self-aware and gestural, offering commentaries and notes on ecological disaster and how capitalism reduces human capacity. “When you’re walking on a stage / The affirmation of a union / Should living offend the dead,” she writes, to open the poem “Transferable Skull,” “Or should I avenge thee / When you’re walking on a star / Managed not to get pregnant / I lied, I don’t know who you are [.]”

De’Ath writes of and on catastrophe and collapse, including a critique of Edward Burtynsky through her poem “Institutional Critique,” that includes: “Burtynsky I told you I’m not / trying to editorialize, this is not / an indictment of the industry, this is / what is it? / we are compelled to progress / to a dry toxic wastebed / Burtynsky I’m one of the foot soldiers / in the war on sustainability [.]” Structured in four sections, the collection holds two untitled bookend clusters on either side of the sections “EIGHT LOVE SONNETS” and “EIGHT WORK EMAILS.” “By refusing to sign the new contract you are / Not acting in the spirit of the contract.” she offers to open the poem “Dear Simon,” a piece signed at the end by Simon himself. In many ways, the poems in Not a Force of Nature are composed as a collection around voice and constraint, such as through articulating a sequence of characters that seemingly compose work email poems to themselves, whether hoping to catch or correct their own behaviours. Or, as “Simone” writes to herself in “Dear Simone,” “It’s wrong, what Patrick Swayze said / in his penitential prayer: this is your space, / but that’s yours too. Every time I think I’m / getting close to you we lose our touch.”