In addition to Is It So? Glimpses, Glyphs, & Found Novels (Why There Are Words [WTAW], 2023), Kevin “Mc” McIlvoy published six novels: One Kind Favor (WTAW, 2021), At the Gate of All Wonder (Tupelo, 2018), Hyssop (Triquarterly, 1998), Little Peg (Atheneum, 1990), The Fifth Station (Algonquin, 1988), and A Waltz (Lynx House, 1981); a collection of short fiction, The Complete History of New Mexico (Graywolf, 2005); a book of short fictions and prose poems, 57 Octaves Below Middle C (Four Way Books, 2017); and numerous poems in national journals. He taught in the New Mexico State University MFA Program from 1981 to 2008, retiring as Regents Professor, and in the Warren Wilson College MFA Program from 1987 to 2019. For twenty-seven years, he was editor in chief of the literary magazine, Puerto del Sol. He died September 30, 2022.
Abby Frucht: First of all, Christine, I’m so sorry Mc is gone, and I hope that your contemplation of these questions provides some solace.
Christine Hale: Thank you. This comprehensive set of questions has led me to do some deep excavation of my understanding of Mc’s work. He always said that his art was his love, going out into the world. Tunneling into his intentions for this particular piece of his art, Is It So? Glimpses, Glyphs, & Found Novels, has proved to be part of my path in letting go of him by assimilating him into the world—beyond me but also inclusive of me.
AF: If you had to identify the genre of Is It So?, what would you call it?
CH: It’s short-short fiction, as particularly defined in the subtitle: “glimpses, glyphs, & found novels.” A glyph is a symbol or pictograph, conveying more information than is visibly present. The glimpses offer a more complete narrative but shatter or torque it by unexpected shifts in time, perspective, or frame. The few words comprising each found novel are the transparency that veils, and evokes prehension of, the withheld narrative.
Mc said that his writing often landed in “the gully” between poem and prose. A reader might reasonably ask writers of the short-short form, “What is the difference between short-short fiction, flash fiction, McIlvoy’s glyphs, and prose poems?” Here’s Mc’s opinion:
Most contemporary American short-short fiction constructs a “flash-flash-and-suddenly-flash-and-suddenly” structure. When I hear people admiringly describe their favorite short-short stories as highly compressed long stories I always want to ask “So what earns your highest praise, then, is concentrated substance?”
In the short-short fiction that most powerfully, pleasurably claims me the entire story resides in the about-to-be-moment or in the coming-to-an-end moment. These moments make no effort to speedwalk across great distances and rapidly experience many things; these moments offer time for a single thing with depth and span, including a charged object, to claim you, as Rilke wrote: “In order for a thing to speak to you, you must regard it for a certain time as the only one that exists.”
The short-short story invites the author to acknowledge that the story portraying a shift in ways of being is as powerful for many readers as the story portraying a shift in ways of becoming. The short-short story invites the author to radically commit to the force of the inverse proportion, that is, to the power of the infinitesimal to reflect the infinite….
AF: I need help with the concept of transparencies. Will you have a crack at explaining it to me?
CH: In the glyph titled “On the 6:25 a.m. Tunnel Rd E1-427,” the narrator says, “I explain that for two decades I studied the techniques for drawing transparencies because clear surfaces found me in every subject appearing before me.” He is chatting, during this very early morning bus ride, with an eccentric older woman carrying a clear plastic bag filled with water and goldfish whose gills are “stressed crimson” due to apparent long confinement in the bag. When the narrator gently suggests that the fish are suffering, she seems entirely unperturbed. He tries to lead her into explaining herself—to tell her story fully—by asking “You’ve come a long way with them?” but she replies only, “A great distance,” and offers nothing more.
Are you the reader not then intrigued? Do you not want to know more, if only out of empathy for the goldfish? And do you perhaps recognize your frustration and pique as feelings you often have, especially if you are paying attention to the world outside yourself? If so, you are experiencing a short-short fiction that vividly portrays ways of being—the narrator’s, the woman’s, and the fishes’—within radical commitment to the force of inverse proportion—the outrage you may feel for the prevalence in the world of needless, careless cruelty and people’s perversity in refusing to explain themselves or hold themselves accountable is all out of proportion to the number of words, the duration of time, and the absence of plot in the glyph.
In my introduction to Is It So?, I’ve said that Mc’s use of the terms “glimpses” and “glyphs” in the subtitle underlines his fealty to radical compression and to rendering the mass and volume of what is only ever implied. This is where “transparencies” comes into play. Think of Renaissance painters evoking three-dimensional volume in a two-dimensional medium. Drapery and the fall of light upon it convey not just the weight and texture of the fabric but suggest the volume, shape, and even the story of the objects veiled by it. The clear plastic bag in Mc’s glyph illustrates the power of this effect in the medium of storytelling. He helps us catch on by making the narrator a visual artist preoccupied with the difficulty of rendering transparencies.
Consider the word: Trans-parencies. When we perceive something, it seems obvious. Yet, the prefix “trans” signals something intervenes between the perceiver and the perceived. The Latin root of “transparency” means “to show light through.” Readers of fiction generally are trying to make sense of “narrative”: a linear, non-ambiguous storyline. Mc is more interested in the somatic effect of storytelling on listeners in the oral tradition. If you ever find yourself listening to family or friends sharing preoccupations, obsessions, griefs, grudges—“stories” that go nowhere or don’t add up but definitely make you feel something difficult to put into words about the teller and within yourself—you are experiencing prehension, a term Mc adopted from Emerson, or the something-there sensation (borrowed from Anaïs Nin), or the about-to-be sensation, concepts on which Mc often lectured. The glyphs, glimpses, and found novels of Is It So? want to give you the about-to-be sensation. You can’t see it, and you can’t nail down its meaning, but you can feel it in your body and be moved. That sensation is the “trans” to be experienced simultaneously with what seems obviously apparent.
AF: “That was something you’ve never seen, and you never will. You’re too small in the big picture of things and you don’t see what you should,” says the narrator of “In the Gila.” Is this what we should expect of these stories, that they will alert us to what we shouldn’t, or cannot, see?
CH: In this story, at first ash and later snow cover the wilderness landscape and lead the narrator to make erroneous assumptions about the terrain he’s traversing and the circumstances that shape its appearance. He also makes mistaken assumptions about the identity and motivations of the forest ranger he re-encounters over the years. Because of first-person narration, the reader is positioned inside the narrator’s mistakes, confusions, and uncertainties, an uncomfortable place vibrant with that about-to-be feeling. Something is about to happen, but what? In the last third of this 6-page story, there’s an abrupt break in the story frame: the narrator’s consciousness is suddenly fused with a writer’s consciousness of the fluidity of his assumptions about who he is and what story he wants to tell. What happens for the reader as the narrative paradigm-shifts from conventional to meta is a shift in awareness. I am moved from linear plot tension about what will happen next to the openness of no concrete self and no definite narrative—a very Buddhist awareness. None of us is always the same self, and our lives have a definite narrative arc only to the extent we impose that structure in hindsight. The line you quote in your question is spoken by the forest ranger, a genial but inscrutable character, resembling some Buddhist teachers. His gentle admonition expresses “interdependent arising”: the truth that myriad interrelated factors form our experiences of ourselves and others and the world we inhabit. It is not necessary for a reader to be familiar with that Buddhist teaching; the shift in frame accomplishes the same open-ended ending.
AF: Is Mc’s sister real or invented? It interests me what he says about her addiction, that for her to overcome it would be for her to “lose her journey.” Would Mc have suggested that for us to loop successfully away from the things that might undo us, we must first move steadfastly into them?
CH: I think the sister is both real and invented, as are all the family members in Is It So? Mc did have a sister, she did have addiction issues from young adulthood on, and although she was the youngest of the five children (and the only girl) in his family of origin, she was the first one to die, in her fifties. But most specific details in that story are fictional.
In the seventeen references to “sister” in several stories, I see Mc’s autobiographical sorrow about the tragedy of alcoholism and other addictions in members of his extended family coupled with his artist’s awareness that readers think they wish to be satisfied by meaning (for example, we learn something useful or surprising about the relationship between an addict and a sober loved-one) rather than startled by paradox (we feel decentered by the possibility that addiction might somehow be a person’s rightful journey). And I see both those factors underpinned by his old man’s wisdom that all of us wish our lives to unfold as coherent narratives with defined arcs when, in fact, the motivations, outcomes, and themes of our lives remain contradictory and confounding.
The further one reads into the book, the more the character referred to as “sister” functions as existential “other.” As in, O, sister, how come you just cannot get me? And, hey, sister, I don’t get you, either, but I can’t leave off trying. In the stories “Blue Squill” and “Mr. Jabbok’s story ends as you would expect,” the narrative centers on Mr. Jabbok’s fate, but the tension is between the story’s narrator—Mr. Jabbok’s writer-neighbor—and that narrator’s sister, in a meta push-pull about how to tell a story properly.
The issue of what is and isn’t so, who thinks they have the answer, and whether they do or do not undercuts every certainty in the book. So, when the writer-narrator of “Mr. Jabbok’s journey ends as you would expect” says about his sister’s addiction that for her to overcome it would be for her to “lose her journey,” we need to regard that seeming certainty of opinion within the context of a riddling book. Mc McIlvoy the author (who is not consistently identical with any of the first-person narrators) has this writer-character startle readers with the possibility that addiction is his sister’s rightful journey, inviting contemplation of the unanswerable “why?” as to repeated rehabs that don’t cure, and the anguished helplessness experienced by loved ones watching that repeated trying and failing.
The narrator’s certainty that to overcome her addiction would be to lose her journey is questionable. It’s the sister (“my restless sister”) who insists (in “Blue Squill”) with biblical certainty that “life permits two choices: You can ask, ‘why is it so?’, or you can say, ‘It is so.’” The writer-narrator then states that the tale he is telling is one of the latter kind—something about which he has chosen to be certain. But, the author of the story has placed the phrase “is it so?” in the line I just quoted in italics, echoing the book’s title and calling into question that narrator’s choice.
Mc was a playful writer, and a provocateur engaged in puncturing our dominant culture’s crippling certainties, and a deeply sincere spiritual seeker. This book he seems to have known would be the last book he’d complete is alive with all three impulses. I believe Mc’s answer to your question might be that it is not easy to know with certainty what constitutes “success” for a given person and that what appears to others to undo us might instead be evidence of spiritual transformation.
AF: “No. No to understanding any of it,” declares the narrator of “Mr. Noom.” I had a colleague who shunned the idea of writers of fiction striving for meaning; the only meaning there is, he declared to his students, is that there is none. I didn’t know him well enough to know whether he also disregarded the idea of real life, as we call it, holding meaning, and now I wonder how Mc might answer this question, and whether his answer might be different were I to ask it in a private setting rather than in a writing workshop.
CH: Since motivations, outcomes, and themes in our lives remain elusive, the attempt to nail down theme or meaning when storytelling is fulfilling for some writers, but for others constipating or even crushing. Mc said “sometimes writers get blocked by The Theme Dilemma.” A focus on “meaning” in fiction he found reductive, inviting exclusion of the arbitrariness, accident, and error that shape our real lives. Literature should be, he believed, “art—humans recognizing meanings and methods while also striving to acknowledge the paradoxical mysteries inviting us to be fully alive.” For him, the purpose of storytelling was to enact consciousnesses and situations that evoke embodied emotional response rather than to create plots that impart knowledge or primarily engage only the mind.
As for what he might say in private about the meaning of life, I am certain he did not believe it to be meaningless. He was the furthest thing from a nihilist. He lived with the same purpose and aspiration with which he created his art: to be fully alive, fully present to joy, sorrow, and paradox. Buddhism, which for Mc (and me) is ontology rather than religion, teaches that our individual lives are part of an interdependent arising too vast and complicated for any one person to fully comprehend, so the best we can do with our questions about the meaning of life is to set them aside and devote ourselves to becoming aware of our reactions to people and experiences, so that we can do less harm to ourselves and others, and generate more joy—and more compassion for sorrow—while we are here.
AF: The narrator of “Mr. Noom” refers to writing and teaching as ways of inhabiting both “open sky” and “prison.” Elsewhere Mc talks about his stories uttering their cries independently of him. Is this because he preferred thinking of his works as living entities, or was his reason for thinking of them as being separate from him, out of his reach and control, darker than that?
CH: Mc described his artistry as a commitment to the craft of storytelling. He practiced the discipline necessary to become “an attentive witness,” saying, “A storyteller, after all, is a watcher always looking for new methods to recognize human mysteries in their most paradoxical manifestations.” I find in that sentence a full explanation of all the particularities and peculiarities of Mc’s many diverse books and stories. He was a watcher, endlessly attentive, ever inventive, and deeply curious about the most confounding mysteries of human behavior and emotion.
AF: “When it seemed my solitude would not leave, he stayed. When it seemed no solitude could hold, he stayed but seemed to leave.” Is solitude an essential component of being an artist? Must artists hold themselves apart in order to see what they need to see?
CH: Yes, of course, one cannot get the writing done without spending considerable time alone. And, if the writer is a watcher, then spatial and perhaps psychological distance between the watcher and the watched may be necessary. But, since Mc also described himself—and many of his fictional narrators—as witness to the stories being told, it’s good to remember that a witness has direct experience of—is impacted by—what they’ve seen and heard. And, of course, “to witness” is also synonymous with “to testify,” as in bearing witness to one’s own and others’ convictions. The apartness between watcher and watched, between storyteller and story, is not loneliness or aloof separation but awareness: the presence of mind necessary to first recognize and then to craft the story.
AF: Was Mc ever free of the kinds of torments that sing out in this book? Perhaps they were what he loved most to write about. Did the writing make his torments bearable, even beautiful, to him, as it does for his readers?
CH: The “torments that sing out in this book” are the torments of human beings, as witnessed by this particular storyteller. Mc said “suffering is part of living fully.” People who knew him well are aware that he was unable to sleep more than a few hours a week because of a lifelong, intractable sleep disorder; that he suffered grand mal seizures as a child, and, as adult, frequent horrific migraines sometimes resulting in hospitalization; and that other serious, chronic health problems dogged him. In spite of that—and because coping with those conditions made him particularly attuned to the sufferings of others—he was an exuberant, generous, and deeply supportive person to family and community members, to writers and artists of all kinds, and to the marginalized, including the elderly, the mentally ill, the differently abled, the unhoused, and the incarcerated. He told me that as a child in a working class neighborhood, he had a paper route, and as he bicycled his daily rounds, he made a wish for each person to whom he tossed that day’s news. He was genuinely open to their pains and their joys—and on his way to becoming that watching, witnessing storyteller
AF: “Your perfect imperfectness.” How I love this definition of character. Using this definition, how would you describe Mc’s character? And your own?
CH: The source of that phrase is Mc’s deep interest in wabi sabi, a concept from Japanese aesthetics and Zen Buddhism, centering on acceptance and transience, through appreciation of beauty that is imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete and sublime, as in the natural world. The classical definition (from 1689) cites “the state of spiritual serenity resulting from the pleasurable and/or disturbing encounter with the egoless, impersonal life of nature.” Mc sought that state in life and in art: he terraced the steep shady slope behind our house into a riot of perennials and flowering trees, cursing and accommodating the bears and deer and rodents that tore it up; on the trails we hiked in the Blue Ridge, he always lagged behind to photograph patterns of branches and leaves for images he’d transform through the randomizing process of scratch art or digital filters into the covers of his books (including Is It So?); and he began each day’s writing session by composing a haiku, a discipline he adopted from reading and studying Bashō and other Japanese masters of the form. For Mc, spiritual practice, making art, and presence to the natural world were never separate.
He was irreverent, funny, and fun-loving. His constant effort at compassion was practical rather than pious. It was obvious to him that everything that appears perfect is imperfect, and that all striving for perfection will wreck itself on the innate reef of imperfection. He stressed to students that beauty is not necessarily pretty. Art, he said, “places the reader inside the envelope of darkness where the envelope of light opens, places the reader inside the envelope of light where the envelope of darkness opens.” I believe he would say the same of life.
As for me, I often describe myself as a recovering perfectionist. Many formative circumstances in my life caused me to grow up viewing perfection as a safe haven I might by diligent effort achieve. I’ve been very grateful for Mc’s ameliorating impact on that particular neurosis, but I’m still working on *perfecting* my appreciation of imperfection.
AF: Somehow these stories all come back to the necessity of having a conscience, and of finding what “matters.” I’d like to hear you discuss this book’s political position in light of its portrayal of human beings’ “fantastic lostness” within nature?
CH: The phrase you’ve quoted appears in the glimpse titled “Birder”: the unnamed (and possibly unhinged) narrator is instructing a group of newbie birders as they prepare to enter a forest.
I’m afraid walking forward is the only way. At daytime: forward. At night: forward. Acceptance. Abiding. Abiding acceptance is the key, Children, since there is no singular Rescue Rule for leaving fantastic lostness: you are at least as old as I, and, so, you understand that bitter, beautiful truth.
You might be curious about the political position of Is It So? because this passage’s focus on acceptance of lostness could be read as a baffling contrast to the biting political satire of Mc’s prior book, the novel One Kind Favor (WTAW Press), which one commentator described as “a fury” and another said set her afire.
It’s worth mentioning, for readers familiar with Mc’s other books, that the speaker in “Birder” is the voice of a very minor character (a son of the poacher Case) from Mc’s 2018 novel At the Gate of All Wonder (Tupelo Press), set in western North Carolina’s Pisgah National Forest. This character was unvoiced in that book, and ended up rescued and fostered by a forest haint—an Appalachian ghost—named Drummer permanently elusively present in the deep coves of the backwoods. That he’s been given voice in the riddling book Is It So? is a bit of substructure deliberate on the part of the author and perhaps—perhaps, is it so?—useful subliminally to the reader. Mc’s books, all very different from one another, were often subtly in conversation with each other through, for example, the reappearance of a minor character presented from a different perspective. (Drummer turns up briefly in One Kind Favor.)
I do think one can find a political position in what the lost speaker in “Birder” says. The “bitter, beautiful truth” evident in old age, through long hindsight on history, politics, and human nature, is that “abiding acceptance is the key.” Acceptance here is not defeat or passivity or apathy or nihilism because it is yoked with abiding, a Buddhist term for the practice of constant attentiveness. The Buddhist position on politics as I understand it is that we should be engaged in acts of kindness and compassion while simultaneously remaining aware that becoming entangled in striving for a particular personal or political outcome is a pursuit of perfection that will wreck on the reef of imperfection. This balancing act—do both—is easier said than done, as it requires us to renew, day by day, our intention to do the right thing while accepting that day by day, we are too small in the big picture of things to control for the outcome we are certain is right. In these incredibly chaotic and divisive times, as power structures and value systems collide, explode, and re-form, awareness of that bitter, beautiful truth, and the gentle admonishment to walk forward anyway, might be a source of courage, if not comfort.
AF: Had Mc gone on living, with what might he have followed Is It So?, which is so complete in its celebration of, as well as in its abnegation of, the writing of it?
CH: After the publication of his last novel One Kind Favor in 2021, Mc said he planned to write only poetry. He’d studied and written poetry from his teens; mentored poets, formally and informally; and lectured in the Warren Wilson MFA Program on the contrasting properties of the prose sentence and the poetic line. Sometimes he shared his poems with close friends, but he began publishing poems only in the last couple of years of his life. His first book of poetry, Singing Lessons, will be published posthumously (Press 53, April 23, 2024). He had, of course, already published a number of prose poems, including those in his 2017 book 57 Octaves Below Middle C (Four Way Books). Still, throughout his four-decades-long writing career he was positioned—he might have felt himself pigeon-holed—as a prose writer. So, “coming out” as a poet was a risk I believe he felt better able to take once he fully retired from academia in 2020. And yet, he wrote Is It So? after he declared his intention to write only poetry. He expressed to me his surprise that this happened, saying that the material of Is It So? insisted on being written. He would always have remained open to what found him in addition to what he sought.
AF: “Beyond judges, judgements, limits: your old body hovers over itself rhythmically aware and ready as a bell rung by a breeze, limbs letting go one shore of sound for this one, losing the full gown of earth for sleeves of sun, for head attuned to hers, hips tilted back in time.” Am I wrong in hoping that Mc was granted the ability to go the way he seems to imagine himself going, here, in the story, “Poise”?
CH: This piece expresses ballroom dance, which we practiced together for a decade, competing as amateurs, culminating in a personal-best performance just a week before his death. Although I agree there’s a metaphor in this passage for a good death—a release from the biblical mortal coils—I read it more as metaphor for transcendence of the illusion of a separate self. In partnered dance in closed frame (meaning both people have both arms or hands in contact) one’s body must be so attuned to the other’s body that there’s a feeling of being lifted free of one’s usual boundaries of body and mind and mystically merged with the all that usually seems fenced off by those habitual boundaries. Death might feel like this—I don’t yet know—but this is definitely a good description, metaphorically, of a Buddhist meditator’s liberated and joyous experience of “no self”—no self separate from the All.
Another reader of this story found it to evoke that “love is a dance.” I liked that, since I find “dance” to be a very accurate description of Mc’s and my literary and life partnership.
AF: Mc was a complicated, learned, gifted, and fully engaged artist. He was a Buddhist, a teacher, an environmentalist, an outdoorsman, a reader, a thinker, and a husband, all of which are made evident in Is It So? Are there other, signature qualities of Mc’s that are perhaps not evident in his writings? Does the writing of books grant a measure, as some people say, of “immortality?” and if so, how does that immortality, in Mc’s case, differ from his mortal being?
CH: Investigating Mc’s entire published oeuvre—all 9 books, written from his 30s to just short of 70—I hope an additional trait becomes evident. He was very bold, in life, in art, in pedagogy, and he was only sometimes appreciated for that originality and verve. He definitely desired his measure of immortality, working like a fiend to finish his final fiction and poetry manuscripts during his last year. The book he didn’t finish, Willingness: A Writer’s Meditations on Crossing the Flood—a compilation of his teachings on creative process—is perhaps the most thorough testament to that boldness. I am finishing it for him, with the expectation it will be published in 2025.
Thank you, Abby, for this chance to think and write about Mc’s work and ways of being. Buy links to all his books can be found at his website, http://www.kevinmcilvoy.com
Christine Hale (http://www.christinehalebooks.com) is the author of a novel, BASIL’S DREAM, and a memoir, A PIECE OF SKY, A GRAIN OF RICE. Her short stories and essays have appeared in numerous journals, including ARTS & LETTERS, THE SUN, STILL, HIPPOCAMPUS, and PRIME NUMBER. A retired teacher, she has been faculty at Warren Wilson College, the University of Tampa, the Great Smokies Writing Program at the University of North Carolina at Asheville, and the Antioch University – Los Angeles MFA Program. She is writing essays on a Buddhist path through widowhood, while also completing her late husband Kevin McIlvoy’s book on creative process, WILLINGNESS: A WRITER’S MEDITATIONS ON CROSSING THE FLOOD.
Abby Frucht, author of 9 books of fiction and poetry and numerous essays across the web, would like to give a shout out to the sheer enjoyments she feels in conducting writer interviews. The idea, she says, is to fuse her curiosity about the writers themselves, their artistic and technical processes, the books at hand, and the insights about the writing life that might be shared with readers. She thanks JMWW for being part of what makes that happen.
JMWW 