Christine Hale: On Kevin McIlvoy’s Willingness, and Handing It On

(Guest post by Christine Hale)

Willingness: A Writer’s Meditations on Crossing the Flood is a book in the world now (WTAW Press, October 21, 2025), but for most of the three years since the death of my husband Kevin “Mc” McIlvoy, finishing this book he’d begun has been a commitment fused equally with the black hole of my grief and the slender rope ladder by which I have written my way toward light. For him, this book—his only work of nonfiction among ten published novels and collections of fiction and poetry—was a project back-burnered for twenty years as he juggled jobs, family responsibilities, and health problems while writing those books (along with several others that never found publishers) and living his legendarily generous dedication to teaching, editing, mentoring, and uplifting other writers.  

Many of you reading that last sentence will recognize—perhaps with a wince of anguish—the overload, frustrations, and uncertain rewards of being a writer in the 21st century. That difficult truth is part of what Mc meant, I think, by “crossing the flood.” But there’s more to it, that subtitle so odd for a craft book, than acknowledgment that writers face adversity.  

At the core of Mc’s pedagogy is the concept of “the will of the work,” in tension with the “will of the writer.” He believed that the willful writer often imposed on their work an agenda (such as preconceived or received notions about structure, theme, or marketability) to the detriment of both the writing’s authenticity—the art—and the writer’s happiness. In Willingness, he says, 

If…you give first priority to locating the problems in your early draft, you will correct and correct the draft, repairing and repairing the boat (the embodiment of your controlled technical skills) before you have gazed into the extraordinary qualities of the river (the embodiment of your inventive capabilities always carrying you beyond what you can consciously control)….You have placed your will over the will of the work. You are outside the work, answering and inventorying, feeling assured you are addressing your novel’s problems. You are not inside the work, questioning and inventing, feeling emboldened to explore your novel’s possibilities.  

He acknowledged that the patience, attentiveness, and openness he suggested did not result in efficient process. He believed that unquestioned pursuit of efficiency—the shortest path to profit—is a capitalist value inculcated in us by a culture of teaching to the test; he asked that artists, and all genuine learners, “jeopardize that agenda.” And he urged writers to take pleasure in the sometimes awkward interaction between their plans for the work and the work’s independent energies.

This conversation between maker and materials, analogous to that of an artisan discovering and then working both with and against the grain of soft or hard wood, the particles of dense or pliable clay, can surprise both the writer and the writer’s audience with delight, astonishment, and maybe the shivers: a glimpse of the sublime—the dark and luminous beauty which strikes us with awe—may not be pretty, and will likely be judged useless by capitalists and other purveyors of agenda.

That near-magical experience—stumbling into serendipity amid unfettered immersion—is or should be, Mc believed, the writer’s truest motivation and reward:  

If a writer asks how to undo Writer’s Block, I feel it should be fair for me to ask, “Is there no pleasure-taking and pleasure-making inside the work that you inhabit during your processes of composing and that you inhabit more intensely during your processes of revising? Are you defending yourself against your work’s most indefensible explorations of happiness?”

Willingness in its published form is made entirely from Mc’s words, excerpted and arranged by me from his lectures, class notes, essays, correspondence, and published interviews. At the time of his sudden death in September 2022, he had gathered his materials and settled on the subtitle and epigraph for the version of Willingness he meant to write. In the months before his death, he talked to me about his intentions, especially his wish that the book be not a prescriptive how-to-write manual, but rather a record of his “process of searching.”  

As I sorted through his files, digital and handwritten, I came across notes for Willingness going back to about 2001. That face-off between the wills of the writer and of the work was always central: the necessary willingness to rein in the ego and to profoundly trust an uncertain path. But I was struck by how much Mc’s stance on his own willingness evolved. In the earliest plans for a book titled Willingness, he seems to conceive of a four-way Socratic interaction of questioning and respect among the writer, the editor, the work, and ultimately the reader. Two decades later, willingness has become the hard-earned insight of a spiritual seeker whose art is his path, as evidenced by that subtitle, derived from the epigraph he chose: 

“How, dear sir, did you cross the flood?”

“By not halting, friend, and by not straining I crossed the flood…When I came to a standstill, friend, then I sank; but when I struggled, then I got swept away. It is in this way, friend, that by not halting and by not straining I crossed the flood.”

The Connected Discourses of the Buddha: A translation of the Samyutta Nikāya by Bikkhu Bodhi

In Buddhism, this passage refers to the Middle Way, the Buddha’s teaching that peace is experienced through a daily practice of neither striving egoistically to get what we want nor collapsing into despair or passivity. “The flood” is samsara, life as we unenlightened beings experience it. I immediately understood this epigraph as personal to Mc in his 70th year: he had survived a lifetime of considerable personal adversity—ill health from infancy, financial struggles, a difficult divorce that ruptured relationships he’d relied on, and many disappointments in his literary ambitions. The Connected Discourses of the Buddha, a thick tome, dog-eared and bristling with Post-it notes, lay beside his reading chair when I finally got myself to enter his studio, weeks after his death. I knew he’d been reading it for guidance, sensing that the end was near.  

Only gradually, over the eighteen months I worked to complete a manuscript of Willingness, did I come to appreciate the relevance of that epigraph to my aspiration to create a record of Mc’s teachings and to release that legacy to those who might carry it forward. My task seemed frankly impossible at first. How could I, sick and grieving and half-blinded for half a year by a detached retina, do justice to Mc’s strange genius? I struggled, sank in sorrow, got swept away in tears and self-doubt, gave up, started again and yet again.  

Eventually I granted myself a compassionate middle way: I would be thorough and painstaking, sorting through every page and file and rigorously keeping my own voice out of the book, but I would also accept that the result could be neither comprehensive of every nuance of his teaching, nor a perfect realization of his intention. In that way, I crossed the flood, finishing the book, and getting to know Mc all over again through immersion in his mind and materials. My process of sorting and seeking, of compiling and editing, was a conversation between maker and materials. My will to do justice to his gifts and his complexity evolved gradually into my willingness to assist his posthumous will in taking its inherent shape.  

Among the papers and books and journals stacked in Mc’s studio was an issue of Black Warrior Review from Fall/Winter 2006 in which the writer Chris Bachelder, introducing two of Mc’s wildest short fiction pieces from 57 Octaves Below Middle C, celebrates “his range, his humor and humility, his regard for the possibilities of language…his curiosity and compassion, his deep and humane weirdness…and most of all: the fearlessness and selflessness of his art.” Bachelder goes on to say,   

You’ll find few writers so willing to disregard ego and market, so willing to pursue voice and vision wherever they may lead, places lofty and low, delicate and dangerous. This gutsy pursuit frequently takes McIlvoy’s work beyond the bounds of the safe or conventional.…I believe his writing belongs to the very best and most honorable tradition of innovative fiction.

Reading that astute assessment of Mc’s nature and of his art of course made me happy. But it also brought to mind a story shared with me by a former student of Mc’s as we reminisced about that gutsiness and the conventional publishing market’s frequent rejection of it. Some classmates, this former student said, had disliked Mc’s ways of teaching and of responding to their work. They felt his approach was not practical and would harm the viability of their work in the  marketplace. I nodded assent, familiar (as was Mc himself, of course) with this criticism from some students and colleagues. His fearlessness about the market could seem quixotic, even self-defeating. His advice to take happy-making, motivating pleasure during revision, in relenting to unexpected side trips driven by the work’s chaotic energies rather than the writer’s reasoned control, well, such a process is clearly not efficient.  

Mc was far from insensitive to the judgments of the market and of other writers. Like most gutsy and non-conforming people, he experienced self-doubt and endured the sting of being overlooked, sufferings that made him compassionate toward other writers’ struggles. He wrote to a student, 

In your letter to me you have addressed the challenging pressures you feel as a writer…engaged in writing as an art (what you have called an “act of faith”) that, in the end, might only offer you “an unloved job and a writing habit that has really come to nothing.” … In my “life”—a far different thing than a “career”—as a storyteller I have experienced a deepening vulnerable heart-sinew-bone-skin-brain connection to humanity (its dark and luminous beauty) that I would not trade for any “career” on this planet.

And in a talk to the North Carolina Writers Network in 2019, he elaborated, 

And what is this humble practice you are engaged in—a practice that for 99.9 percent of us will not likely ever bring power or wealth? 

What is the practice of gazing—and gazing—and more deeply gazing—and losing ourselves in the gazing—and seeing what is before us as never before—and becoming what is before us—and gazing—and seeing ourselves from within the thing or person that storytelling has allowed us to become? 

What is this practice? Here’s what I believe: 

It is the truest practice of selfless, pleasurable, pleasurably difficult compassion.

This advice reflects Mc’s aspiration to write and to teach as expression of his spiritual practice, initially as contemplative Catholic and later as Zen Buddhist. He cared deeply for the survival of the artist, whether addressing writer’s block or the necessity of day jobs. However, in arguing that art be created and celebrated as distinct from the dominant culture’s insistence on profit and power as its highest values, he advocated the stance we see emerging today as financial support for the humanities disappears and freedom of expression is under attack: the very act of making art is political resistance. Years ago Mc wrote that “21st century American culture values the controlling, tough, self-centered ideas of capitalism above the relenting, tender, self-forgetting ideals of democracy.” He cited among his models of activist artists Thoreau, who “made no distinction between matters of attentiveness, aliveness, awareness, and matters of conscience. To be fully aware, alive, attentive was to be a fierce conscientious objector to dangerous groups of people with delusions of separateness and superiority.”

At present, I’m reading another dog-eared book I plucked off Mc’s shelves, The Usefulness of the Useless, wherein Nuccio Ordine (trans. Alastair McEwen) decries “the barbarism of profit…corrupt[ing] our social relations and our most intimate affections.” Ordine suggests that literature, “by virtue of its immunity to any aspiration to make profit,” can and should offer an antidote to such selfishness. Given the long odds in the literary marketplace, and in this country the ever-narrowing definition of what forms of self-expression will be permitted and who will be allowed to live here, why not jeopardize that exclusionary, dehumanizing sociopolitical agenda in the stories and novels and poems we write?  

Why not, as Mc suggests, engage in the self-compassion of pleasure-taking and pleasure-making discoveries as you compose and revise and share with others your literary works? Why not take this opportunity to practice your willingness to gaze deeply with patient, curious attention at all that surrounds you—human, animal, vegetal, mineral, corporeal and non-corporeal? And why not, in that way, connect to your deeper self and to the wide world, forever shimmering between terror and joy, and always a source—if you are bold and can bear to look—of dark and luminous, edifying and transforming beauty?

Christine Hale is the author of A Piece of Sky, A Grain of Rice: A Memoir in Four Meditations and a novel, Basil’s Dream. She completed Willingness: A Writer’s Meditations on Crossing the Flood for her husband Kevin “Mc” McIlvoy after his death in September 2022. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in numerous journals, including Arts & Letters, The Sun, and Hippocampus. From 2011- 2020, she taught in the Antioch University-Los Angeles Low-Residency MFA Program and the Great Smokies Writing Program in Asheville, NC. She served as a fiction editor of Orison Books from 2017-2020. She is now writing essays on a Buddhist path through widowhood, including the Pushcart-nominated “His Body” (The Cincinnati Review); “Wobble” (Still), nominated for Best of the Net; and “Inside   Outside   In-Between” (Southern Humanities Review), anthologized in Best Spiritual Literature 2025.

Kevin McIlvoy is the author of six novels: One Kind Favor, At the Gate of All Wonder, Hyssop, Little Peg, The Fifth Station, and A Waltz; a short story collection, The Complete History of New Mexico; two collections of short fictions and prose poems, 57 Octaves Below Middle C and Is It So? Glimpses, Glyphs, & Found Novels; and a posthumous collection of poems, Singing Lessons. Willingness is his only nonfiction book, on the craft of writing and the processes of creativity. For twenty-seven years he was editor in chief of the literary magazine, Puerto del Sol. He taught in the Warren Wilson College MFA Program in Creative Writing from 1987 to 2019, and as a Regents Professor of Creative Writing in the New Mexico State University MFA Program from 1981 to 2008. He died in Asheville in September, 2022.