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

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.

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Dara Horn, Eternal Life, and Kevin McIlvoy, Is It So? Glimpses, Glyphs, & Found Novels

Dara Horn, Eternal Life, and Kevin McIlvoy, Is It So? Glimpses, Glyphs, & Found Novels

If you had lived for 2000 years and knew that you wouldn’t (couldn’t) die, how would you spend your days? (Not in a Groundhog Day way, but with a life where each day could potentially “count.”) What would be meaningful to you if you were immortal? Or, if you knew that you had very little time left to live, what would matter most to you? How would you see the world? In Dara Horn’s novel Eternal Life, a woman trades the possibility of her own death for a miracle that saves her son’s life. Through her centuries of life, first in Roman-occupied Jerusalem and then in a variety of places around the world, including in the U.S. in the 21st century, she gets very, very tired of being reborn over and over and especially of watching generations of husbands and children die. In Kevin McIlvoy’s Is It So? Glimpses, Glyphs, & Found Novels, a writer facing his imminent death breaks his perceptions, anecdotes, and secrets into tiny stories and prose poems, seeing the world in glittering, exact detail, longing even for its grotesqueries.

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