(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.