An interview with Kevin McIlvoy

McIlvoy Interviews McIlvoy***

I offer this self-interview as a brief, a file on the short story writer and novelist McIlvoy whom I only incompletely understand.

Q:    How did this story collection evolve?

A:    For almost twenty-five years I have written and published novels, including HYSSOP (TriQuarterly Books), LITTLE PEG (Atheneum), and THE FIFTH STATION (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill).  I have also written short stories, having the luck of literary magazine publication but not book publication for them.

About ten years ago, with no deliberate plan, I began to write certain individual stories that shared a narrator, an occasion, a character, or a subplot with earlier stories.  "Maraschinos," for instance, is the twin of "The Rhino in the Barn," published a decade earlier.  "The people who own pianos" is the twin of "Rafters" in that the character A.D. in "Rafters" is the narrator of "pianos."  Over time, as I recognized this occurring, I made this twinning part of my plan, writing and revising "Ice" and "Smoke," for instance, in succession.

Q:    You are slow, then?

A:    I compose slowly, revise exhaustively, mercilessly trashcan my weak unpublished work and the published work I have outgrown. My novels have taught me how to put more at risk in the short stories, and the short stories have challenged me to risk all.  In the meantime, the influence of delta blues and gospel music, always a quiet, constant force in my work, has become more emphatic.  In my novel, LITTLE PEG, I moved further into the fragmentary fictionmaking that is always inherent in personal and public "history."  I have, as well, placed deepening trust in the music of narrative voice as it is formed by various rich oral storytelling traditions in New Mexico culture.

Q.    You place your first trust, then, in narrative voice?

A:    I push to the very limits of narrative voice to find the music that is possible there, and to discover the asymmetry and disproportion and incompleteness and inefficiency and misbalance that are aspects of the work's beauty calling me away from my own limited intentions and carrying me into the will of the work itself.

By my reckoning these aspects of the work are apparent in the three parts of the novella, "The Complete History of New Mexico."  Part I, which appeared in THE MISSOURI REVIEW in 1988, acquired a sibling in 1998-2000 when I finished Part II; in 2000-2001 Part III arrived with great urgency since the storyteller Chum had not, after all, sufficiently completed the work assigned to him.

Q.:    What for you is the hardest part of writing?

A:    Revision.  There is not a story in this collection that escaped less than ten thorough revisions.  Every revision tests my humility as a writer since I'm always having to acknowledge that I'm still learning about the characters, their sensibilities, their voices, their many public selves and their true selves.

Q:    How did you know when this book was finished?

A:    I feel more ruled by the story than ruler of it.  Usually I can only rest as a reviser when the work has finally stopped being recognizable to me as a "story" and has verged on assuming another form. Melville wrote of MOBY DICK, "It is not a piece of fine feminine Spitalfields silk—but it is of the horrible texture of a fabric that should be woven of ships' cables and hawsers. A Polar wind blows through it, and birds of preyhover over it."  Mark Twain said of TOM SAWYER, "It is simply a hymn put into prose form to give it worldly air."  Vladimir Nabokov turned to nature for instruction about the finished work: "I discovered in nature the nonutilitarian delights that I sought in art.  Both were a form of magic, both were a game of intricate enchantment and deception."

A.D., the narrator of "The people who own pianos," is more a singer than a storyteller.  The narration in "Ice" is a rant more than it is a rounded, shapely, storylike imitation of a rant. Chum's "term papers" are tall tales written for an audience of one (Mrs. Bettersen), and I believe they succeed best when they most upset the expectations Mrs. B or any reader has placed their form as a term paper or, for that matter, as a novella.    

Q:    Do you have any questions for me, McIlvoy?

A:    Yes, McIlvoy, I do.

Some writers debate over whether it is right to present a story from the point of view of a person with an ethnic different from your own.  From what I've read, Sherman Alexie is one of those who feel it is wrong to assume the point of view of another cultural identity.  What do you think?

Q:    Like Tillie Olsen and many, many other writers I believe "trespass vision," in writing outside of your own experience. But I believe in earning that right by not making gross assumptions about any single part of the characters' lives.  If I am writing in the viewpoint of an elderly Hispanic woman, what is required of me is that I make that individual character convincing moment by moment, respecting that I can only write within a very focused part of HER individual experience. I cannot and should not presume to present a picture of all elderly Hispanic women—that is the kind of presumption Alexie rightly objects to, I believe.

Q:    What is your best word of advice to a beginning writer?

A:    Trust that in everything before you—everything—there is sufficient mystery for a story to begin.  Be in readiness for wonder.


***    I am indebted to Denise Miller who interviewed me at greater length for M magazine.  My questions here are on her good questions; my answers to her have, some cases, informed the answers here.