Celebrating an Excellent and Productive Life -- Kevin McIlvoy's

Snapshots of the writer and his family flash on the screen in a theater where he sometimes read from his work.

The writer’s older son,  recalls falling asleep in a motel room the evening before his paternal grandfather’s funeral, as his father, the writer, sat hunched over a little desk working on the eulogy. When the writer’s son awakened at 2 a.m., the writer was still working, to make the words just right, “to give the performance he felt his father deserved.” Adds the son, “And now, 40 years later, I’m trying to speak at his memorial.”

I’m at a celebration of the life of Kevin McIlvoy, a brilliant and dedicated writer who was friend, colleague, and mentor to people who mattered to him, some of whom matter to me. “Mac” was also a loving husband and father, and one helluva writing teacher.

Mac wrote several fine novels and many poems and short stories. He arose at 5 a.m. to write. Afternoons, he wrote in coffee shops, listening to the conversations around him. He revised constantly. As a friend and colleague said, “He tortured the text until he got it to do what he needed it to.” He worked incessantly and took risks. (Novels narrated by a sixth-grader or an octogenarian stonemason and sometime thief?)

Kevin with our friend Don Kurtz

Mac gave back, too. Despite a writer’s need to hoard his/her time, Mac cared enough to be incredibly responsive to the work of students, not merely mouthing interest but displaying genuine appreciation with numerous perceptive comments and questions. “He truly engaged with students,” one former student said. Mac also edited Puerto del Sol, responding personally to everyone who submitted work. Wednesday mornings at the Munson Center, he taught writing to seniors. Earlier, in Chicago, he convinced the warden to let him teach writing to prisoners. He was such a dedicated father that on one camping trip, after he fell and broke three ribs, he stayed two more days in the wilderness, despite the pain, because his two sons were having so much fun.

Mac was instrumental in growing the NMSU writing program, and two other institutions here flourish because of his efforts. The Wednesday group became Southwest Writers, still meeting at Munson Center fourteen years after Mac left town. (Members have written more than two dozen books!) Mac chaired the Doña Ana Arts Council when it rescued, rehabilitated, and restored the Rio Grande Theater, now a performing arts venue owned by the City of Las Cruces.

He was a teacher in every moment, but also a lifelong student – an example for all of us.

Above all, Mac was a writer who deserves to be remembered and read.

As he said in 2021, “I remind myself that I want to live inside the sentences and not immediately start asking myself, ‘Where is this going?’ but to stay on the ground of the experience that the sentence is making sonically and then to discover by accident where this is going.” He also said, “Being uncertain, being vulnerable, is the best possible thing for me as an artist. I’ve come to believe it’s the best possible thing for anyone who presumes to make art, to place yourself in uncertainties, to be in over your head, to realize that the work is asking you to rise above your limitations.”

Amen, brother. Such words magnify my regret that I never met Mac.

But we have his words, his wonderful books!

                                                               -- 30 --

 

[The above column appeared Sunday, 20 November 2022, in the Las Cruces Sun-News, as well as on the newspaper's website (or, at least, it will be) and KRWG's website. A related radio commentary will air during the week on KRWG (90.7 FM) and on KTAL (101.5 FM / http://www.lccommunityradio.org/) and be available on both stations’ websites. One obituary of Kevin McIlvoy can be found here.]

[McIlvoy is the author of the novels A Waltz (1981), The Fifth Station (1987), Little Peg (1991), Hyssop (1998), At the Gate of All Wonder (2018) and One Kind Favor (2021, plus a book of short stories, The Complete History of New Mexico (2005), and a collection of short-shorts and prose poems, 57 Octaves Below Middle C (2017). ]

[McIlvoy is the opposite of some writer who sells some books and gets trapped in trying to repeat the same formula, a mystery with recurring characters and scenes, a formula romance, a series of sequels. That, done well, can sell well and please readers who like it; but it’s a death-knell for the creative artist inside, who started all this for reasons deeper than money or fame. As he said, “I’ve always trusted incoherence above coherence.”

Consider the books: One is narrated by a sixth-grader (who barely made it out of 5h) and another by an 85-year-old mason and part-time thief. Little Peg’s protagonist is a woman who’s nearly to the point of being released from a psychiatric treatment center where she’s lived nearly a decade. Scattered through the book are Peg’s short stories, which explain, perhaps without justifying, her behavior.

McIlvoy combined devout Catholicism with an inquiring and creative mind. He named one novel The Fifth Station, after the station of the cross where Simon the Cyrenean briefly helps Jesus carry the cross. It concerns broken promises by three brothers who’ve grown up in an Illinois steel town one of whom lives as a hobo in New Mexico. Reviewers said his hobo friends were particularly vivid. Only when Luke decides to write the story of his youngest brother’s death does he begin regenerating his capacity to love and to trust – and to recover the grace that he (a basketball star as were his brothers) with which he had lived in youth. I’d love to ask McIlvoy over coffee about where helping others, Resurrection, and creative writing intersect in his mind. No chance now.

Hyssop is filled with moments of New Mexico Catholicism, with miracles and saints unquestioned.

In a complex love quadrangle Red loved both his wife Cecilia, 20-years dead now, and her best friend while Cecilia cared deeply for both Red and Red’s best friend, a Catholic priest Red considers a saint. Publisher’s Weekly raved that McIlvoy “has beautifully rendered the soft, Spanish-inflected rhythms of English as it is spoken on the border” in “a farming community where families are rooted for generations” in each other's histories. At the Celebration of Life, Mac’s other son, Colin Allen(?), read the dream sequence that ends Hyssop; it is both strong and sufficiently imaginative that other writers might envy it. (Confession: I wandered down to Coas a few days later and bought that and The Complete History of New Mexico (which Publishers Weekly called a “bizare, engaging collection” of stories that resembles “a series of jazz riffs”).]

[Anyway, this was a guy who enriched not only readers’ lives but the lives of his students, friends, and acquaintances; and who (believing, as he told his wife before they married, that he would not live a long life) lived fully, with creative work, family love, other projects, and plenty of fishing, hiking, tennis, and other recreation. I’m looking forward to the books.]