ISBN: 979-8-9898729-7-8
Trade paperback
Publication date: October 21, 2025
Willingness: A Writer’s Meditations on Crossing the Flood invites wonder, inspires joy, and encourages artists of all kinds to embrace the enigmas that fuel creativity. A posthumous collection drawn from legendary author and mentor Kevin “Mc” McIlvoy’s four decades of teaching, lecturing, and editing, Willingness is a testament to his “process of searching” for truth: the “dark and luminous beauty” that pulses at the deepest heart of human experience—and authentic art.
The only nonfiction book among his ten published works of fiction and poetry, Willingness was in process at the time of Mc’s sudden death in 2022. His wife, the writer Christine Hale, completed it by arranging excerpts from lectures, notes, handouts, essays, and interviews. Mc’s colleagues and students recognized in him a strange genius; Willingness offers readers—those meeting him here for the first time and long-time followers longing to reconnect—the associative, recursive, branching-rather-than-arriving, mind-expanding experience of hearing him speak.
“A gift,” from the capacious heart and mind of McIlvoy, writes Peter Turchi in his introduction, Willingness is a book not on how to write but how to keep writing.
Praise for Willingness
What a rare and beautiful book this is. So large and so particular. On every page is what the book itself calls “the imagination which is the transformer of perspective.” A triumph.
—Joan Silber, Author of Secrets of Happiness and Improvement
How will I reside in language differently than I did yesterday? How will I listen differently than I listened yesterday? Those questions are at the heart of Willingness’s luminous meditations, and they carry the discipline and anticipatory openness, the sustained attention and generative joy in unsettledness, that Kevin McIlvoy modeled for decades as a writer and teacher.
—Debra Allbery, Author of Fimbul-Winter and director of the MFA Program for Writers (2009-23)
What truly distinguishes this book is the deeply thought, deeply felt suggestions about how to keep writing in the midst of doubts and difficulties, how to find a path to what truly matters. Reading these beautiful pages made me feel accompanied in the best way.
—Margot Livesey, Author of The Road from Belhaven
A gift for artists of all kinds, encouraging the embrace of paradox, the discernment of surprise, the willingness to embrace enigmas that lead us deeper into our creativity. This gem of a book—as wholly original and inspiring as Mc was as a teacher, mentor and friend—is its own encounter of beauty and will live, cherished, on my writing desk.
—Jennifer Rosner, Author of The Yellow Bird Sings and Once We Were Home
Willingness by Kevin McIlvoy
Kevin McIlvoy (1953–2022) was the author of ten books, including One Kind Favor and his last work of fiction, Is It So? His work appeared in Harper’s, Ploughshares, and The Missouri Review, among many other journals and publications. He received an NEA Fellowship and taught for decades in the MFA programs at Warren Wilson College and New Mexico State University. For 27 years, he was editor in chief of Puerto del Sol. McIlvoy served on the Board of Directors of the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses and the Association of Writers and Writing Programs.