Willingness: A Writer's Meditations on Crossing the Flood

by Kevin McIlvoy, Peg Alford Pursell (Editor), Peter Turchi

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 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.

231 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 21, 2025

About the author

Kevin McIlvoy teaches in the Department of English at New Mexico State University, and in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Recently, he has taught at the Bread Loaf, RopeWalk, and Arizona State University writers’ conferences. He has been the editor in chief of Puerto del Sol, the NMSU national literary magazine, for twenty-three years, and has published his own work in literary magazines, including TriQuarterly, the Southern Review, River City, Ploughshares, and the Missouri Review. The Complete History of New Mexico is his first story collection; he has published four novels, A Waltz, The Fifth Station, Little Peg, and Hyssop. He and his family live in Las Cruces, New Mexico.