Kevin McIlvoy
Take Me to the Ruins: A Conversation with Kevin McIlvoy
interviewed by C. Connor Syrewicz
In February of 2018, I met Kevin “Mc” McIlvoy on the steps of Arizona State University’s Old Main where he had been invited to speak on a panel at ASU’s annual literary conference, Desert Nights Rising Stars. At the time, Mc’s collection of short stories and prose poems, 57 Octaves Below Middle C had just been published by Four Way Books. In February of 2020, Mc graciously agreed to continue our conversation. Mc has been teaching creative writing for over forty years years and is the former Editor-in-Chief of the national literary magazine, Puerto del Sol. His published works include A Waltz (1981), The Fifth Station (1989), Little Peg (1996), Hyssop (1998), The Complete History of New Mexico (2005), 57 Octaves Below Middle C (2017), and At the Gate of All Wonder (2018). His novel, One Kind Favor, will be published by WTAW Press (wtawpress@gmail.com) in 2021.
Connor: In the past, I’ve heard you refer to your new book, 57 Octaves Below Middle C, as a reflection of your recent growth as a writer, as a kind of turning point for your work. As a young writer, I’m very interested in this question of what it means to grow as a writer. Working on a novel-length project, I sometimes wrestle with that question; I’ll find myself wanting to strike out in these different aesthetic directions while feeling restrained by the needs of the work, the desire to create something with unity and coherence. After writing several short novels, this is your second collection of short prose; how have the shorter forms played a part in your growth as a writer?
Mc: I originally turned to the novel because of the novel’s inherent dedication to paradox. The shorter forms are more inclined to accommodate irony than paradox. That’s not a criticism of the shorter forms; it’s just to say that, in my own experience, when the shorter forms achieve a view into the contradictory human heart, they more often do it through irony. To earn its scale, the novel’s view of contradictions must be, first, more complex, and second, more unanswerable. Once your work is fixed on the unanswerable, the unspeakable, the tonal quality of your work becomes very important because all art that addresses the unspeakable must have ways in which its materials are paradoxical.
I grew up among oral storytellers on my father’s side, and by the time I was thirteen, I said to myself that I wanted to be a storyteller like the people in my father’s family who told these long, marvelous stories that were like listening to a person sing for two hours. In everything that I wrote, I came to look for that, a moment where my ability to sing, as a writer, was tested.
I’m glad to hear that you’re working on the novel. Because of what the scale of that work demands, you will start to understand what is hardwired in you to place your first trust in. I place my first trust in the human voice because I come out of that reality. Another writer would say, “Look, I place my first trust in the landscape, and everything grows from there.” Another writer would say that it grows from the viewpoint. But for me, by the time that I was sixteen, I knew that everything depended on the voice. That doesn’t mean that I haven’t conscientiously tried to advance and grow in all the other necessary skills—I have been disciplined and hard-working about that—but I’ve known that the thing I should pay the closest attention to studying is the human voice.
Connor: The title of 57 Octaves Below Middle C refers, if I’m not mistaken, to the sound that a black hole makes…
Mc: It’s actually the sound that a tube-shaped galaxy emits. This was discovered by a Stanford astronomy graduate student who measured it at fifty-seven octaves below middle C: in other words, an impossible sound, a sound impossible to imagine. And if what you love best as a writer is the sonic force of the human voice, then it’s a title that serves. It was really by accident that I came upon it. I knew I wanted a title that would have a sonic reference. The title was helpful to me in regards to communicating what this book offers the reader at some kind of gross, large level. It has some pieces in it that one would say are ten octaves below middle C; and it may have some that are even crazier; and certain pieces are conventional, that is, at middle C.
One commonality in the work is the mad voice, the voice of madness. Let’s take, for instance, the Teacher Reptile pieces that are truly fifty-seven octaves below middle C—those pieces have moved so far away from what I would call “story” and what I would call the “prose poem,” that they strain the readers’ tolerances. And I believe that straining is made acceptable by the fact that it occurs in the context of a book that makes room for that difficulty but isn’t dominated by it.
Connor: Elsewhere I’ve heard you say—I’m paraphrasing your words—that your work resists meaning, unity, and coherence.
Mc: Absolutely.
Connor: What occurred to me, at the time that I heard that, was that meaning and unity are two authorial means of controlling the reader’s experience of the work. And I’m curious, given that your work resists those means of control: How would you characterize the ideal author-reader relationship?
Mc: Well, that’s unique to each writer. I’ve never consciously set out to write work that resists meaning; I’ve learned that, despite me, the work will be what it wishes to be, and that the ways in which some work of mine strangely resists meaning are different than how some other works of mine embrace it. The Fifth Station is a conventional novel, and I would say that, almost by accident, it has an overt unity and meaning. So there’s a degree to which the writer says, “How do I accommodate what the work itself wishes to be?” I actually, as a reader, love conventional work just as much as highly experimental, strange—what the Russians would call “fantastic”—work, and it just so happens that what has found me at this stage of my writing life is work that asks me not to intentionally force it toward meaning. I would say that there are pieces in 57 Octaves Below Middle C that a reader would respond to by saying, “Oh, I feel like I have a pretty clear understanding of what this means.” My response to them would be, “Well, that’s a happy accident.” I am happy to see that meaning is discoverable in the work, but there were so many things other than overt meaning that the work demanded of me.
Connor: One of those things, I imagine, is the emphasis on the voice or the “sonic element.” Before, you mentioned how the title speaks to that sonic element—a prevalent theme and formal aspect of 57 Octaves. Elsewhere I’ve heard you say that your work “sings first and says second” which seems an apt description of the book both formally and thematically. Your narrators, for example, often seem more interested in making sound and noise than making meaning.
Mc: In music, people make a careful distinction between sound and noise. Where sound more readily carries recognizable rhythmic forms in it, noise resists pleasant patterns. That scraping that we just heard in the hallway there—if that were to continue, it may actually form a rhythmic pattern; it would be called sound. But right now what you and I just heard, a harsh single scraping, we would call that noise. Traditionally, writers, especially people writing prose poetry or lyric fiction turned to that particular quality. It’s just as natural if the work itself invites the question: But what about noise? Isn’t noise also quite compelling and mysterious, and shouldn’t it be given its due? It is given its due to writers like Beckett. It is given its due in some of Kafka. It’s given its due in writers like Cortázar specifically in Cronopios and Famas. And so there are writers who actually also have an interest in work that has a sonic force that tends more towards noise than sound… I hope that the new work that’s forming for me does both, that it carries me further both into the experiment of sound and the odd experiment of noise.
Connor: Referring again to that idea of work that sings first and says second, I’m curious what that singing process looks like as you are sitting at the desk to write. Is it listening just simply to the phonoaesthetic qualities of language? Is it picking up a bit of language that strikes the ear and then running and expanding out with other associations?
Mc: It has a lot to do with a choice between fullness and completeness. If the way you make sentences is by feeling your way into a greater and greater resonant fullness, then you’re not thinking how semantically the sentence completes either a unit of thought or an expository expression or a movement that is part of defining theme, advancing plot, etc. If you’re writing dialogue and you write, “I told you not to do that,” for me what’s really pleasurable is to do a countless number of revisions of that. “I told you not to do – that.” “I told you. Not to. Do that,” etc., etc. In other words, you’re asking, “How absolute is my trust in the resonant fullness of language?”
Now, often that’s the way poets speak of their work, but it is possible, of course, for fiction writers to compose this way. Clarice Lispector basically composed this way. And it’s pretty clear that Virginia Woolf composed her novels this way. It’s a kind of methodology, though if I’m sounding like I have any kind of real mastery over it, I don’t. I’m stumbling around and enjoying stumbling. For me, writing truly is pleasure-making and pleasure-taking, and part of what is pleasurable about it is not succeeding.
For instance, if you gave me the choice between seeing Stonehenge, the real Stonehenge, or seeing the ruins of Stonehenge, in an instant I would say, “Take me to the ruins.” What happens there, what appears before us are ghosts that do not inhabit the real Stonehenge. And it’s full of resonances that move through it in the way that sound only moves through wreckage and not through the complete thing. So I do, I have what I would call a kind of philosophy of composing towards fullness, and distrusting where there is neat completeness.
What’s exciting, for me, are the small movements—Woolf would maybe call them moments of being, the waves that are the moments of being. Once that tide retreats back, you say to yourself, “What did that uncover?”
Connor: One of the ways in which your work in 57 Octaves seems to draw on poetry is in the way the pieces use their space on the page. One story in the collection, for example, is justified right; plenty of stories and prose poems include more traditional poetic devices like caesuras. These maneuvers on the page are unconventional, surprising, and by the same token, you often write about people in situations that are unconventional, characters whose own enigmatic personalities are the cause of wonder or speculation. (I’m thinking particularly about the first story in the collection, “Basho, poet, diarist, recluse, sells lawn mower – used but like new.”) What for you is the relationship between that formal/ material experimentation and content?
Mc: Well, once fullness is the methodology, then the silences and absences in the text become very important. Some of them are enigmatic in a variety of ways. Some of them are counter-intuitive. Some of them are simply a reminder about how sound arrives: words are released from silence. And if the people that we find ourselves writing about are people who are silent and/or have been silenced by the condition of aloneness or madness, then the silences in between the words become very important, and the forms of white space honor that importance.
And so, I do, I feel carried by the work to learn more and more about language-creating moves of its own will far beyond the usual conventional movements of even something like paragraphing. For instance, there are pieces that I think contain invisible structures in them. I can give an example. There’s a piece in 57 Octaves called “A Testicular Self-examination.” What is probably invisible to people with all of the white space in this story is that all of the paragraphs are two-sentence paragraphs. All of them. I don’t think someone would look at the story and say, That’s interesting. Is that a form of couplet? Well, that’s a form of prose couplet. When work leads us in the direction in which we can say, Oh, I’m so glad that the work has surprised me, it also means that you’re growing as a writer because instead of being able to say, No, no, I planned all that, you have to say, No, no, I discovered that in the work. I helped release its wildness.
A short while ago, a great book by Cortázar, Literature Class, was published. There, he says that writers find themselves going through phases. In an early phase of your life, you seem to be creating books that are like other books you’ve read; that is often an early phase in which you can feel real growth because your work is echoing these heroes that you have. Eventually, he says, you have to face what he calls the metaphysical phase in which you have to confront the fact that your thinking was simple-minded; you have to recognize that what you have done with language reflects spiritual mysteries and mystical experiences. In his own metaphysical phase Cortazar began to recognize that what he thought was his mode, which was a certain kind of a high formal literary mode, was in fact, in the next iteration, going to become a lyric mode. And in the next iteration, what he calls the “ludic mode,” the work that found him was definably ludicrous – work inclined towards the absurd.
There are some of us who naturally find ourselves, at a certain stage, writing in this ludic mode, and I’m glad to have been instructed by someone like Cortázar about how that actually works. But again, I take pleasure in being in over my head. I take pleasure in learning from the work and having a sense that I am always going to be in a discovery mode, because then I’m never going to be writing a book that isn’t pleasurable for me. It’s good as an artist to be able to say, No, the work itself gives evidence that I was learning. In all of the works that I admire the most it’s clear the author was learning, and the work then has that sense of sophistication and “radical innocence.” That’s a term from the literary scholar Ihab Hassan who has assigned it to certain works of literature. He called Dubliners a work of radical innocence, and he called Beckett’s work the work of radical innocence, in which you write almost as if it’s not just a matter of the child being alive in you; you’re an adult of sixty-five, but instead of summoning the child, you’ve allowed the child to overtake you in making the work. That’s, definitely true in the most playful works of Cortázar.
Connor: Many of the characters in 57 Octaves find themselves in the midst of intense experiences: ecstasy, exaltation, horror, fear, confusion, pain. A few times now, I’ve heard you refer to those experiences as madness. What do you see as the connection between noise and madness?
Mc: Ornithologists make a distinction between song and call. The call is the noise a bird will make to mark its territory, and the song is natural to its mating time. And so a certain sparrow might give one harsh noise, and that same sparrow will be capable of real singing. There is, among birds, an almost mad territoriality, and you can hear the madness in what is the call.
People who study speech discourse say that when you’re studying the human voice, one of the most curious and powerful aspects of the human voice is the cry—not words but sounds that are expulsions of air. They call this “phatic communication,”our discourse when words won’t do. I am a student of phatic communication because I love Delta blues, and the Delta blues of the thirties and forties, by people like Blind Willie Johnson, in which he simply moans, are the singer essentially asserting, There are no words for this, and so what I can offer is this kind of cry.
Somebody who doesn’t quite have words, will speak words but it will often be nonsense: “If I could, oh man, man, man, man, if I could, if I could, you know, man, all right, I would – fuckshit – I would I, you know, I would, uh…” That kind of cry is what people in speech discourse would call a tonal cluster, language as a cluster of tones that verge into coherence but do not claim it.
There is music in inarticulation, and it doesn’t surprise me that people who study drama say that the most powerful, dramatic, tragic figures are the most inarticulate. At the beginning of King Lear, for example, the king is very well spoken, but by the end of the play, he’s basically speaking nonsense. The great ironic reversal is that, by the end, the fool is more articulate than the king, but it’s beautiful, beautiful, powerful, endlessly powerful to hear those inarticulate rantings of the king. Shakespeare understood that there was a force in inarticulation. When a person is truly lost, a different music represents the lostness.
I’m fortunate to have had very direct experiences of madness; I’ve had the opportunity to understand what it feels like when you actually can’t make words. I had, early in my life, grand mal seizures. They were very frequent and very violent seizures. Going into a seizure, the first thing I would lose is speech, and what I could do was the equivalent of what you hear toddlers do before they start talking or making sentences: pre-speech. In the recovery from the seizures, I would find that I was awake. I would be able to get up onto my feet again but couldn’t quite speak yet, and it was maddening. Maddening. The seizures stopped around the time I was nine. What immediately occurred then was a long life of very difficult problems with migraines, and migraines that would actually almost drive me mad because they would involve hallucinations and distinct incidences of hallucinatory inarticulation.
Connor: Earlier, you referred to speech-discourse theory. One of the concepts that occurred to me pretty early in my first reading of this book, was Bakhtin’s concept of polyphony. All throughout 57 Octaves there’s this wonderful mixing of disparate voices: classical poetry and yard care in the opening story, medical terminology, hallucinatory and naturalistic imagery in “Session Five” and that story’s twin, “All of the stones all at the same time,” a little later in the book. The back of the book is a glossary made of skateboarding lingo and urban dictionary slang, much of which is already obsolete. It helps the reader through the “Teacher Reptile” stories. What place does polyphony have in your process? Are these disparate languages a way of escaping yourself? Or escaping the predictable? Or shifting emphasis away from saying and toward singing?
Mc: One of the things I love about different vernaculars is their music. And when the vernacular is allowed to be its own pure expression, untamed, it is something really quite remarkable to listen to. To write in a vernacular is to make yourself helpless as an artist, because it’s not your language. Skateboarding is not my language. The language of neuro-biofeedback is not my language. The language of Zen Buddhism is not my language. And when you begin to wonder if the pure experiment of writing in another language can actually communicate something sonically that has unique value, you have to be ready to throw out a lot of pages. I’ve done through the years many, many experiments with vernaculars, and have said, Well, okay, Mc, you were having more fun than your imagined reader.
I benefit from these failures even when, for instance, I am writing a novel, and someone has, in that novel, a vernacular that is uniquely their own. I trust this feeling more than I would have had I never entered into these experiments with the vernacular. My forthcoming novel, One Kind Favor, is a sustained ghost story, and there is a vernacular for telling those stories, particularly in Appalachia where the story is set. And, interestingly, that vernacular, at various times, sounds like its own weird foreign language.
Connor: In an ideal world, given that so many of these pieces rely so strongly on voice as opposed to meaning, unity, or coherence, what would you want your reader to take away from 57 Octaves as a whole?
Mc: Any work like this—like the work of Robert Walser, like the work of Beckett—any work that is this playful, and one could even say self-indulgently playful, defines a singular reader existing apart from readers (plural). In American literary culture, we often picture a reader who is receptive first and resistant second. Why don’t we more often picture a reader who is resistant first and receptive second? Certainly in the novel of ideas, as written by people like Milan Kundera and Woye Soyinka, there is a sense that you will resist this work; in fact, some of it is really going to piss you off; some of it, you will feel is unjustifiably difficult. What I am often doing is assuming that you are a reader who is, first and foremost, resistant—that is your nature—and that you also are paradoxically receptive. I am assuming that what you are looking for in all forms of art, in painting, in music, in dance, is something that you can both resist and welcome.
We don’t tend to do that much in American literary culture. Even in what we define as a very “literary” work, we tend to say that the reader must be first and foremost receptive; we assume it’s okay if the reader is a little resistant, but the reader must be really receptive. Those of us who are trying to learn from oral literature have a lot of examples that we can go to and say, So that’s what it looks like when you create a reader apart from what seems like the reader that American literary sensibility defines.
I’m extraordinarily lucky that Four Way Books and Tupelo Press and WTAW Press would say, Yeah, we’ll take on this book because we can picture our readers as resistant and not just exclusively receptive.
Connor: 57 Octaves was released late in 2017. In an interview that was with The Collagist back in 2012, I noticed that this collection was described as almost complete, which suggests to me that much of it was written prior to 2012. I, myself, am only a year and a half into a book-length project, and from my point of view, that feels like a lifetime. So, tell me, how long did it take you to write the book beginning to end? What was that process like? What did editing look like?
Mc: I tend to write short stories, short short stories, novels, prose poems and poems because I can’t help myself. And I’m always working on a novel. Always. The novel, I’m sorry to say—this seems hard-wired—always takes about four years to write and then about two to three years to rewrite. I’m very slow. I like the pleasure of very slowly discovering where the work goes both in the composing and the revising processes. Each novel is six or seven years of effort. A collection of stories like The Complete History of New Mexico, which is more incidentally brought together, could cover ten or eleven years of writing. And then, I’m still going to slow myself down and take maybe a couple of years to revise. So, for instance, that is the sixteenth draft of 57 Octaves that you’re looking at in published form, and I think it was draft twelve that I cut eighty pages out of the draft that were all stories written in baseball vernacular. The only one remaining is “Batter,” the final piece in the book.
I’m very slow, but I’m always doing overlapping projects. So, for instance, there’s the novel that I’m writing right now and I’m also writing new prose poems and poems. There’s about thirty new ones that seem like they may be part of a fictional memoir in prose poems and poems. And probably about the time that I achieve the first whole draft of the new novel, I’ll already be underway with my notes for the next novel. So, there’s always overlap for me. And I think it’s always going to be true that these books that bring together the shorter pieces for me will take finished form over long stretches, really long stretches.
Connor: A few times now, you’ve mentioned your new book. One thing we’ve talked about is what it means to grow as a writer. How do you see this new novel doing that for you?
Mc: Well, first of all, I’m really quite fortunate that I’ve got this book now, a novel, At the Gate of All Wonder. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever written. In fact, I would have to say that it’s the only time I’ve ever felt called to write a novel in which the landscape is the major character. There is a protagonist in it, there are actually three major characters, but it is truly a sustained work in which as both a novel of ideas and character, the landscape of the Pisgah forest, a small primitive camp in the Pisgah forest, is the protagonist of the novel. And so when I finished it I was able to see that it wasn’t quite a novel; it was an ecosystem in the form of a novel.
Kevin "Mc" McIlvoy has been teaching creative writing for over forty years and is the former Editor-in-Chief of the national literary magazine, Puerto del Sol. His published works include A Waltz (1981), The Fifth Station (1989), Little Peg (1996), Hyssop (1998), The Complete History of New Mexico (2005), 57 Octaves Below Middle C (2017), and At the Gate of All Wonder (2018). His novel, One Kind Favor, will be published by WTAW Press (wtawpress@gmail.com) in 2021.
C. Connor Syrewicz holds an MFA in creative writing from Arizona State University where he spent two years as the fiction editor of the Hayden's Ferry Review. He is currently pursuing a PhD in English at SUNY Albany.