Beyond Judges, Judgements, Limits: Abby Frucht Interview with Christine Hale on Kevin “Mc” McIlvoy’s Is It So? Glimpses, Glyphs, & Found Novels

AF: If you had to identify the genre of Is It So?, what would you call it?

CH: It’s short-short fiction, as particularly defined in the subtitle: “glimpses, glyphs, & found novels.” A glyph is a symbol or pictograph, conveying more information than is visibly present. The glimpses offer a more complete narrative but shatter or torque it by unexpected shifts in time, perspective, or frame. The few words comprising each found novel are the transparency that veils, and evokes prehension of, the withheld narrative.

Mc said that his writing often landed in “the gully” between poem and prose. A reader might reasonably ask writers of the short-short form, “What is the difference between short-short fiction, flash fiction, McIlvoy’s glyphs, and prose poems?”