Remembering the Late Novelist, Short Story Writer, and Poet Kevin McIlvoy In Conversation with Mitzi Rapkin on the First Draft Podcast
Fiction alumn, and host of the First Draft: A Dialogue of Writing podcast, Mitzi Rapkin, Mitzi revisits a 2019 interview in honor of the late Kevin McIlvoy, who died on September 30, 2022. They discuss his novel At the Gate of All Wonder. Read an excerpt below and access the full episode on Lithub.
From the episode:
Mitzi Rapkin: What was your inspiration for writing At the Gate of All Wonder?
Kevin McIlvoy: I think for me always a new book grows out of everything else that I have written and out of everything else that I have pushed myself to learn as a writer. For instance, this book to some degree could be described simply as a book about listening. What she is teaching these children is how to listen in a way that the world may not teach them if not for her. She will give them a book of hearing the world around them if it takes hold, it will transform their lives.
I don’t think that I have written anything that isn’t about listening. I’ve written thirteen books, and I have had the luck of publishing seven of them. From the first short stories and novels I wrote to the present moment, everything depends on the sound of the work itself, either the narrative voice and the sound of that voice—its modulations, its tonal shifts—or the world that it introduces.
Since I was eighteen, I’ve committed my life to writing and to constantly listen better. I’ve done very deliberate things in my life to train my ear, and to retrain and retrain myself on how I listen to the world. I hope that when I’ve written the last thing I’ve ever written that I can look back on everything that I have written and say, You went deeper and you went more deeply into how the world sounds and the wonder and marvel of that.
