Is It So? Glimpses, Glyphs, & Found Novels — Kevin McIlvoy

Is It So? Glimpses, Glyphs, & Found Novels, the last work of fiction from acclaimed author Kevin McIlvoy, showcases his artistic dedication to the irreal, the carnivalesque, to ghost stories, fairy tales and the very short form-writing that thrives in the edges, margins, and borderlands. Is It So? tunnels deep into the recesses of long-life experience. A retired dance instructor battles a flock of dive-bombing crows for control of his garden. A teacher and his students develop an uncommon bond with a toy parrot. A seeker in the alternate universe of a DMV is dispatched through numberless corridors to see the Clerk of Happiness. With clear-eyed and transformative vision-and confidence in the power of truths left unspoken-Kevin McIlvoy gifts readers "found" stories excavated from the everyday.

This book may be the most personal of Mc's prose works. In the autographical bits-disguised, as is all autobiography in all his works by veiling, distortion, and transposition-he is, as I see it, putting his heart in order. There is reckoning-the jettisoning of romantic notions about self and others, and acknowledgment that too often our self-delusions mean we fail to see what's beneath a clear surface. But there is equally present the hard-won wisdom of an elder taking the long view on life's trials and joys, and the inevitability of death. The forest ranger at the center of "In the Gila" chides the narrator, "You don't see what you should." But the outcome of their several uncomfortable encounters over decades is a release of the murky animus between them "all at once and for always."

-"From the Writer's Wife: An Introduction to Is It So?"; Christine Hale, author of A Piece of Sky, A Grain of Rice