Letter from the Editor

I met Kevin “Mc” McIlvoy when I arrived for my first residency of my MFA at Warren Wilson College, just six weeks after my undergraduate graduation. I would turn 22 at this residency, and because I was in a low-res program, I was one of the youngest, if not the youngest, person in the program. This sense compounded my already-intense introversion, so I spent a lot of time in my room in an undergraduate dorm avoiding the gatherings, the dancing and late-night shenanigans, of which Mc was a legendary part. 

But I did attend all of his lectures. I can still conjure the image of him: very tall, very lean, soft-voiced and often leaning down into the mic. I had never heard anyone speak quite like Mc: he talked about joy in messiness, about finding the wolf tone—a phenomenon in music that occurs with vibrating strings that makes a note hard for musicians to control—which Mc advocated for in writing. He loved, I could see, the mess and play of making art, which included music, something he always brought into lectures. 

Over the next twenty years, our paths continued to cross in unexpected ways. I returned to teach for a year at Warren Wilson, ten years after my MFA was completed. Mc was still teaching there, and I was struggling to come into my own as a teacher, a writer, a young mother away from my support system. Mc and I had an awkward encounter when one of my students took him to task publicly over a story he’d read at a residency that my student felt was problematic. The questions brought up that day stayed with me: can we write about hate from a place of love? Can we make art in the spirit of joy if it brings pain to others? In the moment, it was a hard conversation for all of us. Soon after, though, as I was walking the streets of Dublin, I saw a street named Wolfe Tone after the Irish revolutionary, and Mc’s presence once again flooded my mind. I snapped a picture, thinking to email it to him, though I never did.

When Mc died suddenly on September 30, his work was there in Bluestem’s Submittable queue, with its customary signature: In Joy, Mc he had written. Reading the poems brought Mc back to me, unexpected and elegant with language as he was even in the most off-the-cuff speech. Perceptive. Tender. Wholly himself, like no one else. I wished I could have told him I thought so, but I’m grateful to his wife, Chris, for allowing me to remind you all of what a writer Mc was. And I know that he played a role in shaping what I now see as my editorial vision for Bluestem: honoring the life creeping into even amidst the melancholy work, like Aiden Heung’s speaker “First Night of January” identifying with the cold dark night before wishing to “escape, before the heliotropic hour,” wishing to take off their very face “like a coat,” but still urging the bell to sound and cut through the darkness. Mc, among others, taught me to honor those who push language to dazzling effect, as in Rose Maria Woodson’s crystalline opening line in “Sunflowers 2”: “There is a bright truth in the church of sunflowers.” And Mc was at the fore of believing in the pleasure in facing the difficult, the wildness of the wolf tone, the note we want to perfect, but that is beyond us, vibrating, like the helpless narrator of Nikki Zambon’s “The Boys,” watching a family in a country that is foreign to her gather around in the aftermath of death, with herself just outside the circle, knowing she cannot stay. And in this very reminiscence, I thought Mc would want me to leave in the wonderful and the difficult memories in which he features in my life. What else is art for if not to try to capture those things in which the sorrow and the marvelous are bound up together? 

In joy,

Colleen Abel