Readings, Interviews, Reviews

Readings

May, 2015. Hear and see Maggie read an essay about making fudge and an excerpt from A Free, Unsullied Land at Tuesday Funk, Chicago

Jan, 2010. The Crack Between the Worlds. WBEZ's Dance Critic Lucia Mauro has this review, which includes a reading from Maggie Link to the podcast.

Reviews

A Voyage of Discovery Is It So?: Glimpses, Glyphs and Found Novels by the late Kevin McIlvoy. Santa Rosa, California: WTAW Press, 2023.  

“Clear surfaces have found me  in every object appearing before me,”  writes the narrator of Kevin McIlvoy’s new book. These surfaces have urged him for decades to look and listen with penetrating attention to objects, animals, plants, and people. Is It So? is  a series of short-short fictions in which the narrator treats the surfaces as  signs or glyphs and explores the layers of meaning that lie within, behind or through the surface. These pieces not only combine narrative prose with the condensed language of poetry, but “playfully mash[ing] up literary genres with visual art and music,” as Christine Hale writes in the book’s introduction.

A surface in this book may reveal layers as literally as a plastic bag shows  goldfish  inside or an over-painted canvas by Chaim Soutine hides the painting underneath.  Another surface may be as complex as an heirloom, a royal blue robe of smelly cloth, a ”blue-rat outfit,” a sign that points to ancestral traditions and family conflicts .

Mclvoy’s honing of sensory perception also drives his earlier novel, At the Gate of All Wonder, where an elderly seer takes children on a “Sonic Adventure Program,” teaching them to look and listen deeply to sounds of a forest. This drive to perceive and explore propelled McIlvoy’s art right up to his sudden death in September 2022. This book is not for those who want answers, solutions or advice. As the narrator says in “Mr. Noom,” engaged readers of his work still ask, ”What Is It?” But curious readers can revel in McIlvoy’s new perspectives. His inquiries  range from hilarious to sardonic, from confessional to morally confrontational.

McIlvoy’s use of language as a tool of exploration is reminiscent of Annie Dillard’s “line of words” which serves as . . . “a miner’s pick. . .You wield it, and it digs a path you follow.” Yet McIlvoy attributes further powers to language. “Language summons for us what has been and what is coming. . .Language subjectively creates what it names: like hope.” At the same time, language for McIlvoy is “a spacious prison to which I have committed my life.”

In “A Difficulty” the speaker attempts to draw the goldfish he sees through the plastic bag.  “I get them,” he says. “I can be them ...  .” What does it mean to “be” a goldfish?  Writers often “become” their creations, adopting the characters’ voice and movement patterns, their diction and dress, to bring the characters to life on the page. This imaginative  empathy allows  McIlvoy's speaker to see the goldfish as “middle-aged, muddled;” to draw and become the drapery in a painting; and to speak in the voice of a dog, Yew, who silently commands the speaker: “Don’t nervously blubber-laugh and hold your hand above me in some kind of air-pet.”

McIlvoy’s work challenges boundaries between human and animal, between self and other, and between author and narrator of the work. Only at the end of “Mollycrawlbottom" does the speaker refer to himself as “the author,” but clearly author and narrator approach each other at various other points. As Ms. Hale points out, these autobiographical  references are always disguised by   “veiling, distortion, and transposition.”

Two ticks  traverse the narrator’s body in  “Hold. Still.” He reports the ticks’ progress with the immediacy of second person. “[They]sprinted up your thigh, and toured your soft parts,” and then enters the ticks’ minds: “They forgot your body’s acclimating camps and difficult  marshes and eerie paths of you.” The distant, commanding voice  of the title, “Hold. Still,” returns, satirizing the “we” of medical-ese: “You need our limited and vast expertise.”  The speaker who earlier became a goldfish is now an object to be held at arm’s length.

Such sudden shifting points of view are certainly not new. Damon Galgut in The Promise goes from “he” to “I” in one short paragraph so that we see the character from inside and outside at once, and a myriad of other writers use a narrative eye that moves in closer and out again without the grammatical shift from “I” to “you” to “he/she/they.” McIlvoy’s “you” can be the narrator himself, as above, but can also suddenly implicate the reader.You may find yourself on his pages.

Observation, emotion, imagination and advocacy  come together in the multi-layered satire, “Mollycrawlbottom.” The speaker tries to persuade the Chief of a “hospice aquarium” to accept  this ancient wormy creature. First the speaker rants about rejection, then he gives up on the Chief and  returns to the sensory feast of a walk in the woods. After a tour de force tribute to saplings, nests, fruits and seeds, which skates on the icy surface of anger, he writes to the Chief , in words many writers will recognize,  that the wonders of nature are “all too complicated for a sufficient number of readers to relate to” and signs it “Respectfully, The Author.”

In the 20-teens I applied to a novel workshop with McIlvoy and talked briefly with him on the phone. “What’s this about dance?” he asked, a smile in his voice, apparently having seen that I had been a dancer/choreographer before I started writing. He had just discovered the joy of dancing with his wife, an unexpected way of perceiving the self and the world. In “Poise” the surface is a ballroom dance class, written in the imperative with the voice of a teacher, who tells  the narrator to see a window over his partner’s right shoulder. “Have you ever seen this view before?” Now the kinesthetic sense, the senses of movement and position of the body, join the other five in the poet’s array of senses.

McIlvoy told us at the time of the workshop that he was moving toward Buddhism,  but I did not know until I read this book that he was raised Catholic.  I am a convert to Catholicism  myself with an ever-broadening sense of this tradition and a desire to bring it to life. Thus I was delighted by “In the Garden,” which retells the New Testament story of the Last Judgement, Matthew 25. In the original, readers can decide whether they are those who help the needy or those who don’t —  sheep or goats in the parable. The first-person narrator of “In the Garden” is quite familiar with a present-day Jesus who speaks in the vernacular and is up-to date on photos and phones. This Jesus “is walking in my neighborhood like he always does” and asks for a ride, then a sandwich, then a drink of water. The speaker “doesn’t have a car right now,” then is “not a sandwich man,” aligning himself clearly with the goats who face damnation.  We, the readers, are left to realize that we might do/have done/ will do, the same.

The poet Sebastian Mathews in his essay, “Listen! Listen!—The poetic genius of Kevin McIlvoy” . . .  claims that “McIlvoy wrote straight-up realism . . . that captured the lunacy of being human.” I agree, not that he writes in that literary tradition,  depicting everyday activities as they are, but that he searches these events for the real meanings they can conceal or reveal. In “Mr.Noom,” a piece that relates more directly to the author than most of these pieces,  McIlvoy’s speaker says of himself as teacher and writer, “I offered despairing and ecstatic madness.”

McIlvoy’s use  of parables and flights of imagination in no way contradicts Matthews’ assessment. Whether laugh-out-loud funny, satiric or celebratory, all these pieces lead to an ever-deepening discovery of the real concealed by illusory surfaces. Is It So? offers surprises at every turn and rewards reading over and over.

“Flesh and Blood Ideas in J. M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello,” my new craft essay about one of my favorite books, is out in CRAFT.

When I’ve given a character my own thoughts on a subject close to my heart, I’ve heard critiques of my writing like, “Sounds authorial,” or, “Your character wouldn’t say that—those are your ideas.” Explication by an author can interrupt the fictional dream if not integrated into the story through character, motivation, diction, and other devices of fiction, all brought to life through sensory detail. J.M. Coetzee’s ninth book, Elizabeth Costello, published in 2003, tells the story of a well-known writer of that name. The book is structured as a series of eight lessons in which Elizabeth delivers lectures on topics including: realism, the novel, animal rights, and the problem of evil. Hermione Lee, writing in The Guardian, said the book was “more like a collection of propositions about belief, writing and humanity than a novel.” South African by birth, Coetzee is now a citizen of Australia. He is well-known as an advocate of animal rights, and gives these and other personal concerns to his character, Elizabeth. As readers we may ask: does the story invite us to enter the emotional as well as intellectual lives of the characters? As writers, we may look to a character like Elizabeth to teach us about the role of ideas in fiction.

Coetzee begins the book by speaking to the reader as the implied author, using a first-person, plural voice to tell us what he’s doing as he does it: “There is first of all the problem of the opening, how to get us from where we are . . . to the far bank.” Already we are in the land of metafiction, directed to look reflexively at the story’s journey. He introduces us to Elizabeth, a little frail at sixty-six, on her way to Altoona College in Pennsylvania to receive a large literary prize for which she must give a talk. She is accompanied by her son, John, without whom she could not have made the long trip from her home in Australia.

Now the point of view moves to John. We see, through his eyes, Elizabeth’s “old blue raincoat” and her “greasy, lifeless” hair. A digression on the role of details follows, using as example lines from Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe. A castaway looks for his shipmates, and his abandonment is rendered with “[n]o large words, no despair, just hats and caps and shoes.” That sentence fragment itself is worth observing closely for the way the rhythm starts strong and weakens, losing hope as it goes: first three one-syllable words with equal stress, a sort of triple spondee, then a weaker anapest, then the list of three abandoned objects, dribbled onto the page by the connectives between them. Both the details and the rhythm with which they are rendered convey the emotion.

Elizabeth has not yet begun her talk on realism, but we have already experienced and analyzed the invention of such a story. We feel simultaneously the world-weariness of Elizabeth and the impatience of John. The implied author returns for the last time to discuss the project of the book, “Realism has never been comfortable with ideas . . .the notion of embodying turns out to be pivotal.” Ideas must flow from characters, their interests and their motivations. This may seem rudimentary to writers, but the dialogue between gut-level embodiment and the powers of reason expands over the course of the book to become a series of lessons about both writing and living.

A principal form of embodiment here and throughout the book is three-dimensional characterization, especially in the relationship between Elizabeth and John. She gives the lectures, but he is the listener, the one who deals with the audience’s reactions (often negative), and the one who tries (but does not really want) to understand her. On the one hand, he thinks of her as “a seal, an old, tired, circus seal” or “one of those large cats that pause as they eviscerate their victim . . .and give you a cold, yellow stare.” On the other, he considers her “a mouthpiece for the divine,” and “serves at her shrine, cleaning up after the turmoil of the holy day.” All of the book’s ideas are funneled through and shaped by the ambivalence of these and other flawed and complex characters, as inconsistent as people often are in real life.

In her first lecture, Elizabeth exposes the failure of realism in modern times. The word-mirror of the text used to give us the objects represented, she says, but now that mirror is broken. It may not seem helpful to writers to question a connection so vital as that between word and thing, but Elizabeth’s image of the broken mirror forces us to do just that, to consider the fragile and arbitrary nature of that connection.

Many writers have had moments when language seems worn out or used up. Gertrude Stein once complained that poetic words like “moon” no longer give one the moon. Linguist and philosopher Ferdinand de Saussure developed the science of semiotics from his recognition of the word-object disjuncture. Elizabeth’s questioning of the word-mirror helps us feel how her foundations shake as she travels halfway around the world to receive an award for work she does not consider her best and is reviled for the unpopular lectures she insists on giving.

In contrast, and in contradiction to the failure of realism, John and Elizabeth wait for an airplane after the talk and watch a woman eating popcorn. John thinks of the mashed corn and saliva in her mouth. He shudders, and so do we. His experience of Elizabeth becomes yet more embodied when she falls asleep on the airplane, head on his shoulder. He sees her nostrils, mouth and throat, and imagines what he can’t see. “No, he tells himself. That is not where I come from.” The technique of realistic narrative may be failing for Elizabeth, but John’s sensory perceptions have stolen the scene.

The two chapters called “Lives of the Animals” were first published as essays in a freestanding volume, raising the question of how essays can be embodied in fiction. Do we still find Elizabeth believable as she discourses on animal rights and, if so, how does Coetzee make us feel her passion on the subject? She invokes moral outrage, comparing the treatment of animals in “abattoirs, in trawlers, in laboratories” to the extermination of Jews in the concentration camps of the Third Reich, with special attention to the “collective sin” (Elizabeth’s words) of populations that chose to ignore what was happening in their own backyards. “By treating fellow human beings, beings created in the image of God,” she says, “like beasts, they had themselves become beasts.” She rejects the idea that reason is the defining human characteristic. “To thinking, cogitation,” she says, “I oppose fullness, embodiedness, the sensation of being a body with limbs. . .  [A]n animal—and we are all animals—is an embodied soul. To be full of being is to live as a body-soul. One name for the experience of full being is joy.” Now embodiment has evolved from a literary technique to a definition of sentient existence and its ecstatic celebration.

“Created in the image of God?” We may well ask what divinity is doing in a book by an avowed atheist author. Coetzee is clearly biblically and theologically literate. He treats lessons as testaments to questions of living. His knowledge and his attitude imply a spirituality that can’t be identified with a particular religious ideology, but his worldview is clearly embedded in the Judeo-Christian one, with Judaism’s understanding of the nephesh, the embodied and sentient soul (shared by animals), and Christianity’s incarnation, another word for embodiment.

Elizabeth speaks of God and her son speaks of gods, but that doesn’t make either of them so-called believers. Elizabeth questions the role of belief throughout the novel. “Belief may be no more,” she thinks, “than a source of energy, like a battery one clips onto an idea to make it run.” Considering animal slaughter, Elizabeth offers the disclaimer: “We may not believe in pollution or sin, but we believe in their psychic correlates.” When a listener asks if she is vegetarian from moral conviction, she responds, “It comes out of a desire to save my soul.”

For writers of fiction, belief has a special meaning. We don’t necessarily believe that our writing is historically accurate or true in the real world, but we know it must be believable. We seek verisimilitude, the appearance of reality, and sensory detail helps us achieve this. The book’s fearlessness in extending the conversation to include ultimate values and consequences should give courage to writers intimidated by current fashions of disaffection, anomie, and avoidance of God-language in fiction.

Back home in Australia, Elizabeth writes to her sister Blanche, now Catholic Sister Bridget, administrator of the Hospital of the Blessed Mary on the Hill, Marianhill, in rural Zululand. There, Sister Bridget cares for children with AIDS. The two debate the value of classical learning versus the love of Jesus. Elizabeth tells of her visit to one Mr. Phillips, a painter confined to his death bed in a nursing home, when she posed like a Greek goddess and let him gaze at her breasts.

She abandons her letter and goes on to reveal what she won’t tell her sister—that she went beyond posing to try to bring the dying painter’s sex to life with her hands and mouth. Searching for a name for what she did she tries on the Greek terms, eros, erotic love, and agape, unconditional love, often used to name God’s love for all creatures. Then she discards these Greek terms and settles on caritas, the Latin word Christians use equally for the unconditional love of God, for God’s love for creatures, and for unselfish acts of charity to a fellow human being. What could be a more fully embodied rendering of three kinds of love than Elizabeth’s selfless act and her reflection on it? Writers might hesitate to write so graphical a sex scene in the context of age and illness, to say nothing of the unsavory smells and touches that Coetzee includes, but these are the details that bring ideas to life in fiction.

As writers, we are sometimes advised to write what we know, but how often do we ask ourselves just what we believe—about life and death, for instance, or the value of art? Do stories and books serve a purpose? These are meaningful questions to ask frequently, for belief shifts with experience, whether once in a lifetime or three times a day. This is exactly what Elizabeth does in the last two parts of this novel. Earlier, she expressed doubt about what she believes, and now, at the end of her life, she faces the question head on. She arrives “At the Gate,” a sort of purgatory, and she struggles to prepare the statement of belief required for her to pass through the gate to the vaguely illuminated other side.

“Belief?” questions Elizabeth, meeting the guard at the gate. “Is that all? Not a statement of faith? What if I do not believe?” She opposes faith to belief in a way that has striking parallels to the dichotomy between reason and embodiment. One can believe in a proposition, a mission statement or a creed. One can proclaim a belief from a podium, shout it in the street or—like Elizabeth—suspect it’s just a motor attached to an idea. But one can be faithful to a god, a way of life, a person or a practice. Fidelity implies continuity of action, and only the body can act. Elizabeth tries to straddle this opposition when she reflects, “If in the end she believes in her books it is only belief in the sense that a carpenter believes in a sturdy table.”

After she has failed repeatedly to demonstrate belief to the judges, she remembers the frogs of the Dulgannon River of her childhood, who die during droughts and come back to life with the rains, a sort of resurrection. She is faithful to her experience of the frogs. Fidelity is her version of belief.

Each writer will have different answers for the guard at the gate, and many will face the most devastating possibility, hinted at from the beginning of the book: that words may fail to mirror the world. Then, regardless of what we believe, we will choke on our thoughts, deprived of words to express them. This experience can manifest as a form of writer’s block.

Elizabeth writes as  Lady Chandos in the book’s Postscript, an intertextual riff on “Letter of Lord Chandos to Lord Bacon,” by Hugo von Hoffmannsthal. Lord Chandos experienced such a loss in the letter. Elizabeth Chandos describes her own version of a similar event. She reaches for things but drowns in the metaphors she must use to name them. “[L]ike a contagion,” she says, “saying always one thing for another.” Elizabeth Chandos’s final plea is, “Save us,” echoing Elizabeth Costello’s hope that avoiding meat will save her soul.

Is Elizabeth Costello showing writers something that most already know and put into use? Perhaps, but Coetzee carries embodiment of ideas a step further than many. As he develops ideas in each lesson, he clothes them in flesh and blood, not merely as disguises but as life-giving incarnations. As the arguments expressed through the lessons accumulate, so do the scenic details, suggesting that fiction can include even complex and extended reflections, so long as the writer renders them through enriched and enlarged objective detail. Coetzee has folded both ideas and feelings into a novel, a capacious tour de force with room for brilliant thoughts as well as the humors and foibles of aging mothers, the irritations and fidelities of sons, and the souls of lions and tigers and dogs.

Elizabeth Costello shows us a way to express our own ideas in fiction, but only by digging deep into our minds and bodies and those of our characters. Every character needs a liver and heart, a gastrointestinal tract and the roller coaster of a sex life, just as we ourselves share all these aspects of human and animal life. Then we and our characters will be on equal footing, a pair of body-souls, and we can dialogue, comparing our innards with theirs and together throwing signs up onto the page, hoping the things they mirror will arrive with the words.

Interviews

December, 2025. Chicago Dance History Project. Interview with Maggie Kast by Susan Manning and Michael Kramer about "Viet Nam Story" (1969).

August 18, 2020. Roell Schmidt, Director of Stage, University of Chicago, interviews Maggie. Video by Matthew Hickey.

January 12, 2010. Dance critic Lucia Mauro interviews Maggie on WBEZ and reviews The Crack Between the Worlds. Maggie reads from the book. 

January 21, 2017. Shelagh Shapiro interviews Maggie about her novel, A Free Unsullied Land, on her podcast, writethebook. 

June 2, 2020. “To Go Beyond.” Sharon Solwitz interviews Maggie Kast about Side by Side but Never Face to Face. Fiction Writers Review.

January 26, 2021. Jan Leary interviews Maggie Kast in Another Chicago Magazine.

Reviews

November, 2020. Review of Side by Side but Never Face to Face by Elizabeth Boyle in Colorado Review.

March 16, 2020. Review of Side by Side but Never Face to Face and Interview with Maggie Kast in Book Pleasures by Norm Goldman

May 8, 2020. Review of Side by Side but Never Face to Face in Midwest Book Review by Jean Donovan.

Review of Side by Side but Never Face to Face by Miriam Downey in The Cyber-Librarian.

Podcast interview of Maggie on New Books in Literature by G.P. Gottlieb.

February 23, 2010. Review of The Crack Between the Worlds in Christian Century by Neil Ellis Orts

The Crack Between the Worlds in ImageUpdate’s Top Ten 2009, a list of artworks in various genres plus a review.

June 5, 2020. Q & A with Deborah Kalb Books. The correct publisher is Orison Books, named Orison Press in the article.

January 26, 2021. Interviewed by Jan English Leary for Another Chicago Magazine.