Kevin McIlvoy: Damaged by Willa Cather: One Writer’s Recovery Story (July 1996)

Kevin McIlvoy unabashedly explores his obsession with Willa Cather, considering what makes her fiction compelling and distinct, and what we as writers can learn from it. Noting her use of an outsider’s perspective and her deep empathy for her characters, McIlvoy points, too, to her characters who will not change, whose fixity, antithetical to all we are taught about storytelling, makes them memorably heroic. Drawing on a range of fiction by Cather and others, he focuses primarily on her short story “Old Mrs. Harris.”