Kevin McIlvoy: Opportunities for Imminence (January 2009)

If imminence is the state in which events are about to occur, isn’t it the fiction writer’s job to fulfill that “about to,” and make things happen?  In this lecture, Kevin McIlvoy suggests otherwise.  Through close readings of Grimm’s fairytales, James Joyce’s “The Dead,” Sherwood Anderson’s “Death in the Woods,” and Agha Shahid Ali’s “The Last Saffron,” McIlvoy explores the power and possibility that can be produced when writers dwell longer in “about-to-happen” conditions.