Our Research Notes series invites authors to describe their process for a recent book, with “research” defined as broadly as they like. This week, Kevin McIlvoy writes about One Kind Favor from WTAW Press.

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Looking For MOM: Some thoughts on a fiction writer’s research methods

“There is no beauty without some strangeness in the proportion” (Edgar Allan Poe) is a statement I have taken more and more to heart in my five decades as a writer. Artists commit ourselves to exploring the dark and luminous beauty that is before us; we avoid assuming that what is pretty is ever truly beautiful. I believe that no matter the nature of our projects, we discern that the question, “Is this engaging?” is not enough. At all points we must also ask, “Is this estranging?” If we do not welcome both questions we will make art that presents completeness, an engine operating exactly as we expect; if we do not welcome the two questions, our art will not present fullness, the fullness of enigma existing beyond our complete understanding while acting upon us with “repeatable surprise” (Linda Gregerson).

I take it as a given that in all my processes of pre-composing, composing, and revising I will try to be alert to strangeness that brings aliveness to my storytelling by creating both receptivity and resistance in that story’s terms of engagement. In all phases of writing and research I give high priority to the discovery of the transformative strangeness evident in three specific areas I consider elemental to the proportions of a story: Motive, Outcome, Milieu. As a playful, helpful mnemonic I remind myself that I’m “looking for MOM.”

I spent approximately five years in making my newest novel, One Kind Favor, and they were deeply strenuous and satisfying years of looking for MOM. In this novel and in my other novels I’ve learned to acknowledge that there are rich paradoxes in how the various elements are counter-intuitively linked: milieu to motive, milieu to outcome, outcome to motive. My novel is set in a fictional North Carolina piedmont community where genuine loving-kindness and conscientiousness co-exist with underlying Trump-cult indifference and cruelty. It is a community in which covert and overt distortions of truth are loathed — and are zealously protected and even advanced. (Many in this community still refer to the Civil War as “The Northern war of aggression” and persist in The Big Lie that Trump won the 2020 election.)

In the Trump era the community of Cord carries in its very name the echo of chord and of accord — and of discord — and of lynching rope. The town is marked by North Carolina’s present-day extremism and by its not-so-long-ago reputation as a town in a unique region of the South in which the hate impulse did not burn as high and as hot as in towns in Florida and Mississippi and Louisiana and Georgia and South Carolina. In the fictional town of Cord the outcome of an unspeakable crime is a cover-up. The outcome of the cover-up is that the town’s sincerest believers in the teaching of Jesus cover up their most valued spiritual beliefs for the sake of devils’ bargains. Strangely, the town finds its throngs of ghosts a laughing matter and a matter for celebration.

As a fiction writer, when I’m writing I am not practicing the control of language; I am with language learning what it brings, by which I mean I am practicing dynamic balance of intuitive and conscious artistry. I am aware that a world is made through the alteration of a word. If I write, “A small lamp was somewhere on his desk,” I have described a completely different consciousness than “A small lamp was on his desk.” When I’m researching I am in the same practice of honoring particularities. Rather than research a place, an era, a person, or an incident for the sake of feeling generally grounded, I am trying to stay alert to the ungrounding detail. In other words, I’m trying to earn the right to make the fictional world, but I am limiting my research to the particulars that inform the mysteries of that fictional world.

Writing One Kind Favor, I had in mind a specific North Carolina small town. I visited it in person so I could take in with all my senses the ungrounding details. I visited it through at least eleven full rounds of reading research, so I could feel informed about mysteries, and particularly informed by the mysteries that seemed unanswerable.

I found Cord.

I did not find it through orienting or establishing notes but through notes generating processes of questioning. Does it matter, I wrote, that the pines surrounding the swamp at the edge of town are slash pines? I wrote, Why barbed wire at all the outer boundaries of the swamp — keeping-in wire or keeping-out? — or once for keeping-in and now for keeping-out? I asked, The town’s yearly festival — a ceremony enacting what paradoxes?

What are the strange mysteries in the milieu as reflected by the ceremony of the town festival? What are the outcomes of a town’s economy being tied to pine needles? What are the motives for the barbed wire? Am I in a town in which it is understood that each generation has failed to achieve economic stability? Am I in a town in which it is understood that each generation has tried to assert boundaries that haven’t held? Am I in a town in which the meaning of any ceremony has been drained of recognizable positive motive or outcome?

In my research questioning I’m looking for MOM. Fifty years into my life as an artist, I’m still learning how to look. I trust that in this journey I am putting aside the need to assert completeness in judgments and generalizations that will keep me – and, by implication, the reader — grounded in certainties. I trust that in this journey I am relenting to destabilizing questions that deepen the fullness of my compassion and connection, and that invite the reader to do the same.

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