FICTION AND NON-FICTION

All My Relations, winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction
Set against the landscape of the American Southwest, this collection of eight precisely observed stories offers a powerful and moving series of observations about love and relationships…McIlroy writes with spare elegance, consistently displaying the illuminating detail or the evocative description. His stories are grittily real, occasionally disturbing, filled with the breath of life.

Publishers Weekly

McIlroy, winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Fiction, offers unflinching and original portrayals of human weakness, solitude, and survival in the rural Southwest. In these stories, imperfect characters leading battered lives are as indomitable as the granite mountains and canyons that surround them…Tightly focused and tersely eloquent, McIlroy’s stories chronicle human inconstancy and end up affirming a tranquil wisdom.

     Kirkus Reviews

Here I Am a Writer

“Here I Am A Writer tells several stories at once, in multiple voices, and what emerges is a moving portrait of people’s lives… I know of no other book quite like this. It’s a wonder.”
Robert Boswell, author of The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards, The Half-Known World, Century’s Son
“This is such a needed book for teachers who work with Native kids, but for teachers everywhere. It’s like a multigenre reflection piece…It’s the perfect example of how writing becomes the window to see outside of ourselves and the mirror by which we look inward at ourselves, and that forever changes us in some ways… The final section where McIlroy shares the techniques that can be used by others is wonderful.”
Robert Wortman, former teacher, principal, and director of Title One, Literacy, and School Improvement for Tucson Unified School District
“For more than twenty years, Kit McIlroy and ArtsReach have been within the Indigenous voice of the Tohono O’odham and Yaqui languages in the desert region of Tucson in Southern Arizona… Put into written form by Tohono O’odham and Yaqui tribal youth, this literary anthology is composed of poems, stories, anecdotes, and narrative tellings…And now resulting in Here I Am A Writer, a moving, powerful voice that evolves from the dynamic traditions of on-going Indigenous languages that are always in creative flux. Highly recommended!”
Simon J. Ortiz, poet (Woven Stone) fiction writer (Men on the Moon: Collected Short Stories), and editor (Speaking for the Generations: Native Writers on Writing)

Iceland (story collection)

It’s been a bear trying to publish this book. Almost all the stories have appeared individually in well-regarded venues. Editors at respected publishers have praised the collection. However, it has never crossed an acquisition editor’s desk. Typical rationale: “We already have [fill in your number] short story collections.”
Even if Iceland were to be accepted, I’m unwilling, in my semi-retirement, to take on the burden of self-promotion that would be demanded. I’d rather travel or watch birds. Cook with my wife. Play with the dog.
So, despite appalled reactions from my writer friends, I’m offering Iceland free on this website. Someone may as well read it. If you like it, send me ten bucks.