At one point early in her new book of essays, I Could Name God in Twelve Ways, Karen Salyer McElmurray writes, “With memoir, we become accountable.” Later, she wants to be clear: “Memoir is a difficult act….It speaks toward the truth, although it may never, ever uncover the deepest part of what is hidden.”
What her thirteen essays penned as memoir do uncover is the remarkable life of a writer who has passionately journaled her world since childhood. “Through it all, there was a paper trail,” she explains in the book’s prologue. “Notebook after notebook full of images of what I’d seen. Full of dreams. Full of small drawings of faces. Full of words.”
McElmurray opens her first essay, “Blue Glass,” in the break room of a hospital’s psychiatric ward where she has admitted herself during a severe anxiety attack. In one succinct clinical paragraph, she presents her troubled medical history like a laundry list of ills: cancer, depression, hearing loss, lung damage, and a metal rod in an ankle. “At my first psychiatric evaluation,” she writes, “a young woman named Dr. X makes notes on my medical history. Upside down on the paper she’s filling out, I see some words, one of which is vulnerable.”
McElmurray’s subsequent description of the vulnerability of others on the psych ward and elsewhere in her life does more to define the word than the dictionary. Here are a few: Vulnerable. A woman is admitted to 1 North to wean off her medication. She stays in bed for days, her face toward the closed curtains. / Vulnerable. Travon, the beautiful Haitian boy who never says a word and curls up to sleep on the tile floor during group sessions. / Vulnerability. Raina, who never leaves her room after the fistfight she started with Donna, whom she knows from the homeless shelter. / Vulnerable. Myself one afternoon when George, the psychiatric nurse, breaks a ward rule and comes into my room, where I’m taking a nap.
Vulnerability, McElmurray claims, is in her DNA. “The women I’m from wore vulnerability, the signs of it, on their bodies, if you knew exactly where to look. The broken lifeline on a palm. The thrice-split lip. That bruise around an eye. Empty arms that ached or hands that were rough from all the cleaning up one more time.”
McElmurray segues between her experiences at 1 North during her eleven days there to her memories of her mother, and snippets from her nine years of teaching creative writing. Her essays travel through time and place as easily as a family photo album reveals the years past. She ends “Blue Glass” with: “Somewhere between meanness and beauty is a place called vulnerable, and if we are lucky, we learn to ride through that country, all the windows down and the wind in our faces, telling us we are alive.”
Like the protagonist Miracelle Loving in her 2020 novel, Wanting Radiance, McElmurray is a rolling stone on a never-ending search for home and love. “I wanted a truth more ancient than any race, something beneath my skin, inside my bones. Trails and highways, roads and paths leading nowhere, and occasionally a somewhere you hold on to.” She has lived and worked in several states, frequently jettisoning herself out of relationships and temporary homes without warning: “As I drove away, I left a trail of debris behind me, all the unexplored love and unknown canyons of my heart tossed out the windows of my car, a life I no longer wanted on the way to the next life and the one after that.”
But it was McElmurray’s odyssey across England, France, Greece, Nepal, and India, at thirty-one with a boyfriend, that left indelible scars in her psyche. After months on the road together, their love went sour. “As we traveled, I felt the thing inside me rear its head. As we traveled, the black dog nipped and howled. It made me look inside its open mouth and name what I saw.” Once they returned home, they broke up, which left her feeling adrift: “Journeys were the masks of worlds I didn’t understand any more than I understood my own sorrowing heart.”
Magic, fortune telling, ghost stories, and superstition are part of the author’s Appalachian heritage and appear in one way or another in her previous work as well as in her new memoir: “In the mountains, ghosts are called haints,” she writes. “They are the wind down a hollow in the wintertime, howling like a woman mourning. They are caught inside the bottle tree in my front yard at home. In my father’s house, the haints are politely hidden beneath the dusted shelves and sparkling floors—but they are there in the dark hall outside my bedroom.”
While magic imbues her life and work, McElmurray’s honest and sometimes brutal forays into what makes her tick speak with an authority gained through intense experiences filled with, life lived, grief spent, dues paid, that is reflected in the characters she created from her own suffering: “The women I wrote were uncertain of their lovers, their homes, their next meals. They rode miles toward futures they couldn’t see, hitched rides along strange highways. Their journeys seemed to have no beginning, no middle, no end, and I let them wander, seeking exactly who they might someday become.”
McElmurray’s I Could Name God in Twelve Ways: Essays, is a deeply insightful, bitter-sweet memoir that is well worth the revelatory switchback ride into McElmurray’s sometimes bleak, but always illuminating territory.
Along the way, she offers optimism after what she describes as “—a near decade of simmering darkness, of worldwide pandemic, climate crisis, and all the manifestations of hate, pure and simple….” For her, “Magic, that sparkle and shine, can exist even now. There will be words to summon happenstance, if not possibility. Surely the world can be new again, can be good again, amen.”
About Karen Salyer McElmurray:
Karen Salyer McElmurray is the author of Wanting Radiance: A Novel and the AWP Creative Nonfiction award-winning memoir and National Book Critics Circle Notable Book Surrendered Child: A Birth Mother’s Journey. Her essays have won the Annie Dillard Prize, the New Southerner Prize, the Orison Magazine Anthology Award, the Lit/South Award, and have several times been notable in Best American Essays. She has received numerous other awards, including grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the North Carolina Arts Council, and the Kentucky Foundation for Women and is a visiting writer and lecturer at a variety of programs and reading series. For more, visit karensalyermcelmurray.com.
I Could Name God in Twelve Ways, Essays by Karen Salyer McElmurray is published by The University Press of Kentucky and available September 2024.
