INTERVIEW: Karen Salyer McElmurray, Author of I Could Name God in 12 Ways: Essays

Interview by Lara Lillibridge

Award-winning writer Karen Salyer McElmurray details her life’s journey across continents and decades in a poetic collection that is equal parts essay-as-memoir, memoir-as-Künstlerroman, and travelogue-as-meditation. I Could Name God in Twelve Ways: Essays, out Sept.10, 2024, from the University Press of Kentucky, explores her personal history from the stance of different places, perspectives, and vulnerabilities as she tenderly and fiercely searches for acceptance and a place to call home.

More from the jacket copy: It is about the deserts of India. A hospital ward in Maryland. The blue seas of Greece. A greenhouse in Virginia. It is about the spirit houses of Thailand. The mountains of eastern Kentucky. The depths of the Grand Canyon. A creative writing classroom in Georgia. An attic in a generations-old house. It is about coming to terms with both memory and the power of writing itself.

I met Karen McElmurray back in 2015. I devoured her memoir, Surrendered Child: A Birth Mother’s Journey and her novel, The Motel of the Stars, so it was with great anticipation that I asked for an advance copy of her new release, I Could Name God in Twelve Ways.” This essay collection does not disappoint — this collection drifts between experiences and emotions, always lyrical and deliberate.Here is our conversation.

---

Lara Lillibridge: This book is so achingly beautiful, full of spiritual yearning and small moments of cherishing the beauty of fleeting moments.

I loved the way you moved poetry to something essential living among us in the world:

My first poems were moments. A box fan blowing warm air across the living room. My mother on the couch, my father in his chair, me in the space between, learning to read the sadness of their faces.

And I love the drive for meaning in art, like in the line, “Now I was going to write something or other and somehow change the world.”

I feel like in the drive to publish and sell books we sometimes forget that pure joy, that certainty that the world needs our words. I Could Name God in Twelve Ways is your seventh book. How do you balance the mundane/practical aspects of writing with the art of it?

Karen Salyer McElmurray: Yes, there have been seven books now! Novels. Memoir. Essays. Genres have bent, transformed. The aunts in my mother’s family have been the start of two novels, many essays, as well as a memoir. It’s been a kind of magic — the “what if” of stories of all sorts. It’s that same what if that has helped balance the practical aspects of writing with the making of art.

When I was six I wrote my first poem long before I articulated what art is or means. The poem went like this: When you don’t have a bathtub/don’t have a shower/wash yourself with the rain. Years later, in community college, we were reading an assigned anthology, and I lit up with Voltaire’s admonition to “tend your garden.” I loved that something as practical as a garden, where I’d seen my granny hoeing a thousand time, had been transformed into literature.

That sense of magic possibilities has only grown over time. Like Emerson, I believe that words exist in a house, and that a house exists in the mind of god. Like the artist Kandinsky said, art is the spiritual. Sometimes I hide that spirit, like when there were sparklers at our Sapelo Island Georgia writing retreat and I didn’t want others to know it was me who’d brought them to share. Always hiding your light under a bushel, my graduate professor said as I ran ahead along the shore, trailing sparks.

These days, I’m somewhere between reclusive and a devotee of the practical aspects of writing. I nurture my artistic spirit by spending hours in my tiny office space at home. I’m on Facebook each day, doing what the publishers urge me to do to get the word out. Creating a buzz, they call it… when they say I should post about my new book at least twice a week, or urge me to have at least four social media outlets. Mostly I tend the garden that is my creative spirit like a small flame. I cup my hands around it and breathe into it as softly as I can.

LL: I Could Name God in Twelve Ways is being published by The University Press of Kentucky. University presses, and southern/Appalachian presses in particular seem to be taking the most risks in terms of publishing these days, when it seems so many are afraid of controversy. How did you wind up there and can you talk about the process?

KSM: I am thrilled to be with University Press of Kentucky (UPK), who have supported my work with the novel, Wanting Radiance (2021), and now with this essay collection. I am even more thrilled to be working with Abby Freeland, senior acquisitions editor, who says that she wants to ‘intentionally use [her] role as a university press editor to challenge the stereotypes that harm the place that [she calls] home and break down the status quo that may or may not directly affect [her]: the prejudice, bias, and preconceived notions, the ignorance, and the laws and policies that harm the underserved and underrepresented people in [her] community, near and far.’

This is beautifully evident in the UPK Black, Native, and Queer Voices Book Series, with its goal of uplifting underrepresented writers. Risks are at the heart of making good writing. Risk is in the very landscape of Eastern Kentucky, where I’m from. My grandfather, my uncles, my cousins, all worked in deep mines. Another uncle worked for forty years as a strip miner. These days there’s fracking, but I don’t know much about that in terms of who does what in what is left of my ancestors.

I do know there’s inherit risk in doing something that pits you against the earth, puts you deep inside it, has you moving it around, scraping it bare and damaging it beyond recognition, bringing on apocalyptic floods like those of 2022. And it’s a risk when you speak up about the systems set in place to support that damage, or when you speak out about the environment or when you vote against the powers that be that promise to bring jobs back to start the whole cycle again and again.

On the personal level, there’s been many other levels of risk. There was risk in leaving home at fifteen, trying as hard as I could to get away from the home that had hurt me bad. There was risk in becoming the first woman in my family to go to college and “become somebody.” And there was so much risk in the leaving the place I was raised. I feel like I’ve been trying to get back ever since. That’s part of what I’m writing about in I Could Name God in Twelve Ways.

 

LL: In this collection you write about drugs, sex, unplanned pregnancy, and spirituality. Personally, I find writing about religion to be the scariest/most vulnerable thing I write about. In the essay, “Stella, In the Upstairs Room,” you wrote:

As a writer of memoirs and personal essays, I’ve often confronted the question of what should or should not be told when it comes to writing truth. When I was writing a memoir about surrendering a child to adoption, more than one family member suggested that the story would be better written as a novel. I’ve many times heard criticism of my raw stories, ones that explore what happened when and why.

Can you talk about the vulnerability and risks of writing this book — your struggles and/or strategies?

KSM: Writer Dorothy Allison said: ‘It seems to me the only way I have forgiven anything, understood anything, is through that process of opening up to my own terror and pain and reexamining it, re-creating it in the story, and making it something different, making it meaningful—even if the meaning is only in the act of the telling.’

I think of many artists I admire who enter their shadow-places, their vulnerabilities, and translate those experiences. Photographer Mary Ann Wasil took pictures of her journey through breast cancer. James Agee’s incredible script for a film call Night of the Hunter was once called by a critic once a dark journey on a river of dreams. A series of Van Gogh’s shimmering paintings are about time in an asylum.

I guess that is one of my strategies — studying the masters of light and dark. I read the pages like a map of vulnerability. Exactly how do words weave into other words on a page? How does the writer lay a difficult image next to gentler one? How does what a character says belie what she thinks or wants or does not say?

Read like a writer, Francine Prose says in the book by that name. The much harder part is living the work. Passing through grief. Passing through love or places now gone. Coming to the realization that time is both finite and immemorial. And harder still, the willingness to not only pass through, but dive deeply. To confront the ghosts both inside your life or via offering that work up to the public eye.  A friend once said that I’m braver than her, that she chooses to be private. I can also be very much a recluse, but I also haven’t been private, not in the sharing personal truths. Take the first essay in I Could Name God in Twelve Ways. I take you to the eleven days I spent fighting anxiety while in a psychiatric ward.

I hope in my deepest self, that I have written the truth about those experiences, those people, those long days and that illness. The word “truth” is a difficult one. I chose to take those days and translate them as exactly as possible. I can only hope there’s also a sense of magic on the other side of despair.

LL: I really can’t stop raving about the beauty of your words. The quote in the prologue is perfect, “In all my work, my language is, as a friend said, beautiful pain. Raw. Almost too much to bear.” You even describe an outhouse beautifully!

 “I looked down into what she called nastiness, the heaps of what we had surrendered.”

I have read several of your previous works, fiction as well as nonfiction, yet I found I Could Name God in 12 Ways to be a different sort of book — more intensely, painfully beautiful. Can you speak about how your writing has evolved over the years?

KSM: I seem to recall an essay by critic Claire Kahane. She describes Flannery O’Connor’s work as ‘a refusal to do pretty.’ While I no longer remember that critical work in exactness, I often come back to that phrase. Refusal to do pretty. For many years my work has been described as beautiful pain, hard dream, and bittersweet. All those are ways I recognize when it comes to the essays in I Could Name God in Twelve Ways.

I deeply recognize my psyche’s refusal to write light. Just like I love a pond on a summer night, I do love to revel in darkness via language. There’s also something to be said about writing during a time of surrender — during the last decade, I’ve lost my parents, my aunts and uncles, some cousins, as well as several friends and old lovers. As these essays accumulated, the world also survived a pandemic, uncontrollable wildfires, massive hurricanes, and entrenched political upheaval.

My work has reflected the world we’ve all been living in, as well as my personal losses and the exigencies of memory. At the same time, I come back a line in the essay “Blue Glass,” which is about vulnerability itself: “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.”

LL: I loved this interaction with your father:

 ‘I suppose I’d say you’re unethical,’ my father said when he read the memoir I’d written about the surrender of my son to adoption. Then he gave the book to friends, underlined passages as he read it over and over. […] On my many visits home, we sat with each other, both of us fumbling for the right thing to say, the one thing to absolve both of us from wounds for which we had no words.

So many writers talk about the fears and aftermath of writing about family, but I think what I love about this is how your writing opened up a new space for understanding between family members?

KSM: My father died in March 2020, just as the pandemic began in earnest. I’m still mourning him, as I am sure I will do in new ways, evolving ways, for the rest of my life. Ours was a complicated relationship. I clearly recall conversations about the ethics of writing about my son’s surrender to adoption — the pregnancy itself had become a family secret we never discussed. And here I was telling the truth in a book I’d publish and discuss with strangers. Wouldn’t it be better, my father often said as I began writing that memoir, to write it as a novel?

I persisted, and wrote the truth of the adoption. After the book  came out, my father surprised me. He read it maybe six times, and he’d call me often to discuss a line or a moment, and this brought us a closeness we’d never had.  Then, when the memoir appeared pre-publication on the internet, my son’s then girlfriend wrote me, opening up the complex relationship I’m still unwrapping with Andrew, my son.

My sense of family expanded, contracted as I grew close to my son’s mother, tried to get close to a son who didn’t exactly want another mother he’d never known. And then there were conversations with people I met in radio interviews, at readings, many of them children or parents of adoptions. They wanted to offer their own truths, further opening up my discoveries about family. This was all a rich and often challenging  time, and I stepped back from memoir for awhile, focusing instead on two novels.

Even so, those works were about family — a roadie fortune teller seeking her father; a father trying to find peace with the loss of his son. In the background, of course, there were essays I thought about and worked on little by little. That became I Could Name God in Twelve Ways, which is about father, lovers, ancestors, all of it. I think that’s what I’m made of, really. Writing toward understanding the people I come from. The people who made me.

LL: I am always interested in structure, and how writers build a collection. In the prologue you wrote,

Even when I remembered, I didn’t think linearly. […] These twelve lyric essays weave together place and memory and the present. Time has become a quilt made of poetic and particular prose. Time is both shadow and hope.

This collection flows between first and second person, past and near-present. Can you talk about the assemblage of I Could Name God in 12 Ways?

KSM: I have been lucky over the years to be part of the assembling of journals and anthologies as well as my own long works in memoir and fiction. When I taught at Lynchburg College, a visiting poet and I put together a literary magazine, and we assembled via the connections of first and last words. Another poet and I worked together on an anthology called Walk Till the Dogs Get Mean, and we assembled our selections in all genres by creating sections.

One section focused on essay about leaving the mountains behind; another was about forbidden ways; and finally, essays about writing Appalachia. When it comes to my own words, I’d like to think that I put a work together much the way my grandmother did with making quilts. Colors. Shapes. The intuition that this pattern belongs next to that pattern. With I Could Name God in Twelve Ways in particular, I thought often of a quilt known as Trip Around the World.

The essays in this book are, in part, about a two year trip with a former lover, from England to Ireland to France to Australia to Thailand to Nepal to India. That’s, roughly, the route we traveled, via hitch-hiking and buses and trains. But I didn’t want only to assemble a travelogue via linear time. There were other journeys inside the central one — ones grief and love and healing.

When I finally came to the order of essays that I now have, the shape floated and settled, moved and wandered. The points of view that you mention, “I” and sometimes “you” are part of that dreamlike arrangement. I look back on myself in a straightforward way often, but I also look back on the “you” I was in second person, or I look back on that long ago lover in second person. Time in this arrangement bends and turns and moves forward, a bit like it felt to trek the long miles over those six weeks in Nepal.

In this final shape, I was very lucky to have the input of Annie Woodford, a poet I love who suggested that I begin with the essay called “Blue Glass.” And I also had the invaluable suggestions of my editor, Abby Freeland, who helped me break the pattern I’d found and move parts here, here, here, until I have the trip around the world that is this book now.

---