The following review is by Chris McGinley, an incredibly talented writer and the author of Coal Black: Stories, which I highly recommended in a Small Press Picks review. It’s an honor to feature Chris’s insights on Karen Salyer McElmurray’s captivating book. –Beth Castrodale, editor of Small Press Picks
There’s an excellent essay called “Hand Me Down” in Karen Salyer McElmurray’s new book, Voice Lessons. In it, the author recalls a dress her grandmother once made, now old and nearly threadbare. The collar is frayed, McElmurray notes, and the old-time pattern is wildly inappropriate for the scholarly event she attends in it. She says of her seamstress granny:
The passage evokes one of the central themes in McElmurray’s excellent “memoir in essays,” some published earlier but now collected in one mesmerizing book. Though the writing spans different periods in the author’s life and travels, it seems inevitably to return to this idea of ancestors, to the resourceful hill women who helped shape the author’s spiritual and artistic core, the women who raised her, grew her in fact, into the woman she eventually became. Throughout the book McElmurray pays tribute to these strong women, commonly the source material for her novels and poetry, and for her essays and her muse generally. In fact, the depiction of these women—mothers, daughters, aunts, and grannies—are achingly beautiful, especially since McElmurray never devolves into maudlin sentiment, never renders a portrait flatly or nostalgically. Instead, the book foregrounds the complicated relationships between the scholar/artist McElmurray–a writer, educator, and aesthetician–and the mountain women who have forever warned her not to “get above her raisin’.”