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’.”
There’s a constant (and lovely) tension that runs through the essays. On the one hand, the author expresses a sense of duty to her forebears, an impulse to stay home, to live as the traditional mountain women of her mother’s and grandmother’s eras, or at least to stay close to this somehow. But on the other hand, McElmurray feels compelled to get out, to educate herself formally and to become a writer and scholar. It’s not a new story—Appalachians who’ve left the hills uneasily, only to question that decision for years to come. But in McElmurray’s capable hands, the story is so much more than that. There’s a poetry to the entire collection, a manner of delivery at once lyrical and earth-bound, transcendent but simple, pure. Indeed, McElmurray manages to tie together so many of the conflicts that have faced her as a woman, mother, artist, and intellectual, but it’s her style and candor that awe the reader so. (Several times, I had to put the book down and say, “Damn, this is beautifully sad.”) So, yes, the book is a memoir, but it’s something far greater, too, a piece of narrative non-fiction perhaps, but not even that term does the book complete justice. What the book is–really–is a work of art, something that defies narrow categorization. Again, it all comes down to McElmurray’s skill at rendering the past and the present, and everything in between.
Consider the way in which she dramatizes the tension between her working-class upbringing and her scholarly work, a conflict she sees when she takes part in writing workshops, events conducted in the “ivory towers” so far away from where she grew up, both literally and figuratively:
The notion of the workshop here is a typical McElmurray metaphor, one deep with meaning. True, she’s talking about a scholarly workshop, one where writers discuss the minutiae of style, of voice, of narrative, but she’s also talking about her grandfather’s workshop with its tools and wood, with its machine oils and fabricating materials. The two workshops are worlds apart, but for the author, each distinct type of creation that issues from such workshops informs her creative (and spiritual) self. For McElmurray, the wood shop is as important as the writing workshop, or the greenhouse, or the quilting circle. It’s the sense of creation, of producing something that supersedes notions of “high and low” art, of folk art and literary art.
Happily, metaphors and connections like this run throughout the book. McElmurray has an uncanny ability to bring together the things and people of her past with those of her present. She’s always trying to see the relationships, to trace the disparate influences through metaphor and anecdote. (Sometimes she’s pretty certain about them–at others times not so much.) She writes about motherhood and loss, about academia and her discomfort with certain elements of it, about the earth and the process of creation and growth, about who she is and who she was. Sometimes she references literary texts, elsewhere religious ones. And again, there’s always that tension running through everything, a sense of unease with one’s place, a feeling of longing for a world one has left, and a continued questioning about the paths one has taken. It’s a beautiful collection, so skillfully written, so precise in terms of diction and turns of phrase.
In my favorite piece, called “Driven,” McElmurray recalls a 1967 Dodge Dart she owned for years and years, one that took her places, physically moved her around from site to site as her life evolved. But the car is also a metaphor for herself, for someone driven to create, to do, to move and change. She writes:
In the end, the car takes her where she wants to go. It’s just that McElmurray is not always sure she wants to be there once she arrives. This is the kind of writing that you’ll find in this excellent collection, a painfully beautiful book that remains with you long after you’ve finished it.
Would My Pick be Your Pick?
If you're interested in ________, the answer may be "Yes":￭ Memoirs or essay collections
￭ Writing about connections to ancestors
￭ The tension between the desire to stay rooted in the place and traditions of our upbringing and to break free of them
