In her newest book, “I Could Name God in Twelve Ways,” writer Karen Salyer McElmurray invites readers to accompany her on a journey that begins with deep roots in Kentucky and branches out across the world, moving back and forth in time with ease. On the title page, presumably in her own handwriting, McElmurray has scrawled the word “essays,” but the writings also qualify as memoir, meditations, travelogues, teaching tools, and life lessons. Readers can take their pick, as this enthralling assemblage can be read in sequence, in random sections, from front-to-back, back-to-front, and any order in between.
McElmurray likens her renderings to “word quilts…blue and somber.” Like a quilt, the individual pieces can be admired for intricate design and rich details, as well as the meticulous stitches that hold them all together. The essays provide endless opportunities to reflect on the many ways the author names God, with readers encouraged to do their own exploring.
The first paragraph of the first essay, “Blue Glass,” beckons the reader with a description of hands, the lifeline breached by an x-shaped scar and the shape of a half-moon. Right away, there are angles and curves to consider. Where to begin?
We are in an unidentified breakroom where is a tall man in a track suit takes in the paper pajamas the narrator wears and remarks she must be new to 1 North.
The second paragraph takes us back to the night before, the emergency room, an Ativan-filled IV, and someone shouting, “Oh my God, oh, my God,” as nurses talk about a patient with delirium tremens. McElmurray Imagines, “an empty Four Roses whiskey bottle lying in a ditch beside some abandoned house.”
“I begged them to admit me,” she says.
All this happens on page one. By the end of that first essay, the reader trusts McElmurray’s deft lead, following her into a childhood that, in her words, “had nearly eaten me alive.” We also delve into her medical history and her mother’s Alzheimer’s disease. Along the way are encounters with other associates on 1 North, a trek that lands “somewhere between meanness and beauty.”
“If we are lucky,” McElmurray adds, “we learn to ride through that country, all the windows down and the wind in our faces, telling us we are alive.”
With an overture that stirring in the first essay, this reader could not resist hitching a ride. As a result, I read “I Could Name God in Twelve Ways,” straight through in one sitting. Even now, weeks later, it tops the stack on my bedside table so I can flip through the pages randomly before I go to sleep, stopping to reread a word, a sentence, or even a whole essay that captures my fancy and colors my dreams.
The other night I re-read the piece titled, “The Land Between,” in which water is the metaphor that propels McElmurray’s recollections of famous authors, favorite films, and limnology, the study of inland aquatic ecosystems. She reflects on the way entire towns have been flooded to create manmade lakes, displacing residents who have lived on the land for generations, much like former residents of what is now Land Between the Lakes in western Kentucky.
“All stories are water, really,” McElmurray declares.
She tells about a 1952 Ford sedan being raised from the bottom of Lake Lanier, the skeletons of two women inside. Delia Mae Parker Young and Susie Roberts had been missing since April 1958. For decades, their disappearance had been a topic of speculation, but the discovery of their remains spawned an explanation:
“How that night in 1958 Susie and a companion drove to a local roadhouse, the Three Gables, where they enjoyed a few drinks. How they filled Susie’s car up at a gas station and left without paying. How a watch found in the Ford sedan, all those years later, was set at 11:30.”
In every essay, McElmurray’s sentences plunge below the surface, sink in the mud, rise to the top, sometimes floating peacefully after being buffeted about by rough currents. Always a teacher, she challenges readers to create their own accounts of a certain slant of light just before dawn.
In her imagination, she creates a house, a boat just beyond the dock, and a father and daughter fishing.
“The girl is laughing. They’re playing music. Patsy Cline. ‘I Fall to Pieces.’”
As the girl trails her fingers along the surface, the author urges the rest of us to, “See how she looks down into the still water, wondering how far they reach, whether there is such a place, the faraway bottom of a lake.”
Pathos and peace, repression and redemption, mortality and memory, are just some of the concepts Karen Salyer McElmurray explores in her essays. With grace and good will, she delivers on her promise to name God in twelve ways, inspiring readers to engage in a courageous search of their own.
Recipient of a Governor’s Award in the Arts, Constance Alexander has won numerous grants, awards, and residencies for her poetry, plays, prose and civic journalism projects. She is also a founding board member of The Murray Sentinel and currently serves as our board secretary.
Contact her at constancealexander@twc.com.
