The Sufi mystic and poet Rumi wrote, “There are a hundred ways to kneel and kiss the ground.” In prayer, in supplication and humbleness, in homage, in desperation for healing and peace. The ground we claim or that claims us. A foreign ground we travel for exploration and enlightenment. Home ground, dismissed, wished for, finally embraced. All these meanings apply to Karen Salyer McElmurray’s stunning new collection of essays, I Could Name God in Twelve Ways (The University Press of Kentucky 2024). In thirteen essays spanning forty years, McElmurray leads us in both travel and homegoing, moving backward and forward in time, memory, despair, discovery, and hard truths. Any travel is as much within as without, and here she questions what her many travels have meant. She bares heart and soul to stow us in her backpack—from myriad jobs across the US to Ireland and Crete to India’s rabid street dogs and Thailand’s golden Buddhas, from lover to lover to lover—always searching for her axis mundi, the sacred place that would at long last connect her to God as faith and the home that is God, far more a place inside herself than any point on a map.
These brutally honest essays show us the writer (poet and memoirist), the seeker, the wounded healer, the granddaughter of Appalachian coal miners, the raw truth-teller, the lost wanderer. The adage is all who wander are not lost, but McElmurray freely admits her lostness: leaving home at 15, surrendering her son to adoption, hitting the road and the world’s byways as a young woman with more than her share of childhood trauma.
And how telling that she begins the collection with her most painful material: hospitalized with severe anxiety for eleven days in 2018. She sees the word vulnerable on her chart. In describing her own vulnerability and those with her on the floor of the 1 North facility—those on suicide watch, those hiding under blankets—she is really saying, “Show me your wounds, and I’ll show you mine.” Thus, we can be vulnerable together and begin the shaky path to self-knowledge, to the light of healing. For this is the road we all walk together, whether around our neighborhood block or finding shelter in the rugged mountains of Nepal. In 1 North she is able to conclude this:
“Somewhere between meanness and beauty is a place called vulnerable, and if we are lucky, we learn to ride through that country, with the windows down and the wind in our faces, telling us we are alive.”
At the root of McElmurray’s initial escape from home is her mother’s obsessive-compulsive disorder, of whom she writes, “Our house could never be clean enough, no matter how much we polished it with our sadness.” But she could not escape her family’s generational threads of mental illness any more than she could the black dog of depression that nipped ever at her spirit. Living with her granny, Fannie Ellen, in eastern Kentucky salved her hurt for a time, until the road and its wildness howled her name. She attended small colleges, moved town to town, filling notebooks with aching words and stories, with vivid dreams. She trekked across the US, working as a maid, clerk, waitress, stenographer, landscaper, so many borrowed lives.
Then she left the country for parts unknown with her lover Paul, and most of those travels comprise the essay collection, following their uncoupling in a nearly endless string of places without meaning. “Journeys,” she writes, “were the masks of worlds I didn’t understand any more than I understood my own sorrowing heart.” In her writing, and in her every breath, only the touchstone of Kentucky could sate her hunger—and over the traveling years she always returned to her native ground—literally, in dreams, and on the page.
Like many of us, McElmurray lost both parents within a short period of time, her mother taken by Alzheimer’s, and worse, during the pandemic’s dark well of isolation and uncertainty. This is not the first time she has written of her many losses, exposed and raw, but it may be the opus of her life until now. And what a glorious opus it is—infused with a poet’s lyricism and bright sensory details, mystery and magic and prayer, the long-sought light coming within reach, her pilgrimage realized. At a writing conference, she heard Dorothy Allison say, “We must be willing to open our stories, and ourselves, to both pain and terror.” McElmurray asks her students this:
“What is the heartwood? Lay your hands against the pages. Reach in, pull meaning from the depths. If you are afraid, be afraid. Ride the waves of intention. Let the inner life and the act of story converge.”
When she knelt by the Ganges in India, the holy river of forgiveness, she prayed and thought that all would be well, that her elusive poems would return, that the water of absolution would fill her empty hands with faith and peace, that she could finally hear the song of the spirit. But in her every word and memory is a poem, then and now. We cannot wish grace upon us, though we may dearly need it; it must visit us unawares and be all the more a gift. And it is great understatement to say what a spirit gift is this collection.
Charles Wright wrote in Scar Tissue: “I can’t get down deep enough. / Sunlight flaps its enormous wings and lifts off from the backyard. / The wind rattles its raw throat, but I still can’t go deep enough.” We can try to name God, or love, in twelve or a hundred ways, that torch burning within and around us, but we’ll never go deep enough. All we can do is summon peace—and love—into our hearts with every in breath, out breath. It comes closer and closer, washing us lighter and lighter.
One enduring image that McElmurray held in all her journeying is a quilt her granny made, “Trip Around the World,” each band a color, trip after trip, both hot and cool to the eye and the touch. She imagined the quilt made of her female ancestors, in silence and labor, leaving, escaping, living anew. These essays are her “word quilts.” Now she says, “I am living at the center of the quilt. The yellow square at the center of a maze. At that center, there is warmth and love.” As a tarot card affirmed, “The journey ends here.”
Hold this book, this baker’s dozen of lifesaving travels, close to your heart, for it is the heart’s pure voice rising from the wilderness.
Karen Salyer McElmurray
Karen Salyer McElmurray writes creative nonfiction and literary fiction, and is widely published, as well as serving at numerous colleges and universities as an instructor, professor, and writer-in-residence. She is the winner of many prestigious awards—including Annie Dillard Award for the Essay, Georgia Author of the Year Award, and Appalachian Book of the Year. She holds a Ph.D. in American literature from the University of Georgia, M.A. in English/Writing from Hollins University, and MFA in fiction from the University of Virginia. Her books include Her works include Wanting Radiance (University Press of Kentucky, 2020), The Motel of the Stars: A Novel (2008), Surrendered Child: A Birth Mother’s Journey (University of Georgia Press, 2006), and Strange Birds in the Tree of Heaven (University of Georgia Press, 2004).
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