Karen Salyer McElmurray

Author Amy Greene wrote about Wanting Radiance: 

"In vivid prose that reads like pure poetry, Karen McElmurray has written an incantatory Appalachian gothic tale of love, murder, and restless souls, populated with flesh-and-blood characters. Wanting Radiance is nothing less than a literary masterpiece." 

And Crystal Wilkinson praises, "This book is brimming with haints, lives full of magic and Karen McElmurray's storytelling is the most haunting of all."

Both are spot on; I found myself falling for Miracelle and Ruby right from the beginning. They are strong women searching for lives that have more meaning than the ones they're living. 

Who really knows that the cards we pick, when having our fortune read, aren't actually telling us something? Something we should listen to, take heed of. And Karen's prose, her soul wrenching and inspiring voice, is not to be missed. 

Here is my interview with Karen and her truly fascinating answers. I especially loved her answer to the popular time travel question.

Tell me about where you live and why you love it so much.

I live in Catonsville, Maryland, which is about fifteen miles outside of Baltimore. I am not a city person by any means, but I have come to love Baltimore: the American Visionary Art Museum, the Harbor, and the chance encounters like with a street-corner preacher I saw just before the quarantine, who was warning everyone about signs of the end of time. In my own neighborhood, near historic Ellicott City, I take long walks with my dog, and often go into an area of woods where there is an abandoned house. This morning I saw wild thistles, a red fox, and two deer.

 

Where were you living when you were 7 years old? Are they fond memories?

When I was 7, my father and mother and I lived in Lynch, in Harlan County, in Eastern Kentucky. The memories of that time are a mixture, as my parents fought often and my mother, even then, had the beginnings of mental illness. I learned a good deal in my childhood about not trusting love. But I do remember the brown oiled board floors of my classroom at Lynch Elementary. I remember morning sing-alongs and always raising my hand and choosing for us to sing all the verses to Froggie Went a Courtin.’  

My father taught in the high school next to the grade school and I’d have lunch with him in what I remember as a science lab. We ate deviled chicken sandwiches and he’d show me experiments—like how you can put a piece of paper over a glass full of water and turn it upside down, not spilling a drop.

Young Karen

On the way home from school, sometimes he’d stop and buy me an orangesicle. 

Did you have a favorite teacher and are you still in touch with him or her?

I woke up thinking about this question. From when I was in grade school, my favorite teacher was a medium-built woman with dark brown hair she always wore in a bun. I sadly can’t remember her name, but I vividly remember that she would read aloud to us for an hour every afternoon. My favorite teacher in high school was Mrs. Carpenter. She taught me to love poems, particularly Emily Dickinson. She believed in my ability to read well and write well. And then long later, in graduate school, my mentor was Judith Ortiz Cofer. She taught me that it was possible to come from working class people and still blossom as a woman and a writer. Judith was the one I kept in touch with as a friend and a fellow writer. She passed away after a long illness about three years ago, and I miss her very much.

Is there a book that changed the way you look at life?

Oh, there are so many. James Agee’s A Death in the Family. Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon. My favorite novel has long been Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony, and I come back to it the most often because it is a journey.  

As someone who has experienced trauma, I love the spiritual journey of the central character, Tayo, from psychic wounding to clarity and strength. I also love that novel because, as a writer, it taught me a lot about structure. It moves on many levels of time, employs poems and chants and even visual work, but solidly maintains a forward moving narrative. It is just brilliant.

Do you have a favorite children’s book? And if so, what makes it so special to you?

Some of my favorite books from when I was quite young are horse books—The Misty and Stormy—books by Marguerite Henry that take place on Chincoteague Island.

I adored horses when I was young, though I never, very unfortunately, had the chance to be around them much, nor the chance to learn to ride. I imagined a girl riding over a mountain, disappearing into a forest. All these years later, I go to Chincoteague at least once a year, and have fallen in love with the ocean there, and with the wild horses on the refuge.

What are the funniest or most embarrassing stories your family tells about you?

I was a wild child, an even wilder teenager. When I was about thirteen and visiting my grandmother for some weeks in the summer, one of my favorite songs was Donovan’s “Mellow Yellow,” and I’d read that it was really about scraping the insides out of banana peels, drying them and smoking them. I ate a ton of bananas those weeks, and scraped the inner peels out and laid them on newspapers in the woods behind the abandoned garage. I was found out before I could smoke them, but my grandmother long reminded me what I’d done. She was angry at first, then grew more and more amused by the story. It wasn’t nothing but fruit, she’d say, I guess it was healthy, when you come down to it.

I loved this quote from your interview with Julianna Baggott a few years ago, "Let’s just say I have solipsism down to a fine art." Can you expand on that?

Oh, I did say that, didn’t I? It’s the truth. I was an only child, and a lonely one. I spent much time reading books way too old for my years (I read D.H. Lawrence and Dostoevsky when I was maybe nine). I learned to live in my head, hear my own stories, think and think and think. Finally, I wrote a memoir about my experiences as a birth mother—I placed a child for adoption when I was fifteen. Being inside myself, learning myself, listening to and translating my own echoes became an art that, I hope, led to a kind of transformation.

How would you say you are different now than you were in your early 20’s.

I was a wild child, then became an even wilder young woman. I traveled, moved thirty-seven times, remade households, crossed state lines, am, as a friend called me not long back, a seeker. I am still in search of an authentic life, whatever that means. These days, I love my perennial garden. My dog, June. I love breathing deeply, and being delightfully still.

What would constitute a “perfect” evening” for you?

A perfect evening was last summer when I was visiting my friend Carlyle in Silk Hope, North Carolina.

We went for a walk in the woods at night with her friend Leif, who was carrying a flashlight. We came to a stand of trees near a field, and just stood completely still. The sound of birds from trees nearest us was a chorus, just amazing. Then Leif shone the flashlight into the trees and they went instantly, completely silent. Light off, they started again, as joyous and raucous as before.

How did you meet your husband Johnny? How did the first date go?

Johnny was my student at Lynchburg College, in a creative class. 

Lynchburg College

Our first meeting was before the class began, when I did a reading for the Thornton Reading Series. Johnny was there, and offered to set up the chairs. Then the first class. He walked in the room, took a seat, and my first thought was “oh, no! Not him in here!” I was completely and immediately on the defensive.  Were there signs of our attraction over the course of the term? Yes, subtle ones. His answers to my discussion questions. My defensiveness. Our first date wasn’t until the end of the term, when we went out for a coffee. I remember taking a seat near the wall at our table, leaving him diagonally across from me, near the aisle. I was still on the defensive. It took me awhile to trust, to open to love. We’ve now been married seventeen years.

Karen and Johnny on their wedding day.

 A couple of questions about your book: one of the people who contacts “Willy’s Wonderama” is Dauphine Murdy. She writes about her daughter Maria (who was named that because of it sounds like miracle, as was Miracelle, one of your main characters). Maria is described by her mother as a “seer.” Can you talk about how and why Maria’s character was important?

Long before I started writing this book, I was fond of the film, O Brother, Where Art Thou? I liked the idea of writing a bildungsroman, but what I wanted was a spiritual journey that was very particularly a woman’s. Miracelle begins as a false-fortune telling roadie, and she undergoes a variety of experiences on her journey toward understanding her own fortune, her own truer (if not true) identity. For me, Maria, the seer, was an integral moment for Miracelle. She hears real vision, authentic telling in Maria’s voice, right away. She is shaken by that voice, nudged down that road she has taken toward her own self.  

Have you ever been in a situation where your fortune was read and what you were told astounded you?

I love fortune-telling, visionaries, cards read, tea leaves, name it. I have a story that was important to this book that involved visiting a woman in a trailer outside Weaverville, NC, where I used to live. The woman read shadows in photographs. To have  your fortune told, you had to go into the back bedroom of the trailer, where a gigantic woman lay in king-sized bed with a velvet headboard.  But the time that truly astounded me was when I visited a Tarot card reader in Lynchburg, VA.  I’ve always had fortune tellers ask a bunch of questions which could well cue them in to the answers you most want, but this woman knew nothing about my history, not this history. She told me I’d meet a young man soon who would be and had been integral to my life. Two years later, I met the son I’d placed for adoption.

Were there parts in Wanting Radiance that your editor cut that you hated to see go? If so, what were they?

Let’s say that I was resistant, hesitant, and then so, so pleased with my editor.  As you know, from reading Wanting Radiance, I am in love with language. I like its sound, its texture, its ability to, as Margaret Atwood says somewhere, “rise off the page, like the singing voice in music.” I get carried away. I love clusters of images. I love long, flowing sentences. This editor helped me reign in the power of the sentence. She helped me polish language, let it gleam.

What gave you the original idea for the novel?

As well as being inspired by the shadow-reading fortune teller from Weaverville (who was shot by her lover some years ago), the novel began with a short story called “The Black Cat Diner.” That story was based on a service station/diner once owned by a great aunt of mine named Della. Della fixed engines and ran that place, and I remember going there when I was little enough to sit underneath the tables at a booth. Della’s husband, Russell, was found in his truck one morning after being locked out of the diner overnight. His death, her power, became that story, then later took their place in the novel.

And in a short essay…………………………

IF YOU COULD GO BACK IN TIME

I likely wrote my short essay in a way wasn’t quite what you expect, I fear. Anyway…..

to any period from before recorded history to yesterday,

be safe from harm, be rich, poor or in-between, if appropriate to your choice,

actually experience what it was like to live in that time, anywhere at all,

meet anyone, if you desire, speak with them, listen to them, be with them.

 

When would you go?

Where would you go?

Who would you want to meet?

And most importantly, why do you think you chose this time?

 

The women I grew up with were often powerless. They were poor, they wed men who were often cruel, and they led lives ruled by what god made true or not true. They led lives that were often about despair, loss. And so, I have often dreamed of other times and places, other lives not my own. When I was little, I’d lie awake far into the night, making up stories of those times, melodramas with myself as the woman kidnapped by pirates, the woman taken from her frontier home to live among the Comanches.  I dreamed myself Rima, the bird-girl, in her jungle or Circe, the woman who transformed men into creatures. 

 

Rima

 

After I read about Joan of Arc, I created more powerful narratives. The woman soldier, adventurer, knight. I read about Bernadette Soubirous, the miller’s daughter from Southern France who reported eighteen apparitions of a holy lady. I read about woman saints, mystics, dreamed myself the woman who translates stories about her visions. I read about Rasputin, the mad Russian monk, then dreamed myself that monk, but a wild-haired woman lending healing advice to Czarinas. As I grew older and read more and more, my woman-dreams were sometimes an island inhabited by only women of power, like the one imagined by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Herland.

A utopia free of war, conflict, domination. 

Other times my power dreams were more equitable, taking me to the mid-nineteenth century’s Brook Farm, in Roxbury, another utopia for women and men, one that guaranteed the mental freedom, a society of human beings who, as Hawthorne told me,  might lead “a more wholesome and simpler life than could be led amid the pressure of competitive institutions.” Or I dreamed myself as Vita Sackville-West, lover of Virginia Woolf, writer of lyric novels, she who experienced the freedom of her own male spirit, inspiration for the androgynous Orlando. These days, I still write about and dream myself a woman who finally accepts her own voice, her own power.  

And that is timeless. 

Thank you Karen for your insightful and honest answers to my questions, I will always think of you as Rima, Joan and Bernadette, all rolled into one amazing woman.

Karen is also the author of: