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NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
THE TRANSFORMATIONAL POTENTIAL OF WRITING by Monica Carol Miller Karen Salyer McElmurray. Voice Lessons: Essays. Iris Press, 2021.
MONICA CAROL MILLER is an Assistant Professor of English at Middle Georgia State University. She is the author of Being Ugly: Southern Women Writers and Social Rebellion (Louisiana State University Press, 2017) and co-editor with Katharine A. Burnett of The Tacky South (Louisiana State University Press, 2022). KAREN SALYER MCELMURRAY is the author of multiple award-winning books of both fiction and nonfiction, including her novel The Motel of the Stars (Sarabande Books, 2008), partially set in North Carolina, and her memoir Surrendered Child: A Birth Mother’s Journey (University of Georgia Press, 2004), which won the AWP Award for Creative Nonfiction. Her other awards include grants from the North Carolina Arts Council and the NEA.
On Karen Salyer McElmurray’s author website, she identifies herself as, “Teacher, Mentor, Writer.” The essays in McElmurray’s new collection Voice Lessons explore all three of these aspects of McElmurray’s life, especially as one who came to academia and academic writing as an outsider. At the heart of the collection is McElmurray’s familial life, beginning with the book’s dedication “to the ghosts of my ancestors” and its opening preface titled “Before I was Born.” This preface consists of a rough outline of her family history conveyed through a series of anaphoric statements, from “Before I was born” and “Being young” to “Less young” and “No longer young” (9–10). Beginning with “Before I was born. My father tells me there was a shootout in Floyd County involving the Baisden’s and the Gray’s [sic], my mother’s kin. I do not know if this is true. A history of Floyd County says one of my ancestors was Belle Starr” (9), McElmurray anchors her life story in a specific Appalachian place and outlaw history. Such themes reverberate through the rest of the section in statements such as, “Being young. There was a well with sulfur water,” to “No longer young. I went back to school. I thought I wanted to study D.H. Lawrence, but my own poetry interested me more,” to “Less young. I found my son because I wrote a memoir,” and “Less young. I had cancer. I am glad. I love my life. I love being alive. The cat sleeps in the sun next to me right now” (10–11; author's italics).
Winter 2022
The series of statements that opens the collection sets up the themes and content of the subsequent essays, in which McElmurray describes her struggles with her mother’s Alzheimer’s, through graduate school and finding her writing voice, to a career in academia where she searches for her role in a place that treats her like an outsider. In all of the essays, McElmurray consciously writes her way through various modes of pain, difficulty, tragedy, and confusion, explaining that she is using her writing as a way of “creating a map of scars” to follow (22). In “Geography of Scars,” she explains her project: “If I follow the map long enough, surely I will find the path forward that will make me whole” (22). The uncharted ground that McElmurray finds herself on requires that she draw her own map, but the agency that it requires will also provide a way out. Writing is not only a method for McElmurray but also the focus of many of these essays, like how her study of poetry as an undergraduate at Berea inspired her to write her own poetry, initiating her into a community of poets and scholars. As she describes preparing for her comprehensive exams and defending her choice of subject matter in her writing, she illustrates the ways in which her feelings of marginalization within the academy were exacerbated not only by her Appalachian identity but also by her choice to write creative nonfiction, a genre that was still suspect at that time.
