Karen Salyer McElmurray is a writer of fiction and nonfiction, but if you’ve ever had the pleasure of reading her work, or are only now experiencing her writing, you’ll notice she’s also a poet. Karen’s lyrical writing stays with you like finely written epic free verse poetry, with no word over or under-used, each sentence honed to the syllable and essential in the telling.
She’s been awarded accolades for both her fiction and nonfiction, including the National Book Critics Circle listing of Surrendered Child as a “notable book” along with Motel of the Stars as an Oxford American Editor’s Pick (just to name a few).
Karen also serves as a faculty member and advisor in West Virginia Wesleyan’s low-residency MFA program, and it was a seminar on her concept of “heartwood” which inspired the very name of our magazine and is the mission which guides our editorial board to this day. Her essay on the topic is a beautifully instructive piece on craft, and the following excerpt is reprinted with permission from the author:
It was novelist Charles Baxter who became my writing workshop home when I sat in on every lecture of his I could at Warren Wilson College to hear more about what he called “the intentions of the work.” In his collection of essays called The Art of the Subtext, he calls intentions “a collection of luminous details that take us in the direction of the unsaid and unseen,” beyond just “plot or a collection of instances” (35-36) For purposes of the workshops I teach these days, I have chosen to call “intentions” the heart or heartwood of the piece we are discussing. By “heart” I do not necessarily mean the emotions evoked by the piece nor experienced by the characters nor the writer, but I mean something closer to the word essence, core, quintessence—or, as a poet friend said, heartwood is the center of the wood, its hardest part.
I have circled other words in Baxter’s essay for heartwood or intentions and here is a list: source; subterranean; mind-haunting; hidden-story possibilities; real story; derailment of ordinary life; impulse and dream; wellsprings; source of power. Some of the questions that heartwood might ask. What are the layers of this story, that essay, the poem? How do we peel them back, like an onion-skin, like the petals of a flower, to find the bulb, the bud, the core? Does that core hurt? Does it sing? What is the caliber of that song? What words will be remember most after we close our eyes and no longer see the lines the words make if we break them apart? Does the piece echo inside us, and how? Does it create a vacuum, or an absence? Does it taste sweet or bitter, salty or sour? Does it leave us thirsty or does it satisfy? Why? What does it tell, long after the pages are turned over, folded, left behind?*
Her latest is the novel Wanting Radiance, from the University Press of Kentucky. Learn more about this novel and Karen Salyer McElmurray’s writing life in her conversation with HeartWood’s Appalachian Arts Editor, Larry D. Thacker.
LDT: I’m as much interested in the writer’s life as I am the resulting stories. Tell us what you normally think of as soon as you realize you’re awake each morning. As you’re drifting off to sleep?
KSM: For about three years now, what I’ve been doing first thing when I wake up is a guided meditation. I have an online site that I am now using that guides me, and I do my best to stay focused on the body, the present moment, on breath. And before I go to sleep, I have been doing another meditation, this one a chant that variously focuses on heart, healing, self-acceptance. I began working with mediation after a time of serious anxiety and self-doubt, and now the meditation is part of my daily life. I find solid ground there that lies beneath everything I do, from time with loved ones to writing.
LDT: “How to tell it, the way a body bleeds from a wound into forever?” This line from your newest novel, Wanting Radiance, stays with me. You let your characters act and speak from mysterious and deep places, as illustrated here, by not just watching someone bleed, but letting them believably contemplate so much in so little space, being a true witness. They witness dying, they question the how of it all, eternity, that process of physically and spiritually bleeding out, a deflating, even the metaphor of all our wounds. Do you see your characters as witnesses to an often missed “full world,” and is that an overarching purpose in much of your writing – that we should all “be” differently in our experience?
KSM: That line, that wound into forever. I suppose that is how I would describe my own heart for much of my life. A missed childhood, full of hurt. A young adulthood, seeking as much hurt as I could find to prove I could still feel. And these last years of my life. Finally recognizing the power of love and trust. I suppose I myself have been what you describe in that line from my novel. Witness to an often-missed full world. Like it’s a card game, I lead with heart. And, yes, I suppose my characters do as well. Characters, I believe, come from not only the earth, light, dark, the imagination and, sometimes, the lack thereof, but they come from who we are and have been and wish we could be. Yes, a metaphor for all my wounding, and for all our wounds.
LDT: A portion of your writing feels as if it’s channeled from some otherworldly dream by which you occasionally hand over control. Has this always been the case, or has this writing relationship with that material realm grown over time?
KSM: I love this question and I think maybe I fear it a little, too. Since Wanting Radiance came out, I’ve heard it described, variously, as dreamy, like entering a long dream, and as “seen at a great distance, like a dream.” I worry about all these descriptions. I think of a book I loved years ago, by Roger Hazelton. It’s called Ascending Flame, Descending Dove, and it is described as a long essay on “creative transcendence.” Described simply, there’s the spirit and there’s the world, and one of the purposes of making art is to capture that spirit in the here and now, be it in words or paint or music. I worry often that my writing ascends to the spirit just fine, but loses its path on the way back down, to the page and to the reader. But as my father would have said, I come by it honest. My grandmother on my mother’s side believed that hairs on a pillow case in the morning meant you’d been visited by ghosts in the night. I grew up hearing about signs and predictions and prophecies. And I grew up having dreams so vivid they are sometimes complete narratives I wake up being able to recount. Maybe because of all that, the work I’m drawn to most is visionary, from Leslie Marmon Silko to Marc Chagall. I tell myself to be careful, though. Psychologist James Hillman has a book called The Day World and the Dream World. We descend into the dream world, ascend to the world right in front of us. I can linger there, in dreams.
LDT: We’re all the sum of our choices, and other’s choices for us, the seen and unseen, interactions, and fates, mistakes and intentions. Can you think back, with any accuracy, to the one most pivotal instance in your life that sent you toward “being a writer”?
KSM: I often say that the time my writing came from was the summers I was ten, eleven, twelve years old. I stayed weeks with my Granny Salyer those summers. She lived in Hagerhill, just outside of Paintsville, and I became friends with another girl, a few years older than me. Her name was Vicky Cantrell, and she wrote poems and played a twelve-string guitar, had a voice I love to this very day. Those summers were the first time I wrote poems—really sentimental ones about moonlight and birch trees—but I feel in love then. Writing became a thing that saved me, from an unhappy childhood, first. Then it became more than that. It became a path I believed in, and still do.
LDT: If you have a Zen to your life, is writing your Zen, or is writing the result of being Zen out in everyday life and paying attention, or some combination thereof? And closely on that topic, what is your meditation?
KSM: I’ve talked a little bit, above, about my still fairly new practice of meditation. Meditation is absolutely connected for me to the everyday life, to paying attention, which are the essentials of the writing life in more ways that I now know. I was just the other day talking about meditation in an Introduction to Creative Writing class. They are writing short stories, and I was talking about “the narrative present,” meaning the present action of a story—what happens the now time in terms of plot/action. That now time as compared to backstory, memory, flashbacks, reflection. The now time, I was saying, is so much like focusing on present time, on everyday life. Its about paying attention, to what characters do, say, how they act, move, do things, are in the world of here, the world right in front of us. I’m not entirely sure the students got what I meant, but talking about it reinforced where I am in terms of my mediation life and my writing life. What was that hippie book I used to own and that might still in my stacks and stacks of books? Be Here Now. A great lesson for me for writing fiction.
LDT: To the extent you might share, what’s the book you might never write and why?
KSM: More and more I think the book I might never write is a mainstream novel. One with an exciting, action-driven, heart-thumping, what-will-happen plot. I am a lyric writer—a writer of poetic prose, meditative prose. I keep wanting to write an exciting, plot-driven novel that is also lyric. I know that I will keep trying.
LDT: Writing routine questions can be mundane, yet people are curious. They want to know what works for successful writers or they want to know what they have in common with someone they admire. As for routine, do you prefer morning, daytime, evening writing, or all times? Do you sketch stories longhand or spend most of your time at the computer. Pen or pencil when journaling? Music on or off? Several writing projects at once or only one at a time? Same place or lots of spots as comfortable for writing? Can you work around a crowd, or do you prefer to be alone?
KSM: I’ll answer the last question first. Yes, I prefer to be alone, or I revel in it. By alone I mean still. Quiet inside myself. And that is hard for me to achieve. It’s hard with the teaching life, which I take very seriously, giving as much as I know how to the cultivation of other minds and spirit. And that quiet is especially hard to find in the world we have right now. When I’m up and eating my bowl of oatmeal, I read the news, and the pandemic, the election, the machinations of the political machine, the fires out west, the deterioration of Great Barrier Reef, the whole world crowds inside the still space of my brain. And how can it not? The world itself feels like it is on fire this year, and who am I to pull down the blinds inside myself and not look outward? Even in quarantine, I participate in that world with my whole heart, and the chatter of that world resonates inside me. Each day during this pandemic time, I go on a long walk with my dog, June. I walk and I imagine. Essays are being born that way.
LDT: I’m sure you would respond, “I must write, this is why I write,” if we were to ask why you do it. But what happens when you can’t? As in, too busy to get the usual level of writing in? Do you feel something internally when you’ve not “been writing lately”?
KSM: Writing in this time we find ourselves in is just what I’ve written about, above. Do I feel something when the world crowds in and I can ‘t write? Oh, yes. I feel exhausted, mostly. I feel so crowded inside. I also feel like there are two stories going on inside me. One story is the way of the world. The other story is the quieter one, the one so far down inside me some days it is hard to hear its voice, but I know its there. That’s the voice of this essay I know must be written, that huge project I want to undertake. The difficulty is balancing those two stories. World-story, inner story. As I write this right now, I realize that it’s all a bit like balancing plot and reflection/memory. Balance is the key. Some days I am much better at it than others. Some years, like this one. I just wish my life were much longer. Like. An extra hundred years maybe?
LDT: Do you have a writing related talisman?
KSM: How well you know me with these questions. My house is full of talismans. I am writing you answers to these questions right now in my bedroom, so let me describe the talismans in this very room. Skull of seagull on the wall, next to a blue and silver dragonfly made of recycled metal. Photo of a gage looking out over the sea in a town called Oia, on Santorini, in Greece, where I went a million years ago. On a shelf, photos of my ancestors. Granny Baisden. Granny Salyer. My mother. My father. And on that same shelf, a Black Madonna, given to me by my son’s mother, some years ago. And on the chest next to this bed. A quartz-heart. A Holy Mother candle. A shiny compact with a drawing of a fox on top. And on the mirror across from the bed, Reflection of an icon from Russia. Metal and tile Mexican cross. A cardboard cut-out of Virginia Woolf, her elbow stuck into the corner of the mirror, so she seems to float. Imagine if I went on like this, room by room by room. There’s a lot memory here, and I hope there’s a lot of magic.
LDT: What new writing are you engaged in presently?
KSM: Starting in March, I wrote three new essays. I dream about a memoir about faith. I dream about a novel set in Chincoteague, one of my favorite places on earth.
LDT: And finally, tell us a little about Wanting Radiance, your new novel.
KSM: Wanting Radiance can be read as a murder ballad, but I wanted to make it a revisionist one. What would happen if a woman set out to solve the story of a murder, but made sense of her own life along the way? This direction for the work made even more sense a couple of years into the writing when a friend saw a draft. Readers will wonder, he said, why Miracelle Loving is almost middle aged, and has never married. A woman wronged. A woman who chose not to marry. My revisionist ballad became about a woman who has been lost (in ways emotional, familial, spiritual even), and along the journey to solve her mother’s murder, reclaims herself.
Readers may access more about Wanting Radiance, including details on ordering, here: https://www.kentuckypress.com/9781949669145/wanting-radiance/?fbclid=IwAR22ba_lLEIS83GVL09qjwYZEI9UNytosmUpOnx2QWMzgvHWcJpf7ZZET2s
Learn more about Karen’s life and writing via her website: www.karensalyermcelmurray.com
*McElmurray, Karen Salyer. "Heartwood," Piano in a Sycamore: Writing Lessons from the Appalachian Writers Workshop, edited by Silas House and Marianne Worthington. Hindman Settlement School. 2017.