Voice Lessons

by Karen Salyer McElmurray

A memoir-in-essays, Voice Lessons is one woman from Appalachia's remembrance of childhood and of education, both formal and personal. McElmurray enters the world of writing and teaching, all the while coming to understand her deeply troubled mother. The essays are arranged in four major early years and experiences of faith; the work of hands and the work of classrooms, paralleling her mother's diagnosis of Alzheimer's; writing and academia and the mother, disappearing into a land of forgetting. Finally, a fourth section relays both her mother's death and the author's acceptance of her own voice. Silas House writes that "McElmurray's voice is inimitable, innovative, powerful, and always a pleasure to behold."

Genres: Essays

128 pages, Paperback

Published May 14, 2021

Reviews

[Monica]

I’m writing a book review for this, so I’ll wait and rate it there.

[Meredith Willis · Rating 5 out of 5]

McElmurray is well-known in Appalachian and Southern literary and academic circles. She has won multiple prizes and honors for her work, both regional and national, and has published with, among others, the University of Kentucky Press, the University of Georgia Press, Sarabande, and Iris. This collection of memoir essays is my first encounter with McElmurray's work, and I should have known it much sooner.

The essays engage in a conversation about the culture of the Appalachian mountains. She speaks as one who has explored Europe and Asia as well as many cities and more that 35 different homes, as well as tracing her own family and her personal struggles. She has a dialogue with literature and with the people who teach literature and how to write it. She writes about how her discovery of expressive language changed her life, but she is critical of the kind of academic discussion that wants to put a distance on real life emotions. She writes about how a particular poetry class down played, even disdained, confessional poetry.

McElmurray's take on literature is about wholeness--a balance among form and structure and the digging out of our own personal--yes, emotional-- truths. She understands that in the end, you need all the parts.

A lot of this comes together in the the family stories, in particular her relationship with her damaged mother who obsessively cleaned house as well as cleaning her daughter--bathing McElmurray up into her teen years. Her father was a committed, rigid Christian, and there are a host of interesting aunts, uncles, and grandparents. The people and her powerfully sharp details of places and jobs and illnesses give the collection its depth. There are heart-wrenching scenes of the mother in the late stages of Alzheimer's disease, and there is a dream-fever exploration of the author's own experience of cancer treatments.

On the surface there is certainly a great deal here that could be called confessional–the mixed feelings about her mother, the details of colostomy bags, the struggle to study and write while you are working full time transplanting seedlings in a nursery. But the essays also experiment with form. One of the most interesting experiments is how McElmurray uses repetition. Incidents are told more than once, often in the same words, in different essays. Sometimes the passages come back word for word, and sometimes they reappear with the final sentence changed. Different nuances and depth come with the changed context. Towards the end, the prose works more than a little like a pantoum or villanelle. The essays were published in various periodicals before being collected in this book, but McElmurray is doing far more than recycling here: she is permitting us to remember, re-remember, re-experience with her some of what she has lived. We get the benefit of her memories and insights, and how she has used her life's materials to build her walls-- and her bridges.

[Rita Quillen · Rating 5 out of 5]

VOICE LESSONS is labeled a memoir in essays, but it's unlike any memoir or book of essays I've ever read. It's memoir in poetry, exploring not just some linear facts, dates, places, stories from the writer's life, but an accounting of the history of her heart and soul and mind. It's an accounting of how she got to where she is now, particularly and specifically as it pertains to her writing.

Harrowing passages about her cancer battle and family stories of the unbearable ravages of mental illness and Alzheimer's disease, just for two examples, are interwoven with concurrent accounts of McElmurray's teaching and writing life at the time.

If you are a writer, VOICE LESSONS is absolutely a must read, much deeper and more insightful than Annie Dillard's account from Tinker Creek. A uniquely beautiful, brave, unflinching voice on the page, Karen McElmurray is a writer's writer.

[Meredith Malburne-Wade · Rating 5 out of 5]

McElmurray’s Voice Lessons is stunning. I found myself reading it in small snippets for two main reasons: I wanted to have time to process what I was reading—to savor it, to ponder it, to revel in it—and I just didn’t want it to end.

In writing about love, relationships, family, inheritance, Appalachia, escaping (and returning), Alzheimer’s, birth, loss, cancer, and academia, she leaves nothing untouched. But her touch is deft. It probes while it soothes. As a teacher, as a writer, and as a daughter, I felt her words in a way that is now uncommon, sometimes difficult, and always welcome. “Writing is resplendent,” McElmurray tells us, and indeed it is. It is also “[o]rdinary and humble.” It is this combination of beauty and humility that drives McElmurray’s writing, and the world is richer for it. This work feels timeless and timely simultaneously, reminding us that we are never fully defined by--and never fully free of—our pasts. What an absolute gift this collection is.

[Zoe Zolbrod · Rating 5 out of 5]

I meant to just peek at this book before getting back to my novel, but one-page into the prologue and I was hooked. I read until I couldn’t keep my eyes open and reached for it again first thing this morning. Beautifully written personal essays likely to resonate with anyone who has a writer’s soul, or anyone who has traveled far from where they started while remaining connected by a thin live wire. I never read or watched Hillbilly Elegy, but this seems like this could lead a list of what to read or watch rather than or alongside Hillbilly Elegy.