Karen Salyer McElmurray’s collection I Could Name God in Twelve Ways is a profound and lyrical memoir-in-essays.
James Tate Hill wrote of the book:
“What does it mean to come from the center of a labyrinth and find
one’s way out?’ is a question these essays ask and answer with exquisite
urgency. For McElmurray, writing is both a compass and an act of faith,
and what a compass she wields, what faith, to lead us out of her
labyrinths with a rare blend of fearlessness and vulnerability.”
In her own words, here is Karen Salyer McElmurray’s Book Notes music playlist for her essay collection I Could Name God in Twelve Ways:
My work has always been influenced by music. One of my books has lyrics from a blues song I made up: Love me in the morning, love me at night. Love me, Radiance, honey, till long past midnight. When writing another book, I cranked up the volume on Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon to bring back the times I was summoning on my pages. Still another book is woven with lines from the book of Psalms, which are as much music as anything. All of it is writing haunted by sound.
I Could Name God in Twelve Ways, my new book of essays, has been informed by music in other ways. The songs, this time, are made of geography, of distant cities, of seas. They’re made of lost love, love found. They’re made of the son I never knew and the longing I have gradually learned to express. Ten songs, made of remembering.
Gerry Rafferty, “Baker Street”
When I hear this late ’70s song on the radio, I remember working in a towel factory in Sydney, Australia. I was folding towels embroidered with tennis rackets and golf clubs and I was fitting them neatly into small plastic bags, where they’d be shipped out, who knows where. We worked ten hour days, Paul and me. All day I stood at the giant folding table and Norma, the towel folding manager, who in my memory looks a little like a blonde-headed chicken, called out corrections on the fold for this towel or that. All day I stood across from Paul, the man I loved then, while he, too folded towels for the under-the-table wages that we were saving to travel more in Australia, then on to Asia. There was a radio going in the towel factory, all day, every day, and Gerry Raferty and “Baker Street” played again and again. When work ended, I followed Paul back to the house where we were staying in Botany Bay. We had cookouts on the beach with our housemates—Marty and Steve and Mary—and we all got high and danced to more radio music. After six weeks passed, we had just enough cash and I followed Paul across Australia, from Sydney to the Great Barrier Reef, then to Alice Springs. After that, we traveled north to Bangkok where taxis blared music all day, every day. “Baker Street” isn’t in my book of essays and Paul is now a tiny dot in my memory, so small, so no longer mine that he vanishes altogether. But I can still play that song in my head, city to city, country to country.
Pink Floyd, “Time”
The first time I heard Pink Floyd, I was kid living on the streets in Columbia, Missouri. I lived here and there and finally ended up in an apartment on Hitt Street with George and Nancy and Marcia and who knows who else. This song isn’t in my book of essays either, but time sure is. Memory travels roads across years and places and highways west. One day you find ten years have got behind you. I spent so long looking for home.
Eddie Vedder & Nurat Fateh Ali Khan, “The Face of Love”
This first time I heard this piece of music was when I saw the 1995 film, Dead Man Walking. Right after, I bought the soundtrack, and fell in love with the artist Nurat Fateh Ali Khan, accompanied by guitarist Eddie Vedder. While my book takes place much earlier than that film, “The Face of Love” could have been in the background in my head as I wrote many of these essays, particularly the ones set in India.
One essay in particular takes place in the holy city of Varanasi. I didn’t write the incident I will tell you here, but I think often of a time when Paul and I were walking and walking in that city. We’d fallen out of love by then, but we didn’t so so yet. The heat was stifling, the streets packed with people. The sky was hot and blinding. We were both feeling lost in the streets, in the city, with each other. We trudged down crowded alleys, passed bicycles, taxis. Daily we saw so many others like ourselves. We talked about how they were all alike—the Westerners with their back packs, their maps, their pocket guides—but we failed to see ourselves in their heat-flushed faces. We talked about whether to buy food from a hawker’s stall, or whether to fill our water bottles from one of the pipes extending from a low, winding wall.
We walked, walked by that wall as it led high up. In the distance we could see a shrine or a temple of some sort, then a woman in a white sari walked toward us. In my memory her head was down, her face covered with the trailing cloth of the sari. She held one arm up to shield herself from the blinding sun and she stopped just as we rounded a curve in the path. She raised her eyes to us, the sari cloth falling away. Her hair was pale blonde and her eyes haunted, blue as sorrowful flowers. I remember sharing some water with her. She said she was from Sweden, but that hadn’t been home for a long while. I have been the priestess for a dozen years, she said, gesturing toward the far away temple.
“The Face of Love,” plays in my memory as I think about her story of all the years living alone.
Johnny Cash, “Hurt”
When I was a kid we’d visit Dwale, Kentucky, where my grandparents lived. My mother and I would stay with them a few days while my father visited his own people in the next county, a thing that just was in my childhood.
I remember a boxy television set in the living room and sitting up with my Granny and Pa, my Aunts Ruby and Ruth, and my mother, Pearlie, to watch The Johnny Cash Show. They were a God-fearing family, but when Cash was on, my aunts did a little sashaying from kitchen back to living room, cokes with ice with to shake in their glasses. My mother, who laughed very little, giggled, and the three of them exchanged looks as they whispered about how handsome he was, that man in black. Even my granny slapped her knee, her gold tooth flashing a smile in the TV screen light of those evenings.
I’ve loved Johnny Cash for years, especially his American series. I have every CD, and my favorite song is the one on this playlist, “Hurt.” A Nine Inch Nails song, it became the centerpiece of Cash’s last album, American IV: The Man Comes Around. It’s a song I’ve listen to on repeat as I drove the miles back to Kentucky, missing the aunts, the father, the mother, Dwale, all of them and that tiny town so long gone.
Joan Armatrading, “Show Some Emotion”
The first time I heard Joan Armatrading, I was falling in love with a mysterious young woman I’d seen at the weaving and sewing studio at Berea College, where I was working full time for June/July/August. By day I sewed and stuffed cloth animals—giraffes and cows and the like. By night, I lived alone on Center Street, in a three room apartment over a big white house owned by Mrs. McRae. By night it was a lonely time. I owned a turntable, but only two or three albums—Rolling Stones, Cat Stevens, Jefferson Airplane. I was afraid Mrs. McRae, the landlady, would tap a broom on the ceiling if I played those albums too loud, so I mostly sat on the couch that came with the apartment, reading books and listening to cars head down the night shift at the factory at the end of Center Street.
By day, when I took my lunch break, I sat outside on the campus lawn, beneath a canopy of trees, and I began to notice the mysterious woman. She had sandy brown hair, wore overalls and lace up boots which she took off as soon as she got to work. Her feet were slender, tough. She was a weaver in the studio, and she, too, sat outside at lunch, smoking cigarettes or blowing into her cupped hands, a thing I learned meant she was playing a tune. That summer meant her evening visits. She brought me Kahlua and cream. She played the Kalimba for me, and we took night walks through Berea with her dog, Thurber. Ours was a gentle love story, and when she brought me Joan Armatrading, we listened to “Show Some Emotion” volume turned up, a heart’s gift.
Joni Mitchell, “Blue”
Joni Mitchell has been a favorite of mine for many years. When I was a kid I’d play “Free Man in Paris” as loud as I could on my stereo and imagine all the places I’d go someday. I bought all her recordings. Clouds. Court and Spark. The Hissing of Summer Lawns. Don Juan’s Favorite Daughter. There was a beautiful melancholy in her voice that expressed something I wanted to say in poems and later stories and finally in essays. I never realized until I was in my late thirties that she was like me in an essential way. At twenty one, Mitchell gave birth to a child she named Kelly Dale Anderson, and placed her for adoption when she was six months old. She met her daughter, renamed Kilauren, in 1997. My own story was having a child when I was fifteen, then relinquishing him to adoption the day he was born. Like Mitchell, I met my son later in my life.
Once I knew that our stories had a connection via birth-giving and adoption, all the songs I’d listened to so many times made a different sense. “Little Green,” “River,” and especially “Blue” resonated with the empty place I’d always had at my center. I also realized that the deep hole in my heart has lent resonance to all I’ve ever written. Maybe, like Mitchell, there’s been a particular darkness to in my language, including the essays in I Could Name God in Twelve Ways. I can only hope that, as with the work of Joni Mitchell, I’ve also been able to shine a light on those dark places, acknowledging my demons, leaving light where darkness has been.
Steppenwolf, “Born to be Wild”
There was The Family Dog—a hangout for bikers in Richmond, Kentucky, where I used to go with Sharon Lawson. There was a Hell’s Angels funeral, also in Richmond, which attracted hundreds of bikers, shutting down the roads into town for a day. There was the showing of Easy Rider in a park while I was in Chania, in Greece—the whole thing in Greek, dubbed in English, with Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper gorgeous in their biker books. I even met my husband when he took my creative writing class twenty years back and wrote about wanting a Harley, “even if he had to be on a walker when he got one.” My history is somehow intertwined with a love of bikers, even of the literary variety. James Tate. “The Motorcyclists,” for example—a biker chicks monologue. It’s no wonder I love Steppenwolf and “Born to be Wild.”
This collection of essays has nary a motorcycle, but they’re full of highways and back roads. They’re full of my own wild longing.
Indigenous, “Things We Do”
My husband’s name is Johnny Johns, and when I met him he was the Council Chief for the Monacan Nation in Amherst, Virginia. The first months I knew him were filled with so many things. He took me to a reburial ceremony where he stood in the bottom a large grave and held his hands up high—receiving the cremains of his people after years of petitioning Virginia historical sites and museums to have those cremains returned. In the first months I knew him, he came to my bed, his hair smelling of tobacco and sage smoke for blessings. In the first months I knew him, he took me to the Monacan powwow where I saw the Grand Entry, saw for the first time, hoop dancers and fancy dancers, and the hand beaded regalia. And in those first months we went to Charlottesville, Virginia and stayed up till dawn, seeing the rock and roll, blues group Indigenous. In those first months I knew him, I fell in love for good. “The Things We Do” plays in my mind and heart from then and now.
Lana Del Ray, “Ride”
I Could Name God in Twelve Ways is about all kinds of travel—spiritual, emotional, geographical—and, as Lana Del Ray says in this song, “Ride,” sometimes I definitely felt I’d been travelin’ too long, trying too hard. The first essay in the collection is, after all, about my experiences with anxiety, which in its title is known as “Blue Glass.” I’ve felt like that often, blue, fragile, breakable and, again as Del Ray describes it, like I’m fuckin’ crazy, like there’s a war in my mind.
Anxiety, I’ve always thought, rides a thin line. It’s somewhere between so much joy you can hardly stand it and the bitter taste of sad. It’s somewhere between awe and being afraid, not always knowing of what. It’s like one time standing on the thin rock facing on a cliff and not knowing whether to climb back up or jump into the freezing cold creek water beneath me. These essays felt like that at times. That’s why I love this song. Just ride. Just ride.
Edith Piaf, “Non, je ne regrette rein”
This is a small song, a minute, delicious taste. I’ve always loved it, just as I love the taste of wine, the aftermath of love, the feel of the blue, blue ocean. As Piaf sings, No, I do not regret anything. It is paid, swept away, forgotten. Better yet, it is written in the pages of these essays.
Karen Salyer McElmurray is the author of Wanting Radiance: A Novel. Her memoir Surrendered Child: A Birth Mother’s Journey is a National Book Critics Circle Notable Book and winner of the AWP Award Series for Creative Nonfiction. She has received numerous awards, including the Annie Dillard Prize, the New Southerner Literary Prize, the Orison Anthology Award, a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and multiple notable mentions in Best American Essays. She is a visiting writer and lecturer at various programs and reading series across the United States.