Description
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 sections: 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.
Praise for Voice Lessons
Voice Lessons is a collection of urgent, short essays that are beautiful in their grit and tenderness. In this elegiac book, McElmurray reveals the way she is haunted by the past: by the sorrows, the joys, the people, and the places which have made her. In the process she illuminates what creates the stuff of life for all of us, using laser-focus precision about her own experiences to show us the universal condition. McElmurray’s voice is inimitable, innovative, powerful, and always a pleasure to behold.
—Silas House, author of Southernmost and Clay’s Quilt
Tug your voice up from the water, a friend told Karen Salyer McElmurray. Let it swell to bursting, a wicked and beautiful bloom. Here, the writer heeds that friend’s advice. In luminous prose, McElmurray’s voice rises up and carries with it the echoes and textures of the people and places she’s known—the murmurs of odd-turned women, the creak of old floorboards, the ringing of temple bells. More than anything, these lyrical essays bear witness to the necessity and transcendence of language itself—its extraordinary resplendence, balm, and light.
—Sonja Livingston, author of Ghostbread
Voice Lessons plumbs the complex and often painful negotiations of Appalachian women who spend their lives moving between worlds: between working-class Appalachia and upper-middle-class academia; between the worlds of mothers and daughters; and, most bittersweet of all, between the spheres of family and self. The beauty of McElmurray’s prose in tension with her unflinching look at difficult subjects leaves you after reading her with ripples through your heart.
—Ann Pancake author of Me and My Daddy Listen to Bob Marley
Voice Lessons is about translating experience into awareness, and that awareness into words. McElmurray transcends both the Southern rootedness of her upbringing, and the genre of writing about writing, without leaving either behind. During most of her young life, McElmurray sustains herself through manual labor. What we come to understand, in this powerful book, is that writing itself is manual labor. It is blood sport. Taking aim. Knowing when to wait, when to hold your breath, when to let go, and when to pull the trigger.
—Sue William Silverman, author, How to Survive Death and Other Inconveniences
