McElmurray teaches us how to reckon and ravel, how to unpack secrets, abandon maps, and learn from everything, even vertigo, even a global pandemic. This book is for everyone who has ever felt vulnerable in this world, which is to say, everyone.
~Julie Marie Wade, author of Otherwise: Essays and Just an Ordinary Woman Breathing
'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.
~James Tate Hill, author of Blind Man's Bluff: A Memoir
A psychedelic dreamworld metaphysical journey and spellbinding story of a life.
~Cat Pleska, author of Riding on Comets: A Memoir
Lyrical and radically fearless stories about suffering and revelations of beauty. You'll be spellbound in the current of a masterful storyteller.
~Annie Woodford, author of Where You Come from Is Gone: Poems
The essays in this stunning collection are elegiac, urgent, vulnerable—full of loss and longing. Although the narrative is rooted in Kentucky, the scope is global as the narrator travels literally and metaphorically toward love and away from the ghosts of the past.
~Sue William Silverman, author of Acetylene Torch Songs: Writing True Stories to Ignite the Soul
A great pleasure to read. These lyrical essays explore what it means to leave a place where one has deep familial roots and to travel far and wide, geographically and culturally, without ever escaping the pull of home and its mysteries, richness, and sadness.
~Zoe Zolbrod, author of The Telling: A Memoir
These lyrical sojourns soar through space and time—revisiting hollows, canyons, and holy rivers of the past—and holding them up to the light. McElmurray's prose traverses terrain both haunted and lush, faraway and deeply familiar, while surveying the boundaries of longing, possibility, and the physical and spiritual manifestations of home. A stunning collection of essays from a master of the form.
~Sonja Livingston, author of Ghostbread
In thirteen essays spanning forty years, McElmurray leads us in both travel and homegoing, moving backward and forward in time, memory, despair, discovery, and hard truths. These brutally honest essays show us the writer (poet and memoirist), the seeker, the wounded healer, the granddaughter of Appalachian coal miners, the raw truth-teller, the lost wanderer. Hold this book, this baker's dozen of lifesaving travels, close to your heart, for it is the heart's pure voice rising from the wilderness.
~Southern Literary Review
Pathos and peace, repression and redemption, mortality and memory, are just some of the concepts Karen Salyer McElmurray explores in her essays. With grace and good will, she delivers on her promise to name God in twelve ways, inspiring readers to engage in a courageous search of their own.
~Hoptown Chronicle
Award-winning writer Karen Salyer McElmurray's collection of essays is many things at once: memoir, travelogue and prayer. Taking inspiration from each of these forms and incorporating them into her singular lyrical prose, McElmurray reflects on her upbringing in rural Kentucky, her adventurous youth traveling the world and her career as a writer and professor.... McElmurray lives twice in this collection, honoring her coming of age as a woman traveling the world and weaving that story into her current process as an established writer and teacher battling present-day challenges of health, grief and aging. Her reflections are personal and also about the craft of writing itself. I Could Name God in Twelve Ways is a gripping collection of braided lyric essays — but more than that, it's a book-length love letter to the art of memoir....a testament to the power of vulnerability — in both walking one's path and retracing one's steps to tell the story.
~Chattanooga Times Free Press
In every essay, McElmurray's sentences plunge below the surface, sink in the mud, rise to the top, sometimes floating peacefully after being buffeted about by rough currents. Always a teacher, she challenges readers to create their own accounts of a certain slant of light just before dawn.... Pathos and peace, repression and redemption, mortality and memory, are just some of the concepts Karen Salyer McElmurray explores in her essays. With grace and good will, she delivers on her promise to name God in twelve ways, inspiring readers to engage in a courageous search of their own.
~Constance Alexander, Northern Kentucky Tribune