“I COULD NAME GOD IN TWELVE WAYS” by Karen Salyer McElmurray (The University Press of Kentucky, 184 pages, $26).
Award-winning writer Karen Salyer McElmurray’s collection of essays, “I Could Name God in Twelve Ways,” 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.
The author, whose previous books include “Wanting Radiance” and the 2006 memoir, “Surrendered Child,” pulls details from the disparate threads of her life to create associative, nonlinear meditations on larger themes. At one point toward the end of the book, she cites Patricia Hampl on the subject of writing memory: “The authority of memory is a personal confirmation of selfhood. To write one’s life is to live it twice, and the second living is both spiritual and historical.”
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.
The overarching theme of the book is a longing for spiritual connection. While this longing launches McElmurray across the world to the temples of Nepal, the spirit houses of Thailand and the deserts of India, its seeds were planted in her girlhood attending a Baptist church in Kentucky, where she nursed big questions: