Karen Salyer McElmurray
The nonprofit Pat Conroy Literary Center will host an evening with award-winning writer Karen Salyer McElmurray, author of the essay collection I Could Name God in Twelve Ways and the novel Wanting Radiance, on Friday, January 24, at 5:00 p.m., at the Conroy Center (601 Bladen St., Beaufort). Sponsored in part by WayWord Books, this author event is free and open to the public. Books will be available for sale and signing. Seating is limited; please call in advance to reserve: 843-379-7025.
McElmurray will also lead a writing workshop, Endings and Beginnings, on Saturday, January 25, beginning at 9:30 a.m. The workshop is limited to 12 participants, $60/person. Advance registration required: https://endingsandbeginningsworkshop.eventbrite.com
About the Writing Workshop: Endings and Beginnings
Graham Greene once said, “a story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.” This arbitrariness—catching hold of an idea or a dream or a moment of insight—is certainly part of the sheer magic of writing. Deciding how to start a story and how to end it involves careful translation of our original moments of insight. Beginnings and endings become careful revision once we capture the arbitrary experience we begin with. This workshop will look at some examples of openings and endings from essays and longer works of memoir. We will discuss, and we will also begin work on writing some openings of our own.
About McElmurray’s Memoir I Could Name God in Twelve Ways
“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
“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
About McElmurray’s Novel Wanting Radiance
“A poetic tale of a daughter’s quiet exploration of her past and how it pushes her forward.” —The Rumpus
“An incantatory Appalachian gothic tale of love, murder, and restless souls, populated with unforgettable flesh-and-blood characters . . . [a] masterpiece.” —Amy Greene, national bestselling author
About The Author
Karen Salyer McElmurray’s Surrendered Child: A Birth Mother’s Journey, was an AWP Award Winner for Creative Nonfiction. Her novels are The Motel of the Stars, Editor’s Pick by Oxford American, and Strange Birds in the Tree of Heaven, winner of the Chaffin Award for Appalachian Writing. As a fiction writer, she is the recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Kentucky Foundation for Women and the North Carolina Arts Council. Her work in nonfiction has been a recipient of the Annie Dillard Award for the Essay, the New Southerner Award, the Orison Anthology Award for Creative Nonfiction and, most recently, the LitSouth Award. She has co-edited, with poet Adrian Blevins, an essay collection called Walk till the Dogs Get Mean. Wanting Radiance, a novel, and Voice Lessons, a short collection of lyric essays, came out in 2021. A new essay collection, I Could Name God in Twelve Ways came out in September 2024 from University Press of Kentucky.
Learn more about the nonprofit Pat Conroy Literary Center at www.patconroyliterarycenter.org.
