Karen McElmurray’s Haunting Book, “Wanting Radiance” Starts with the Murder of a Fortune Teller
Podcast: Download (Duration: 33:51 — 31.2MB)
In this episode 139, we visit with Karen McElmurray, author of “Wanting Radiance.”
Crystal Wilkinson, author of “The Birds of Opulence,” says “This book is brimming with haints and lives full of magic, and Karen McElmurray’s storytelling is the most haunting of all.”
Published by University Press of Kentucky, this is a story of fortune-telling, murder, passion and love lost and finally found.
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Praise for the book:
“Reading Wanting Radiance is like inhabiting the best country music song you’ve ever heard— the high lonesome, heartbroken, ‘wanting and not-having’ sort of song.”—Josephine Humphreys, author of Nowhere Else on Earth, winner of the Southern Book Award
“An incantatory Appalachian gothic tale of love, murder, and restless souls, populated with unforgettable flesh-and-blood characters. Wanting Radiance is nothing less than a literary masterpiece.”—Amy Greene, author of Bloodroot and Long Man
About the Author:
Karen Salyer McElmurray is on the faculty at West Virginia Wesleyan’s Low-Residency MFA Program. She is originally from the mountains of Eastern Kentucky. She attended Berea College, where she studied literature and philosophy. She later received an MFA from the University of Virginia and a doctorate in creative writing and American Literature from the University of Georgia. She has been Writer-in-Residence at Berry College, Hollins University, Gettysburg College, and The University of South Dakota. Her work in fiction has received support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Kentucky Foundation for Women, and the North Carolina Arts Council. In addition to her work as a writer and teacher, McElmurray has worked as a landscaper, a cook, a maid, and a deck hand.
McElmurray’s debut novel, Strange Birds in the Tree of Heaven, was published in 1999 by Hill Street Press and received the 2001 Thomas and Lillie D. Chaffin Award for Appalachian Writing. The story of the Wallen family and set in the coal fields of Eastern Kentucky, the novel attempts portray both the “traditional” Appalachia that readers will no doubt recognize–revivals and haints and moonshine–and also an Appalachia that is as honest as it is sometimes dark and unrelenting. While it is a novel of both light and dark, Carrie Brown, in a review in the January 30, 2000, Chicago Tribune, says that it is “also a story about love, about how salvation can be located…in the human experience of love.” The novel was a June, 2005, Kentucky Educational Television Book Club Selection.
Strange Birds was followed by the novel The Motel of the Stars, from Sarabande Books (2008). Publisher’s Weekly calls Motel a story filled with questions, passion and despair, and as the intertwining flashbacks roll out, the two characters move ever closer to the 26,000-year cycle-ending Harmonic Convergence of December 24, 2012—after which, Mayan prophesy suggests, the world will be changed unalterably.
Her memoir, Surrendered Child: a Birth Mother’s Journey, won the 2003 Associated Writing Program Award for Creative Nonfiction. The book was published by University of Georgia Press received strong praise. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution says that “McElmurray has composed a moving meditation on loss and memory and the rendering of truth and story” while Nashville Scene says that “it’s a testament to McElmurray’s talent that she can send her reader’s minds wandering across cultures and musing such paradoxes while keeping her story firmly planted in the bitter ground of Kentucky coal country.” The memoir was a 2004 National Book Critics Circle Notable Book. McElmurray has also co-edited, with poet Adrian Blevins, an anthology called Walk till the Dogs Get Mean: Meditations on the Forbidden from Contemporary Appalachia (2015, from Ohio University Press). Other work in nonfiction has been awarded the Annie Dillard Award, the New Southerner Award, and the Orison Anthology
Her latest novel is Wanting Radiance, released April 2020 from University Press of Kentucky.
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