Where's the Madness?

Dog days have descended on the campus of the Hindman Settlement School, and Karen Salyer McElmurray is in an air-conditioned classroom furiously writing on the marker board. The word: transcendence. "This is what we want," she tells her students here at the 2009 Appalachian Writers Workshop, held annually in Knott County, Kentucky. She underlines it to further emphasize its gravity.

I am on the edge of my seat, scribbling notes in my moleskin notebook, but my attention remains on the marker board, on that word. Transcendence. On Karen and her square glasses, on the single lock of her brown hair that she has dyed blue.

She is in her element here in the classroom, mad with a desire to live, to create art not just for art's sake, but for salvation's sake as well. Her students—many of whom are regular workshop attendees and can therefore be quite jaded—are enraptured. Her passion is contagious, and she is the talk of the week. Students from other genres show up to audit the class. Even some of her fellow faculty members turn up, notebook and pen in hand, students once again.

In our individual conference later that week she tells me that her goal is to "use language as a vehicle for spirit." She is unequivocal on this point—that art can be a means of spiritual salvation.

I leave Hindman inspired, yet worried that I will lose touch with this concept of transcendence. But it has remained, due in no small part to Karen's nurturing emails and phone calls. Her commitment to my work, it turns out, was not restricted to that classroom on the forks of Troublesome Creek.

Rosanne Cash, in her recent memoir Composed, writes of sharing new songs with fellow songwriter John Stewart. "If he thought it was too 'perfect,' which was anathema to him, he would say, over and over, 'But where's the MADNESS Rose?'"

This, then, is the question that Karen often poses for her students. Sometimes with a comment, other times with a raised eyebrow. "This is what we want," she reminds us. And when I approach my writing desk each day I see that word—transcendence—scribbled in green on a marker board, underlined.