Strange Birds, Too: A Reflection on the Work of Karen Salyer McElmurray

Rather than offer a critical assessment of Karen McElmurray's writing, I beg the indulgence of sharing my experience of reading her writing, particularly her novel Strange Birds in the Tree of Heaven. I am moved so profoundly by this novel, I find I cannot speak about it in objective terms. The story of Ruth Blue Wallen, her doom-driven father, Tobias, her husband, Earl, and their uncertain son, Andrew, is wholly compelling, sad, and hopeful. It is a story that blurs the different kinds of perception into a single vision, a composite of imagery and dream, memory and hallucination, revelation and its opposite. Strange Birds surely puts me in mind of its Modernist forbears, namely, Faulkner and Virginia Woolf, but it also brings to mind the Romantics, especially, Wordsworth and his "spots of time," his interest in the forces which shape and provoke the human imagination, for Ruth and Earl—the characters of whom we see the most—are driven by the force of unyielding and tireless imagination.

The very design of this novel reveals its author's authority: it is not plot-driven; it is a work of fiction forged from the fire of seeking souls. Whereas the process of many novels is to unwind a spool of events, Strange Birds conveys its effects by an accumulation of impressions, a series of stark and sudden images which strike us with their sudden stillness and, simultaneously, with the very haunting resonance of that stillness. From such a perspective and sensibility, the world of this novel is less told; instead, the world is felt. And it is felt in an amazing range of context—from secret back-road trysts and bawdy dancehalls to mountain hollows pinched for light, from shacks to churches, between the neon light of radio and the under-shadow of the coal industry, from world war to self-war, from the searing blaze of blasphemy to something very near redemption. The stakes in Karen McElmurray's world are high.

What is more, each of the novel's three narrators hears voices, a voice inside themselves, strangely familiar and prophetic at once. Each episodic chapter, therefore, feels listened to, the sound of a voice listening over and over to itself. My experience reading this novel brought forth another voice as well, my own, for I found I could not help but find my own strange place in Strange Birds. And so my report from that domain.

Soon after graduating from college I found myself back home where I wanted to be, working part-time on a dairy farm. It was a small operation, 12 stanchions, 24 cows. One morning, after cleaning up the barn, I walked out to the pasture with the farmer, Logan Spoonamore. It was middle spring; the trees were just showing leaves. By this point, all of the cows had wandered up the hillside; the field of green was immaculate around them. Mr. Spoonamore looked for a moment and softly said, "There's nothing prettier than a bunch of Holstein cows laying up on a hillside in the spring." It was a small comment, but I've always remembered it because it was an aesthetic observation, a judgment, and it has always struck me as a complex assessment. Mr. Spoonamore's judgment was of the entire composition, of all the elements of the scene in resonant relation with each other, complimenting each other, joining each other to make a claim for beauty. I'd just spent four years in college learning about such things, and here was a pleasure Mr. Spoonamore had known and contemplated all of his life.

I've thought about this subject considerably, and have concluded one thing I'd like young people to learn in school is how to determine if something is beautiful. The knowledge of beauty—the ability to make a sound aesthetic judgment—has social and moral implications. If we fail to see the beauty of a hillside, for example, if we fail to be moved by natural beauty, then we will have little compunction to preserve its source. Similarly...