English professor writes award-winning memoir

Georgia College & State University English professor Karen Salyer McElmurray took time Friday, Jan. 21 to read from her award-winning memoir “Surre-ndered Child: A Birth Mother’s Journey” in the Arts & Sciences Auditorium.

“Surrendered Child” won the 2003 Associated Writing Program Award for Creative Nonfiction. The memoir recounts the events that lead a 16-year-old McElmurray to give up her child and the years of uncertainty following the adoption.

McElmurray said the question she is asked most often is how she could put her own child up for adoption.

“Basically, there is no answer. My world was chaos at the time,” said McElmurray. “[The memoir] is a story not just of myself as a mother who surrendered her child. It’s also very much about my own mother.”

McElmurray’s mother suffered from obsessive compulsive disorder, a disease that she said was not discussed where she grew up in eastern Kentucky.

McElmurray compared her childhood to growing up in a prison, and one obstacle she faced in writing the memoir was how to tell the truth without hurting anyone. She said the challenge was “not just putting teeth on the truth, but also putting a gentle hand.”

McElmurray said that a search for the truth is not about blaming her mother, but trying to understand her.

“With her limitations she’s also a human being with her own experiences that made her what she is,” McElmurray said.

The memoir was a lifetime in the making, but took only three years to write, a much shorter time period than McElmurray’s first novel, “Strange Birds in the Tree of Heaven.” She admitted there was an urgency to write “Surrendered Child.”

“It wasn’t a question of wanting to [write the memoir], but of having to look at that thing that happened in my life,” she said. “It was an emotional necessity.”

In her 30s, McElmurray began to have body memories, a condition where the human body manifests signs of memories the mind has repressed. She began to wake up with the feeling of contractions and labor pains around the date she gave birth to her child.

After moving to her first job, she would receive phone calls and the callers would hang up when she answered. Although the calls where probably wrong numbers, she could not help but wonder, “What if it was my son trying to reach me?”

On Thanksgiving Day, 2001, McElmurray received an e-mail from her son’s girlfriend. The girlfriend was looking for writings by Kentucky women and found a Web page that listed McElmurray’s first novel. The Web page contained a link to “Surrendered Child” which was supposed to be released in 2001. Her son’s girlfriend read an excerpt from the memoir that included a letter from social services with no identifying information about McElmurray’s son. However, McElmurray said there were too many similarities for it to just be a coincidence.

“She found my picture and we [McElmurray and her son] look so much alike,” said McElmurray. She was reunited with her son later that year.

McElmurray said the memoir is more than just her story. It is a story about pain and healing, a story that anyone can relate to.

“I want people to understand that sometimes it’s necessary to go to the depths of our souls, even if it hurts, to reach healing.”

Posted by Colonnade Archives on Feb 4 2005. Filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry