On Book Tours and the Silence Afterward
September 24, 2026
by Karen Salyer McElmurray, fiction and creative nonfiction faculty
In September, 2024, my essay collection—I Could Name God in Twelve Ways—appeared with University Press of Kentucky. I remember that day well. A postwoman left a big box of books on my doorstep and I wrangled it inside. I slid a knife through the layers of tape. I lifted a book out. Words are strange little critters, especially in their collaboration with each other or with us. Only one word best describes holding that book against my chest: Viola! A book had appeared at last. Voila! A kind of magic, after the years of making the essays, little by little, one by one. The book’s new pages smelled clean and papery.
The months before had been difficult; I’d been suffering depression and bad anxiety, precipitated by Meniere’s Syndrome, a malady that comes on, takes hold, then finally lets. At the same time, hearing disappears incrementally, leaving the world more silent. I’d feared this silence as I huddled in my blankets, feeling vulnerable. Vulnerable is a state I strive for in writing, but this vulnerability had teeth. It bit me and spit me back out and now here I was. I held the book next to me, held its magic scent. Maybe that helped summon me back to the world.
The world, of course, was the thing that came next, as it always does when a book comes out. There’d been the preamble to this coming out. The book is about travel, geographically, spiritually and metaphorically. As I waded through my anxiety, I’d written a pre-publication piece for Lit Hub about my wish to travel to a writing retreat in Wyoming. I’d compiled a personal playlist for the website Largehearted Boy, my favorite a song about travel to India and meeting, in Varanasi, a pale-haired British woman who lived in a hilltop temple. Each day on social media, I posted photographs of places I’d seen in the two years I’d traveled, from Ireland to France, from France to Greece, Greece to Australia, Australia to Thailand to India, and on to forever.
Ah, but now. Travel was to be much more specific. I planned, my editor planned, for reading series, universities, bookstores, festivals, kind readings in the back yards of friends. For a year and a half, I set forth, leaving as much of my anxiety behind as I could toss out along the roadsides. I did readings in Alabama. In Kentucky. In North Carolina. In South Carolina, West Virginia, Tennessee, Georgia, Pennsylvania, South Dakota. I read to big audiences, to small audiences. I talked and talked. The silence I needed was in between. I experienced it in my car as I drove without the radio, the hum of highways in my growing-deaf ears. The silence was a motel with a television turned low as I tried to sleep. Silence was the space between someone introducing me and that walk to a podium, fear stuffed inside the pockets of my black jeans.
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To write pieces about my new book, I pushed through the fibrous, black web in my brain and described traveling to what my mother once called “all those foreign countries.” I made those countries real again, maybe more real than they’d been as I hitchhiked and rode buses and trains. I wrote the awe of the Taj Mahal. The amazement of the muddy Ganges. I wrote my long wish for a home inside myself, one I’d yet to truly find. As I found these words, I tossed the black dog that often followed me a great, big stick, and it ran off into the woods to find it, gnawing and leaving me alone awhile. Even through the veil of despair, words came. Memories of places and times settled in my fingers and I typed and typed and typed. I remembered who I was, at least a part of me. I was writing to sell my books, but I was writing when I had been silent for so long. I was grateful
Much as I’d been when I traveled all those countries, I became a roadie again. I became a performer of words. Preparation for events meant task after task. It meant notes for a reading or outlines for class visits. Flying and airport pickups meant a few days of talking, a lot. Questions about what I’d read. Questions about process. Answers from a mouth gone dry with more answers. Readings themselves summoned what I’ll call a sustained upness—an enthusiasm I surely had in spades about what it means to have a book out there, to have it received well by an audience. And because my writing is deeply personal, there’s that. There’s telling and retelling as I read of the long ending of a long relationship that accompanied my travels. There’s telling that story or other stories of my life, of my private heart. All of it brings forth a deep weariness. There’s bone deep weary, and there are other kinds of weary. There’s the weariness of hearing someone be moved by experiences similar to their own. There’s the weary of not knowing what to say, or trying to say, or saying, over and over. There’s the weary of meaning it, every single time. It is weary, that kind of absolutely essential caring.
The silence that came with these experiences of public performance was born of exhaustion. When I came back home to my husband and my dog after several days of an event, I curled up on the coach and slept, being me and needing a week sometimes to recover. I petted the dog, walked her block after block looking for one beautiful thing, a flower, a slant of sunlight to sooth my fatigue. I craved light. I craved quiet in the room and in the mind. I needed to find the space inside from which words come. Believing that such a space exists opens in us the art we all make via words, paint, clay, music. Any visions. Our visions.
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In his The Gift, Lewis Hyde describes the creation and distribution of art, which he sees as a form of gift exchange. “In the essential commerce of art,” he writes, “a gift is carried by the work from the artist to the audience . . . where there is no gift, there is no art.” Gift-giving, he goes on, establishes relationship, which makes gift exchange, the lending of art to the public, an essentially “erotic commerce,” where the erotic is “the principle of attraction, union, involvement.” Basically, making and lending (a word I choose deliberately) what we make as art to the public world is an exchange that is a deeply living. We living beings lend our work to living beings.
In my workshops I talk about something called “heartwood.” For me, this is the deepest thing we find and bring to life as we write. The heart. I don’t necessarily mean emotions evoked by a piece nor experienced by the writer. I mean something closer to the word essence. As a poet friend said, heartwood is the center of the wood, its hardest part. Writer Charles Baxter calls these deepest intentions these things: source; subterranean; mind-haunting; hidden-story possibilities; real story; derailment of ordinary life; impulse and dream; wellsprings; source of power. Some of the questions that heartwood might ask: What are the layers of this story, that essay, of the poem? How do we peel them back, like an onion-skin, like the petals of a flower, to find the bulb, the bud, the core? Does that core hurt? Does it sing? Does the piece echo inside us, and how? Does it create a vacuum, or an absence? What does it tell, long after the pages are read and the work is laid aside?
A tall order. And certainly an order that means we must be silent. We must cultivate a listening self, one capable of listening to what the work itself wants as we approach the page with our words. I believe this with all of me. We must be capable of resting deeply. We must care for ourselves. We must find enough silence to be able to translate our experiences, be they despair or joy or some vision that is made of both. We must honor what words we receive, and trust that giving them back to the world, even that world we are now in, will mean something to our listeners. That something, of course, could be anything at all. Rage or willingness or love or . . . I stop my sentence there. Most days I hold my empty hands and hope quiet lands there, that I know how to receive it.
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. Her nonfiction work has been three times Notable in Best American Essays, several times a Pushcart nominee, and a recipient of the Annie Dillard Award for the Essay, the New Southerner Award and the Orison Anthology Award for Creative Nonfiction. She has co-edited, with poet Adrian Blevins, an essay collection called Walk till the Dogs Get Mean. Wanting Radiance, a novel, was released in April 2020 from University Press of Kentucky. Her essay collection Voice Lessons was published with Iris Press. McElmurray teaches for the Sena Jeter Naslund-Karen Mann Graduate School of Writing at Spalding Univeristy. Her website is: https://www.karensalyermcelmurray.com