Wanting Radiance, by Karen Salyer McElmurray

Wanting Radiance is at once a murder mystery, and a love. It is a road trip novel focusing on a late-thirties something woman who reads cards in bars and restaurants to earn as she travels from town to town. It’s a novel about an imaginary Knoxville, Tennessee Museum of Freaks and Oddities called Willy’s Wonderama. And Wanting Radiance is also a story about love and about magic. 

Wanting Radiance started on a cool autumn night in the back of the holler off Phoenix Cove Road outside of Weaverville, North Carolina. There was a full moon, and I stood holding the egg in my hand as I recited exactly what the fortune teller had told me. Face of the moon, look down on me. Face of the moon, look down on him.

The egg was as rough and smooth as my relationship with George had always been as I rubbed my thumb across its shell. I held the small flashlight beneath my arm as I wrote his name on the egg, then knelt to bury it in the moist black earth. I didn’t quite believe in magic, and I didn’t quite believe in all the other rituals I’d undertaken in the months since my lover had left me. I’d lit candles at the shrine of the Holy Mother in the church in Asheville.

I’d prayed over and over. Bring him back to me, bring him back to me. Later, I told myself that the rituals didn’t work because I hadn’t believed hard enough. And the egg spell, in particular, didn’t work because the egg was to be new-laid, I’d used a leftover boiled one from the fridge. 

Of course, I didn’t know that Wanting Radiance began on that particular night, though my writing had always been laced with a kind of dubious magic. I was in the very early days of another novel in the year before George left, that one about a young man who is part of a fundamentalist family in Eastern Kentucky who falls in love with another boy.

The magic there was visions. It was a scene in which a dimpled girl floats above a praying congregation. Magic in that novel was pitted against zealous faith and an unforgiving God, just as, years later, magic in Wanting Radiance pitted against a woman being spiritually and emotionally lost, and lost to any faith in love. All my work, be it novels or stories, memoir or essays, has at its core that essential struggle with doubt and faith, with love and varieties of magic, and Wanting Radiance has been at last a kind of coming to terms with those questions. 

Six or seven years back, when I began to draft Wanting Radiance earnest, I started by going back in time to those North Carolina days of lost love.  Back then, I’d sought another kind of literal magic to bring George back. I’d heard about a fortune teller who lived just outside of Asheville, one who read the shadows in photographs, so I gathered up two or three George-photos and brought them along with me to the appointment I made with the fortune teller.

She lived in a smallish trailer up little rise near the Ingles grocery store, and I climbed up there, knocked on the door. A voice called for me to come on in, somewhere in the recesses of the trailer. Inside, there was a kitchen table piled with canned tomatoes, a long couch, and the same voice summoned me to the back room. Come on back here, young’un.

There I found a huge woman, I mean a huge woman, stretched out in a giant bed with a velvet headboard. She had me sit on the end of the bed while she told me about her own struggles. She’d been shot by a long-ago love and paralyzed from the waist down ever since, but that had given her the power of seeing, didn’t I know, and had I brought her any photographs?

And so, she looked at the pictures I’d brought along. There was one in particular that caught her attention. One of George standing in front of a stand of trees, the sun in his eyes. The fortune teller pointed to this shape in the branches of the trees, this shadow crossing George’s face. There was a lot I didn’t know about him, she said. Many things he’d never told me. Over time, this not-knowing proved to be quite true, about George, and more importantly, about myself.

As I dove deeper into Wanting Radiance people became characters. The bedridden reader of photographs became a character named Ruby Loving, who shape-shifted again and again as I came to know her. A great-aunt of mine who used to own a diner and garage set up shop in my novel at The Black Cat Diner. A family story about a gambling and drink loving man found its way into the story.

My love of Tarot cards became a gift I gave to a character named Ruby. My own many road trips and many part-time jobs transformed into the north-to-south-and-back-again world of Miracelle Loving. What I was experiencing was magic at its finest. Experiences I’d taken, took their own backroads and side streets. Those experiences opened unfamiliar doors and renamed themselves, becoming a plot I began to recognize and follow, like a deep red line on a road map.  

But the magic that meant the most lay inside my own heart, which I loaned for the years it took to write this novel to Miracelle, my central character. Miracelle, like myself, was a doubter. Like me, she doubted the power of love to last, or to even be real at all. Also like myself, she’d grown cynical about what was possible in this old world. Could staying put mean happiness? Was there such a thing as home? 

I like to think I owned at least a measure of magic by the end of those seven years of writing. I mean, of course, the magic of seeing the last page unfold. The magic of the final revision and the polishing of lines. But more than that, I like to think that all writing is a powerful transformation. Via the journey of writing—be it a long work like a novel or the pages of an essay—we confront some of our most difficult truths, our losses, our loves. The entire landscape of a work is about bringing to life, and perhaps we are brought to life along the journey.

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Karen writes both fiction and creative nonfiction. Her memoir, Surrendered Child, won the AWP Award Series for Creative Nonfiction and was listed as a “notable book” by the National Book Critics Circle. She is also the author of Motel of the Stars, Editor’s Pick from Oxford American, and a Lit Life Book of the Year. Strange Birds in the Tree of Heaven (University of Georgia Press), a novel that won the Lillie Chaffin Award for Appalachian Writing and, most recently, Walk Till the Dogs Get Mean, co-edited with Adrian Blevins, from Ohio University Press.

Her essays have won the Annie Dillard Prize, the New Southerner Prize, the Orison Magazine Anthology Award and have several times been Notable in Best American Essays. A collection of her essays is forthcoming from Iris Books.  Her newest book, a novel called Wanting Radiance, was released in April 2020 from University Press of Kentucky.

Find out more about Karen on her website https://www.karensalyermcelmurray.com/

Follow her on Twitter https://twitter.com/McelmurrayKaren

WANTING RADIANCE

Miracelle Loving’s world comes crashing down when her mother, Ruby, is murdered during a fortune-telling session gone wrong. Not that she had much of a stable world to lose in the first place; the free-spirited mother-daughter duo had never remained in one place for very long. Without the guidance of her mother, Miracelle grows up following the only path she knows, traveling from town to town, sometimes fortune-telling, picking up odd jobs to fill the time and escape the ever-present lostness she can’t seem to run far enough away from.

Uncertain of what she wants and, indeed, whether she wants anything or anyone at all, the now thirty-something-year-old finds herself working as a card reader in a Knoxville dive bar, selling fictions as futures, when she is confronted with her mother’s ghost voice promising to reveal the truth about her shadowy past. Desperate for answers, Miracelle sets out on a magical road trip unlike any other, in search of her own story and a father she’s never known.

Following snowy highways and backroads, Miracelle stumbles across a museum of oddities and a hole-in-the-road town called Radiant, ultimately wandering into the town of Smyte, where she begins waitressing at the Black Cat Diner. Here, she befriends card-playing has-been Russell Wallen, whom she joins for a series of nighttime adventures, long drives, and after-dark visits to a Holy Roller church. This mythical journey uncovers family secrets and forgotten truths, transforming a familiar story of love and betrayal to reveal the binding power of magic and memory.

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Category: On Writing