By Jacob Tone, Contributing Writer
The Gettysburg College English Department welcomed celebrated author Karen McElmurray for a guest lecture on Tuesday, Oct. 28, 2025, at 4 p.m., which sought to draw students and faculty to explore the intersections of travel, spirituality, and creative nonfiction.
Professor of English Catherine Rhett highlighted McElmurray’s writing awards, including the AWP award for her memoir “Surrendered Child,” and the Chaffin Award for Appalachian Writing for her novel “Strange Birds in the Tree of Heaven.” Her essays have also won the Annie Dillard Prize and the New Southerner Prize. Rhett praised McElmurray’s formal innovations and emotional depth, noting the author’s influence on her own teaching and creative work.
In her lecture, McElmurray discussed her newest book, “I Could Name God in 12 Ways.” It is a collection of essays that examines the spiritual and emotional journeys she experienced through travel, memory and reflection. Drawing on six-month hitchhiking adventures and extensive trips to places such as Varanasi, Thailand, Greece and Crete, McElmurray explained that her travels informed her exploration of forgiveness, personal growth and the complexities of women’s lives.
She mentioned Italo Calvino’s “Invisible Cities” and shared her experiences in Varanasi, Greece and Australia, emphasizing that travel can be both a literal and spiritual journey. McElmurray expressed support for writers who focus on the darker elements of life, as well as questions and dreams as part of the creative process.
McElmurray emphasized the necessity of being emotionally authentic in one’s writing and read parts from her essays which described her meetings with her mother in Eastern Kentucky, and her grandmother, Fanny Ellen and the holy places of Crete. She then presented her idea that speculative creative nonfiction could help one to combine real experience and imagination in a way that the characters’ inner and outer journeys are revealed.
McElmurray concluded the program by speaking about the difficulties and benefits of writing about women’s lives, aging and family ties. She argued that it is important that characters’ paths have dreams and questions, and she urged the students to think about the emotional and spiritual aspects of their literary creations.
