A memoir-in-essays,
Voice Lessons
is one woman from Appalachia's remembrance of childhood and of education, both formal and personal. McElmurray enters the world of writing and teaching, all the while coming to understand her deeply troubled mother. The essays are arranged in four major sections: early years and experiences of faith; the work of hands and the work of classrooms, paralleling her mother's diagnosis of Alzheimer's; writing and academia and the mother, disappearing into a land of forgetting. Finally, a fourth section relays both her mother's death and the author's acceptance of her own voice. Silas House writes that "McElmurray's voice is inimitable, innovative, powerful, and always a pleasure to behold."