'BLUEBERRIES could be described as a collection of essays, the closest term available for a book that resists classification: a blend of personal essay, polemic, prose poetry, true-crime journalism and confession that considers a fragmented life, reflecting on what it means to be a woman, a body, an artist. It is both a memoir and an interrogation of memoir. It is a new horizon in storytelling.
'In crystalline prose, Savage explores the essential questions of the examined life: what is it to desire? What is it to accommodate oneself to the world? And at what cost?'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
(Publication summary)
'Stones underfoot; they're slope-faced, many thousands of them, ancient as the moon. They crunch as she hobbles over them from the water's edge towards the castle. She should have worn her runners. Up ahead, Kronborg - Elsinore, for today - is as vast and regal as any castle. The scene is so familiar, though how should it be? It's her first time in Denmark.' (Introduction)
'“Writing in the first person is writing that admits that experience is always truncated,” writes Ellena Savage. The Melbourne-bred, Athens-based writer is powerfully self-aware in her debut essay collection, which marries cultural criticism with personal experience to both inhabit and deconstruct the memoir form.' (Introduction)
'The writerly ‘I’ is notoriously fraught and political in non-fiction writing. What are the implications of writing from a biased and limited perspective (as all of us inevitably do)? How to get around – or work within – the constraints of the personal? These questions are ethical ones but also ones of craft. Many memoirists and essayists have grappled explicitly with them on the page.' (Introduction)
Ellena Savage’s outstanding debut book calls on readers to lift their game, writes Geordie Williamson.
'Memoir, poetry, probing essay-style musings and competing inner voices exist side-by-side in Ellena Savage’s Blueberries, a bold and incisive collection of experimental non-fiction.' (Introduction)
'In the wake of the mid-2010s ‘personal essay boom’, writers are shaping and stretching the personal essay form to share stories that refuse a traditional telling.'
'I am sitting in a café in North Melbourne adjacent to the hospital. It’s filled with older people anticipating or denying or recovering from the usual bodily attrition, sporty-looking medical staff with lanyards drinking long blacks, and people on break from day-programs in street clothes trying to blend in. These are people with enough money to sit in a café and eat something and to dawdle while doing it, not worried about = being asked to leave. A very limited inner-city melting pot, in other words, of which I, on my laptop typing this essay, am a part.' (Introduction)
'In 1956, describing the process of artistic creation, the French writer and dramatist Henry de Montherlant wrote that le bonheur écrit à l’encre blanche sur des pages blanches: ‘happiness writes in white ink on a white page.’ When we attempt to capture the visceral nature of happiness in words, it doesn’t show up.' (Introduction)
At Home with Ellena Savage
Astrid Edwards
(interviewer),
2020
19698944
2020
single work
podcast
interview
'Ellena Savage is an author and academic. Her work is published in literary journals and anthologies around the world, including Paris Review Daily, Sydney Review of Books, Choice Words and Lifted Brow. Blueberries is her first collection.
'Ellena is the recipient of several grants and prizes, including the 2019–21 Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship.' (Introduction)
