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AbstractHistoryArchive Description
'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.
Notes
-
Dedication: For Dominic
Contents
-
Yellow City,
selected work
essay
'Published in The Atlas Review Chapbook Series, this essay chronicles the author's return to Lisbon years after experiencing a violent event and her struggle to piece together memories and elusive facts.'
(Publication summary)
- Blueberries, single work prose (p. 41-60)
- The Museum of Rape, single work prose (p. 61-76)
- Satellite, single work prose (p. 77-96)
- Allen Ginsberg, single work prose (p. 97-106)
- Unwed Teen Mum Mary, single work prose (p. 107-114)
- Holidays with Men, single work prose (p. 115-129)
- You Dirty Phony Saint and Martyr, single work prose (p. 129-138)
- Friendship between Women, single work prose (p. 139-142)
- The Literature of Sadness, single work prose (p. 143-156)
- Turning Thirty, single work prose (p. 157-168)
- Houses, single work prose (p. 169-192)
- Note to Unlived Time, single work prose (p. 193-210)
- Portrait of the Writer as Worker, single work prose (p. 211-220)
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Antimemoir as in Fuck You (as in Fuck Me),
single work
essay
'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)
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Works about this Work
-
What I’m Reading
2021
single work
column
— Appears in: Meanjin Online 2021; -
Best Books of 2020 #1
2020
single work
review
— Appears in: The Saturday Paper , 19 December - 22 January 2020;
— Review of Blueberries 2020 selected work prose -
Victoria Nugent Reviews Blueberries by Ellena Savage
2020
single work
review
— Appears in: Mascara Literary Review , August no. 25 2020;
— Review of Blueberries 2020 selected work prose'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)
-
y
At Home with Ellena Savage
Astrid Edwards
(interviewer),
Melbourne
:
Bad Producer Productions
,
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)
-
Capital Writes White
2020
single work
column
— Appears in: Overland [Online] , May 2020;'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)
-
Ellena Savage : Blueberries
2020
single work
review
— Appears in: The Saturday Paper , 28 March - 3 April 2020;
— Review of Blueberries 2020 selected work prose'“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)
-
Books Roundup : Shirl, Blueberries, The Wandering
2020
single work
review
— Appears in: Kill Your Darlings [Online] , March 2020;
— Review of Shirl 2020 selected work short story ; Blueberries 2020 selected work prose -
Blueberries by Ellena Savage
2020
single work
review
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , April no. 420 2020;
— Review of Blueberries 2020 selected work prose'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)
-
Against the Grain
2020
single work
review
— Appears in: The Weekend Australian , 7 March 2020; (p. 20)
— Review of Blueberries 2020 selected work proseEllena Savage’s outstanding debut book calls on readers to lift their game, writes Geordie Williamson.
-
Victoria Nugent Reviews Blueberries by Ellena Savage
2020
single work
review
— Appears in: Mascara Literary Review , August no. 25 2020;
— Review of Blueberries 2020 selected work prose'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)
-
The Personal Essay Is Dead, Long Live the Personal Essay
2020
single work
essay
— Appears in: Kill Your Darlings [Online] , March 2020;'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.'
-
Does Trauma Need a Witness?
2020
single work
essay
— Appears in: Sydney Review of Books , April 2020;'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)
-
Capital Writes White
2020
single work
column
— Appears in: Overland [Online] , May 2020;'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)
-
y
At Home with Ellena Savage
Astrid Edwards
(interviewer),
Melbourne
:
Bad Producer Productions
,
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)
-
What I’m Reading
2021
single work
column
— Appears in: Meanjin Online 2021;
Awards
- 2021 longlisted The Stella Prize
- 2021 shortlisted APA Book Design Awards — Best Designed Autobiography / Biography / Memoir designed by Jessica Horrocks
- 2021 shortlisted Victorian Premier's Literary Awards — The Nettie Palmer Prize for Non-Fiction
- 2018 shortlisted PRH Australia Literary Prize
- 2017 longlisted Kill Your Darlings Awards — The KYD Unpublished Manuscript Award