Ellena Savage

'I mean who cares about opinions, gossip, whatever, when bodies are so vulnerable, in search only of love and breath.' The body frequently escapes her, but is always very much present in these compellingly vivid, clear-eyed essays on an embodied self in flight through the world, from the brilliant young writer Ellena Savage. In Portuguese police stations and Portland college campuses, in suburban Melbourne libraries and wintry Berlin apartments, Savage shows bodies in pain and in love, bodies at work and at rest. She circles back to scenes of crimes or near-crimes, to lovers or near-lovers, to turn over the stones, re-read the paperwork, check the deeds, approach from another angle altogether. These essays traverse cities and spaces, bodies and histories, moving through forms and modes to find a closer kind of truth. Blueberriesis ripe with acid, promise, and sweetness.

Essays Concerning Understanding

Blueberries

kite

I was paralysed by the truth of my not being able to be any of the people I longed to be. I wasn’t grown enough to untangle my desires from my reality. If being grown is desirable at all.

lily lily 

But then again, what is an interior life if not a chorus of invisible ghosts shouting at one another: parents and siblings and friends and lovers and teachers and enemies and masters and every novel newspaper celebrity and the dead, all of the dead. What is history if not a stunted, haunted conversation between the living and the dead? Inviting the dead into the world of the living is finding a way to be at home in the body, which is not only a body made of skin and bones. A body that exists only because it exists in relation to the deceased bodies that have created it.

Rebecca Lum

If anything of me lives on after I am dead, I hope it will not be what I failed to get done. When I die, when it happens, please throw my MacBook into the ocean.

All useless, according to the common sense of utility, yet all of them inspiring in me curiosity and the simplest delight. Delight in the fact that beautiful things made by people forty years ago sit around, bringing pleasure to a stranger in the now. It reminds of my duty, everyone's duty, to the future. My friends' kids will need in twenty years to find crap like this at the markets so that they can feel held by the hands of past people's future and not feel totally alone.

Why write? Especially about something as trivial as the particularities of one's own creature thoughts, habits or obsessions? My timeline fills with these endless debates' about what the hell a person is now, about how 'self-representation' fares in the internet age. Is the personal essay a corrupt form? (Possibly.) Does social media promote narcissistic behaviour? (I suppose.) Is 'self-care' a neoliberal scam promoting individualistic coping strategies in the absence of broader social obligations or the possibility of radical structural change? (Well, yes, I say to myselr a slip into my fourth late-night bath of the week, thinking about my next semester of unemployment.) Now ns

Apart from this temporary love-blessed reprieve, in general, I am not a 'happy' person. In general, I unreasonably assume I am difficult and unlikeable. I assume that every email contains a threat. I am genuinely surprised when people don't torture their children or animals. When I am in the habit of writing every day, sometimes it feels that I am writing because writing is trying not to die. Or writing is trying not to become a hopeless alcoholic. This sounds melodramatic, for sure, and I say it only to suggest that sadness is not always a terrible illness. Sadness is, perhaps, the most honest response to living.

I was still a sad teenage girl: my heart was torn up, I didn't know how I was going to pay off my rapidly increasing credit-card debt, I was paralysed by the truth of my not being any of the people I longed to be. I wasn't grown enough to untangle my desires from my reality. If being grown is desirable at all. My writing, even my diary writing, was terrible. Not because I didn't know about sentences, or because I didn't have literary ambitions, but because I couldn't tell a truth. Insincerity, I now know, is the language of those who deny their interiority.

Who cares about opinions, gossip, whatever when bodies are so vulnerable, in search only of love and breath. Every body reaches into the future to touch someone there.

In response to “Why write, when there is so much horror going on in the world?” from Notes to Unlived Time

Because there is a human future; maybe not a forever-future, but one beyond now. Writing is an argument for hope: it believes in the future; it believes, even, in futures it ought to know better than to. It believes in the ongoingness, the wanton tenacity, of human beings.

Sadness is, perhaps, the most honest response to living.

One of Red Rosa's sweetest pleasures its incorporation of some of Luxemburg's personal writings, also collected in another Verso title, The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg, where she delights in being alive, in being a body in the world. From prison, she writes to her lover: "The hour before sunset has a magic all its own. The sun was still hot, but one gladly allowed its slanted rays to burn on one's neck and cheeks like a kiss.' Politics is not removed from the way the sun kisses your neck at the hour before sunset. Politics is the pleasure in the body and the imagination, too.

Why is it that the closer we get to sadness the realer we feel? Sadness is the glue between the days as we live in them. Sadness is the other face of those object-events, the face of the world that stagnates and abnegates and doesn't much change. By ‘sadness' I don't mean depresion; I don't mean the feeling of poor, pathetic me. I mean the bodily response when humour, and life, have been extinguished. The opposite of love. The closing down of possibility--and the reluctance to see and name and claim possibility when it appears. Self-hatred. Emotional ineptitude. Complicity. Complacency. Overwhelming meh-ness.

“…the only thing in our power is to avoid distorting the voice of life which sounds within us”

Sudden knowledge that I, the puniest least consequential human being, am the same as the love feeling of looking at the ocean.

I was in America at a very expensive writers workshop, working on my social mobility, which was foolish, not because social mobility and cultural capital are useless pursuits, but because people who have already passed into the field of the elite tend not to attend these very expensive writers' workshops. That the students did not know this proves that they had not passed, may never pass, into the field of the elite. Which is also not to say there were no deep, thoughtful, stylish writers attending this very expensive writers' workshop, because elitism is not excellence it is barriers to entry.

So what good is it to be a woman except to resist the universal that denies us specificity (as does the category ‘woman’), to occupy a position as female person in solidarity with other women? This is something I talk about with a friend who is trans and femme, whose femininity has been violently denied to them by the public and continues to be, and so is an expert in femininity more so than I am because for them their claim on it is a claim to a recognition of their full humanity, and in this sense their femininity is politically significant in a way that mine which is naturalised and unquestioned is not. One day my friend was telling me about the breasts they longed for, and how at some point they'd have to decide the what and the how, what ‘type’ of visible, legible femininity they might stake a claim on, and they said— ‘the question is not how large should they be, but now many?’ —and this for me confirmed the answer to the question of what is a female person. And what is a female voice. And what is the point of continuing the class of women. The point is always to be in resistance the point is to play the point is to be relentless in the desire to unmask callous reductions the point is to multiply breasts the point is to love what is different.

are there really any correct, humane ways to rate someone’s long-suffered trauma and stinging memories stored in a collection of essays? honestly, i have no answer, but i decided to address the person behind these stories as a fictional character, a protagonist whose notes i have a chance to witness.

first and foremost, the promising description of this collection gave me hope that this would be something i would cherish and sincerely care about. before reading this, one has to abandon everything they know about memoirs, for it’s more an anti-memoir than a memoir, and not in the ways it could end up being (in de-selfing, immersive ways). blueberries wasn’t able to make me ponder my role, my place, my body and life choices, and i, a being reading this collection, was left unincluded in its matters despite being a woman, a feminist, a worker familiar with benefits and limitations of the creative field. 

blueberries is not as much a memoir as it is a literary collage of retellings of films and books, quotes, facts from google, mentions of expensive literary workshops and phd in english or whatever, sprinkled with the vibes of a woman occasionally flirting with a certain ideology out of boredom because she has never lived in time and space where such ideas caused irreparable damage. which is surprising considering the mentions of s. alexievich, who is phenomenal at documenting individual trauma. and if you look at it, really look at it, there will not be much left if you take all of these elements out of the book. except for, maybe, leeching off trauma and issues of oppressed groups the character doesn’t even belong to and never will. my problem with this book lies in my inability to tolerate the protagonist’s permanent urges to feel oppressed and end up in awful situations because of harmful choices that would seemingly wash away some of her deep-lying guilt. she performs this self-inflicted punishment, she tries too hard to be relatable and make sure that we understand she is not living a bourgeois life in any sense. the main character mentions that she is a writer, again and again, but for most parts of blueberries its reader has to wonder where to find this writing, how to dig it out of the abyss of hypothetical writing present in this book.    

the only essay i can highlight is the literature of sadness, which deals with the indescribable nature of trauma and enormous grief, insufficiency of normal vocabulary to express this experience, and privilege to not know, to look away from tragedy. 

"sadness is, perhaps, the most honest response to living."

are there really any correct, humane ways to rate someone’s long-suffered trauma and stinging memories stored in a collection of essays? honestly, i have no answer, but i decided to address the person behind these stories as a fictional character, a protagonist whose notes i have a chance to witness.

first and foremost, the promising description of this collection gave me hope that this would be something i would cherish and sincerely care about. before reading this, one has to abandon everything they know about memoirs, for it’s more an anti-memoir than a memoir, and not in the ways it could end up being (in de-selfing, immersive ways). blueberries wasn’t able to make me ponder my role, my place, my body and life choices, and i, a being reading this collection, was left unincluded in its matters despite being a woman, a feminist, a worker familiar with benefits and limitations of the creative field. 

blueberries is not as much a memoir as it is a literary collage of retellings of films and books, quotes, facts from google, mentions of expensive literary workshops and phd in english or whatever, sprinkled with the vibes of a woman occasionally flirting with a certain ideology out of boredom because she has never lived in time and space where such ideas caused irreparable damage. which is surprising considering the mentions of s. alexievich, who is phenomenal at documenting individual trauma. and if you look at it, really look at it, there will not be much left if you take all of these elements out of the book. except for, maybe, leeching off trauma and issues of oppressed groups the character doesn’t even belong to and never will. my problem with this book lies in my inability to tolerate the protagonist’s permanent urges to feel oppressed and end up in awful situations because of harmful choices that would seemingly wash away some of her deep-lying guilt. she performs this self-inflicted punishment, she tries too hard to be relatable and make sure that we understand she is not living a bourgeois life in any sense. the main character mentions that she is a writer, again and again, but for most parts of blueberries its reader has to wonder where to find this writing, how to dig it out of the abyss of hypothetical writing present in this book.    

the only essay i can highlight is the literature of sadness, which deals with the indescribable nature of trauma and enormous grief, insufficiency of normal vocabulary to express this experience, and privilege to not know, to look away from tragedy. 

"sadness is, perhaps, the most honest response to living."

Deserving of the cover. Re-read material.

Dora Tominic

Disclaimer: this is not a review.

Deserving of the cover. Re-read material.

Isabella 

great essay collection. very personal. i loved reading 'Yellow Taxi' and 'Unwed Teen Mum Mary' insightful and brilliant read about various topics such as capitalism, trauma, feminism, writing etc.

My impulse is to describe this as Eve Babitz-esque—as in, a self-indulgent, candid, wandering memoir—but substantive, Australian, and communist. To compare Babitz to Savage is unfair to the latter. This is a cerebral, artistic, sad, profound, existential, and often difficult to keep up with collection of essays(?) about gender, class, travel, colonialism, the consequences of having a body, aging, trauma, writing, being a writer, time, what we owe to ourselves and each other, and even more. Ellena Savage’s writing is beautiful. Many pages demand to be read aloud to yourself multiple times. Writing like this is for collecting quotes to weave into your nest, to remind you that we are all reflections of each other, that we could never possibly be alone in any feeling, but thank god other people can paint feelings into words worth hanging up in your house. I didn’t expect to like and need this book as much as I did. Savage’s vulnerability in sadness and sincerity are my permission slip. There is so much to say about this book but I read it in a day and now my head hurts. “My friends’ kids will need in twenty years to find crap like this at the markets so that they can feel held by the hands of past people’s future dreams and not feel totally alone.”

‘I mean who cares about opinions, gossip, whatever, when bodies are so vulnerable, in search only of love and breath.’ The body frequently escapes her, but is always very much present in these compellingly vivid, clear-eyed essays on an embodied self in flight through the world, from the brilliant young writer Ellena Savage. In Portuguese police stations and Portland college campuses, in suburban Melbourne libraries and wintry Berlin apartments, Savage shows bodies in pain and in love, bodies at work and at rest. She circles back to scenes of crimes or near-crimes, to lovers or near-lovers, to turn over the stones, re-read the paperwork, check the deeds, approach from another angle altogether. These essays traverse cities and spaces, bodies and histories, moving through forms and modes to find a closer kind of truth. Blueberries is ripe with acid, promise, and sweetness.

essays concerning understanding

azliana aziz

so cerebral it made me feel dumb (in a good, not punched down way ofc !!!)

"the story as it plays out in my mind is that I became a writer (if that was what it was) when I started to realise that I wasn't loved and that maybe I never would be" (47)

"It is difficult to imagine being content for more than ten minutes with even the sharper, creamiest parmesan crumbled over taut spaghetti, though this comes a little closer to it" (137)

"despite its promise to make the unmanageable manageable, language is not a complete tool for recording the world...Writing is the collision of thoughts with events, translated into a material form and then back again into the whisper of a feeling" (155)

"A few months ago, I read a feel-good--or maybe it was horrifying--news story about an elderly couple in Rome who found themselves so despairing with loneliness they wept and wept until the neighbors called the state police. Four officers knocked on the door and made the couple spaghetti with parmesan to soothe them. One officer described the encounter: ' Sometimes the loneliness melts in to tears. Sometimes it's like a summer storm. It comes suddenly and overtakes one.' I thought. I don't want to live through that. But also, I thought, how many millions of people are sitting in their apartments right now with no reprieve from their isolation? I've had peace and privacy, living without a hundred housemates with a hundred opinions, for three months out of my three decades. I cherish this quiet, this long-awaited solitude. But for many, aloneness, for years, and involuntarily, unkind--that's a different story. Millions of people not kept busy enough to assuage this dread." (185)

"I shudder because of the plans I made--and documented--and then never fulfilled. The voice from the past that was so desperate for a future. Whose voice is that...It's touching, I suppose, to see myself like that, a girl of future action. But mostly there is chagrin circling the absence of my follow-through. Fantasy futures not lived, having never lived." (195)

"Perhaps, I have thought, the notes are not strictly for revisiting. Perhaps they're artefacts of good intentions. They are the insisted-upon valour of making the (always-broken) promise that they'll be returned to, retrieved, revised. Notes; hope! Their real addressee is time--things being recorded as they pass by, for the future note-reader to recall. Gestures towards a future that will almost certainly not care." (201)

"If anything of me lives on after I am dead, I hope it will not be what I failed to get done. When I die, when it happens, please throw my MacBook into the ocean." (205)

Deyana

"the story as it plays out in my mind is that I became a writer (if that was what it was) when I started to realise that I wasn't loved and that maybe I never would be" (47)

"It is difficult to imagine being content for more than ten minutes with even the sharper, creamiest parmesan crumbled over taut spaghetti, though this comes a little closer to it" (137)

"despite its promise to make the unmanageable manageable, language is not a complete tool for recording the world...Writing is the collision of thoughts with events, translated into a material form and then back again into the whisper of a feeling" (155)

"A few months ago, I read a feel-good--or maybe it was horrifying--news story about an elderly couple in Rome who found themselves so despairing with loneliness they wept and wept until the neighbors called the state police. Four officers knocked on the door and made the couple spaghetti with parmesan to soothe them. One officer described the encounter: ' Sometimes the loneliness melts in to tears. Sometimes it's like a summer storm. It comes suddenly and overtakes one.' I thought. I don't want to live through that. But also, I thought, how many millions of people are sitting in their apartments right now with no reprieve from their isolation? I've had peace and privacy, living without a hundred housemates with a hundred opinions, for three months out of my three decades. I cherish this quiet, this long-awaited solitude. But for many, aloneness, for years, and involuntarily, unkind--that's a different story. Millions of people not kept busy enough to assuage this dread." (185)

"I shudder because of the plans I made--and documented--and then never fulfilled. The voice from the past that was so desperate for a future. Whose voice is that...It's touching, I suppose, to see myself like that, a girl of future action. But mostly there is chagrin circling the absence of my follow-through. Fantasy futures not lived, having never lived." (195)

"Perhaps, I have thought, the notes are not strictly for revisiting. Perhaps they're artefacts of good intentions. They are the insisted-upon valour of making the (always-broken) promise that they'll be returned to, retrieved, revised. Notes; hope! Their real addressee is time--things being recorded as they pass by, for the future note-reader to recall. Gestures towards a future that will almost certainly not care." (201)

"If anything of me lives on after I am dead, I hope it will not be what I failed to get done. When I die, when it happens, please throw my MacBook into the ocean." (205)

Lucy Newlinds

A brilliant collection of genre-defying essays. Ellena Savage explores a myriad of topics from the lasting effects of trauma to the writing process itself. 

Some of the essays were very challenging to get through, however, all were intellectually stimulating. I personally really enjoyed her discussions on class in the 21st century. 

I found the best way to read this collection was one essay at a time in order to let yourself properly grapple with the ideas that Ellena Savage presented.

A stimulating combination of memoir, essay, poetry, confession and critique, Blueberries is a powerful and revealing collection from a rising star in Australian creative non-fiction.

Jales

one of the favorites favorite i've ever favorited.

she has a huge brain. it's like jimmy neutron's brain.

Blueberries Essays Concerning Understanding

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