Blueberries by Ellena Savage
To make a living as an author, Ellena Savage writes, you need to have a diverse portfolio. As an editor, academic, teacher, critic, literary event host (among other things), Ellena Savage has had to live at least a double life. In an essay titled ‘Antimemoir’ she writes that the ‘swinging, smiling author me’ pitched the book proposal for Blueberries with ‘Hey … You can bet on me to write a thought-provoking commercially successful essay collection!’ but inwardly she felt shame and doubt, ‘Was I a serious enough person to call my work autotheory? (No.)’. Whether or not Blueberries is a personal essay collection, memoir or antimemoir, it perhaps works best as an answer to the question ‘What kind of body makes a memoir?’.
The first essay, ‘Yellow City’, was originally published as a chapbook and it documents, day by day, a trip Savage took to Lisbon to track down the police file and court documents of a sexual assault she had reported eleven years earlier. Back then, she had to leave Portugal before the end of the trial and had never found out the verdict. The writing here is compelling, spare and elegant. Savage weaves in prose poetry and her philosophical and honest interrogation of the situation often takes the reader down a surprising path.
Another essay splits the page in two. On one side are a series of vignettes titled ‘Holidays with Men’ which Savage had published in a zine years earlier. On the other side of the page she writes about her experience of reading at the zine’s launch and the events that had led up to the writing of the work. The essay as a whole becomes an examination of cultural capital, travel discourse and a materialist critique of the threat of physical violence.
Ellena Savage has produced a collection that defies categorisation but is fervently experiential, candid and original.
