Author, essayist and academic Ellena Savage and I caught up over Zoom to talk about sources of inspiration, discipline, waking up in the middle of the night/the very early morning to write, and our mutual desire to throw our devices off tall buildings. 

The podcast that I mention in this episode where Ellena talks about writing forms is actually not the magnificent ‘Take Home Reading’, hosted by Stella Charls at the Wheeler Centre (although you should definitely listen to that one here) - I got it mixed up with the equally excellent Sydney Writers Festival podcast ‘Reckoning and Retribution’, hosted by Maeve Marsden and featuring fellow Australian non-fiction writer Lucia Osborne-Crowley. 

Ellena recommended the Penguin Dictionary of Symbols and Carl Jung’s Man and His Symbols as writerly must-haves; she also mentioned the importance of building a library of reference books in general (dictionaries, encyclopaedias, books of quotations). For more on the Christian community getting woken up in the middle of the night for procreative sex, check out Michel Foucault’s ‘Of Other Spaces’ [PDF]. 

Ellena’s book of essays, Blueberries, was published in 2020; you can buy a copy here.