Megan (Loverde) Savage
A Multi-Genre Writer and Educator
in Portland, Oregon
FEATURED PUBLICATIONS
GRAPEFRUITS, MELONS, CANNONBALLS
Short Fiction in
The Portland Review
Spring 2024
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All of my friends are cutting off their breasts. Top surgery. Breast reduction. The trans and the genderqueer and the top-heavy alike. It’s got me taking stock.
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Grapefruits, melons, cannonballs. Bazoongas, sweater puppies, jugs. Fun bags, wocka wockas—god knows, I don’t love them. But they define me.
TELL A PITIFUL STORY
Short Fiction in
Tahoma Literary Review
Spring 2024
(art by April dela Noche Milne)
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I grew up with a boy who scared me—he was troubled and inappropriate. At seventeen, he was brutally murdered. Years later, far from the wetlands of Massachusetts where we lived (and he died), I was haunted. I felt compassion for his ghost, and even something like regret. Living near freight lines, I learned of the signs left by Depression-era train hoppers as warnings or guides to their fellow outsiders. The two images collided, and I wrote the story to puzzle through all the ways we try and fail to understand—and to care for—the strangers in our midst.
TWO POEMS
The Pointed Circle #40
Spring 2024
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From SPACE AND TIME
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...Distance,
I think, is not a line on a map,
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but the wire of a tin can telephone,
tinny echoes crackling over miles –
the voices of our child selves and our dead best friends playing Girl Talk,
mooning passing cars
with stickers of zits on our faces...
THE SEAMSTRESS LOVES THE WOLFBOY
Short Story on the Podcast, More Devotedly
(art by Lettie Jane Rennekamp)
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The month before the seamstress is scheduled to marry the Wolf Boy, she becomes unbearably curious about the man beneath the hair. Although her love for the Wolf Boy is built on a foundation of two souls keeping pleasant company regardless of physical appearances, the truth is, the seamstress deals in material goods, makes her livelihood trading in visual commodities, and that is how she finds herself, sitting next to the Wolf Boy on their train ride to Chicago, where he will meet her family, running her fingers through the hair on the back of his hand, and imagining how she might ask him to shave, only once, not forever, for the sake of her love.
SPOONS
Short Fiction in
Extraterrestrial Boyfriend
by Black Warrior Review
Fall 2023
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I rejected the specialist in non-violent communication, the one who dressed like a princess while drinking apple juice from a challis, the one who understood the ways in which touch regulates the nervous system, leading to emotional alignment, and the one who advertised “fun wrastles.” I didn’t know it until I started looking, but I wanted someone imprintable. No sexual favors, yes. Emphasis on hygiene, yes. An understanding that consent is not possible under the influence of alcohol, yes. References to silence, spooning, comfortable clothes and music were all acceptable. References to holding space, eye-gazing, trauma responses, red solo cups, massage creams, or aerial arts were not.
MORE WRITING
Audio Poem -- Let me read to you:
Something in the meaning is left out, an absence/
like the difference between challah and brioche,
Flash Nonfiction: "We divvy up the shirts while your body is still there in the room."
"Field and Stream," "Minutes," & "Playing Telephone."
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Laughter is nothing like forgetting,/
breath holding the body apart
This volume brings together academics, activists, social work practitioners, poets, and artists from different parts of the world during the Covid-19 pandemic. It sheds light on how the pandemic has exposed the inequities in society and is shaping social institutions, affecting human relationships, and creating new norms with each passing day.
COLLABORATIONS
1
I'm a member of the Portland-based writing group, The Buoy.
THE BUOY,
PORTLAND, OR
2
I serve on the steering committee of the Carolyn Moore Writers House, the first and only writing residency housed at a community college.
3
I have collaborated with international performer, director, and scholar Rosalie Purvis for over 20 years.
ROSALIE PURVIS
www.rosalietpurvis.com
BIO
Megan Savage is a multi-genre writer living in Portland, Oregon.
Recent work is forthcoming in The Rumpus, The Forge, and Tampa Review and is featured in Pandemic of Perspectives: Creative Re-imaginings on Routledge Press.
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Her poetry, fiction, and nonfiction have appeared in such publications as Tahoma Literary Review, Portland Review, Boyfriend Village by Black Warrior Review, Sixth Finch, FE Magazine, Hunger Mountain, Plainsongs, Spork, and Subtropics; and she has been nominated for Best of the Net and Best New American Voices.
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Her writing has been adapted for performance by, among others, international performing arts collective Chaepani.
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She holds a BA from Bard College, and MA and MFA degrees from Indiana University, where she served as Fiction Editor of Indiana Review.
Writing, marketing and editorial clients have included Bradley Angle House; The Providence Children's Museum; The Mary Baker Eddy Library for the Betterment of Humanity; Storymatic; and Disjecta, LLC.
She has worked as an educator in Providence, RI; Boston, MA; Bloomington, IN; Putney, VT; and Vancouver, WA. Currently, she teaches writing at Portland Community College where she serves on the Steering Committee for the Carolyn Moore Writers House, the first and only housed residency at a community college.
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Areas of interest include Children's Literature, Women/Queer Writers, Technical/Professional Writing, Illness Narratives & the Medical Humanities, Hybrid & Online Pedagogies, and Creative Writing Pedagogies.
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She has many beloveds, including 22 first cousins and a dog named Fig.
No events at the moment
CONTACT
To contact Megan regarding bookings (readings or workshops), publications, interviews, or editorial work:
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Portrait of me (shadowboxing in front of a full moon) by my supremely talented former student, Von Hemert
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