Elizabeth Reeder

Author

elizabethkreeder.com @ekreeder @ekreeder26
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Biography

Elizabeth K Reeder is a Chicago native now living in Scotland. She writes novels, essays and stories, and also writes for the radio. She is fascinated by things we build and dismantle (houses, identity, family, community) and how we write about them.

Elizabeth is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Glasgow and is a MacDowell Colony Fellow. Her first novel was shortlisted for a number of awards including a Saltire Literary award.

Publications

Fiction

Publication Details Notes
FREMONT 2012 Kohl Publishing

When Rachel Roanoke sees Hal Fremont across a diner counter, she claims him as her own, and they start to build their rambunctious brood. Against their parents’ ill-starred fairytale romance, the Fremont children fight for their territory within the shifting, bitter bonds of family. In this tale of prejudice, identity and desire, Fremont becomes a map of survival.

RAMSHACKLE 2012 Freight Books

Roe is like any other fifteen year old suburban Chicago teenager. Her only worries are schoolwork, keeping up with her wayward best friend, and whether or not she should sleep with her boyfriend. Then her adoptive father, a locksmith, disappears one winter’s day without explanation.
As Roe tries to find out where he is and why he left, her past unravels, revealing secrets and lies that will change her future forever. RAMSHACKLE is a beautiful novel about abandonment, identity and self-discovery in the harshest of circumstances, set in suburban Chicago.

AN ARCHIVE OF HAPPINESS 2020 Penned In The Margins

A poetic novel about an unconventional family in the Scottish Highlands by Elizabeth Reeder. An Archive of Happiness is mostly set over the course of one day, during the Avens family’s annual get-together on the Summer Solstice. Theirs is a fractured family, broken by arguments, by things said and not said, by a mother who left and a father who was left behind. What happens on this day will force them to cleave together to survive and redraw the traditional bonds of family. The novel offers sharp insights into family and grief.

MICROBURSTS 2021 Prototype Publishing
An interdisciplinary collaboration with artist Amanda Thomson; a collection of lyric, intermedial essays about the places between life & death, memoir & poetry.
‘microbursts shows that grief is communal, that love is experimental, that forms are yet to be decided. This book is a generous lesson in living and dying.’ Maria Fusco
‘Reeder writes of grief and its siblings, anger and not knowing, with the surety of an initiate. The in-between time of illness shatters and scatters language. Thomson creates a cohesive reading space to contain these fragments. Shadows of past and future texts ghost expanses of white paper. Punctuation hangs in the balance. In these soft absences. Language has time. To regroup. To recover.’ J. R. Carpenter
‘microbursts is a sparklingly original, tender book that remakes language with delicacy and verve – finding new ways to speak loss, change and the many layered movements of the self.’ Rebecca Tamás
‘microbursts is… a map of loss and wonder that charts the tectonic plates of life and death at the places where they rub together’. Sophie Ward
‘microbursts is a master-class in the necessary constructedness of fine elegy that renders the heart-wrenching buoyant… Under the fierce beams of its fateful subject, the willingness of language to move freely, poetically, in bird-like hoverings and escapes, produces a rare haunting resonance.’ – Jeffrey Robinson
‘Haunting, beautiful, honest. This is an incredibly relatable and carefully curated collection of writing and imagery about love, grief and creativity. The passages recounting the decline and loss of Elizabeth’s parents resonated deeply with me and will offer comfort to anyone in a similar situation. It is a wholly original, truthful and sensitive portrayal of life and loss.’ – Annie Lyons
‘It’s a magical act to make something from the fragments of two lives crumbling. It might be called a work of art. To make a piece of paper out of fragments of a tree, it is necessary first to break them down into microbursts. Reconstructed it is never a tree, but it might be a map. Reeder and Thomson have made a map of grief from the fragments of two lives crumbling, a map we might be able to find our way by.’ Joanna Walsh
‘This is a gem of a book, in which Reeder crystallises her experiences of family love and grief onto each page… [Thomson’s] shading of text for different voices, the mirroring of print, the word layout all serve to replicate how memory works. The effectiveness of Reeder and Thomson’s collaboration is clear to see in this magnificent book’. Malcolm Alexander
‘microbursts is as elegant as it is daring, a ‘needlesharp’ interdisciplinary primer on how to communicate the quiet discoveries and sublime pains of the lived experience. The project presents stirring testimony to the crucial roles of inquiry, Queer collaboration, and experimentation in twenty-first century artmaking’. Margot Douaihy, Editor, Northern New England Review
Elizabeth Reeder
Elizabeth Reeder
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