Liz Lane and I step off the street and into Stefano's brewery, we are unsure of where we belong and what to expect here. We stand in the doorway for a time. I spy the rest of our rag tag class sitting together on a table. At this point, none of us really know each other and we are all a little stand off-ish. There are some nods and smiles while we sit down.
We are seated toward the back, behind white haired beings that are far richer
in age than us. I take them all in. Some have lots of hair, even more than I,
while others have only strange wispy tufts. Some of them are beautiful and
others are ugly. An elegant, ageing woman catches me looking around and she
smiles at me, I smile back and we share a moment. Our heads swivel to the space
in between the crowd and the gleaming steel brewery. There is a little stage and
a little woman. Alexis Wright.
I get a warm feeling seeing her,
I make a mental note in my head to read one of her books. Her speech is broken
and at times difficult to listen to, but I learn that she was a mother at only
fifteen, a young hot head, and that most of her classmates didn’t
think she would amount to much. Didn’t she show them?
The more she spoke the more I liked her. She let the room know she didn’t learn
much at school, but that that was probably a good thing because they weren’t
teaching the right things anyway. When Alexis spoke about why she wrote The Swan Book (Winner of the Australian
Literature Society Gold Medal) she said simply ‘I could either think about John
Howard or black swans’. Everyone shared a laugh at this.
When it was over Liz and slipped out for another cigarette.
There is something I wish to speak about further from this interview with
Alexis Wright but it belongs else where, so keep a look out for my next post.
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