5 February 2020
Poet, essayist and legal scholar Alison Whittaker's latest book Blakwork defies easy categorization. A mix of memoir, reportage, fiction, satire and critique it reflects Alison's interrogation of feminism, class, social justice and the erasure of Aboriginal people. Alison will be in conversation with Anahera Gildea to discuss poetry, advocacy and Australia on Sunday 14 March.
The first book to capture my imagination was…
A bit embarrassing. I was an irredeemable child nerd. Artemis Fowl.
The books that saw me through my childhood were…
It was a bit late in the game, but when I was a teenager I was transfixed on Best American Gay Fiction 2, the one book of queer fiction in our local library. They don’t have it anymore, but I would borrow it as often as I could. I liked reading the little memoirs — even though I couldn’t fully relate to their writers — because they taught me how people come to reflect on their queer youth and gave me a bit of perspective that I would grow into what I was experiencing and find a way to memorialise it. And I did!
My favourite book of 2019 is…
A hard one! Tony Birch’s The White Girl, maybe?
The fictional character I’d most like to be is …
I’m not a big fiction reader! The fiction I do read is full of characters I’d never want to be.
The author I’m most likely to binge-read is …
Andrea Long Chu reviews. May we all be so blessed to be eviscerated by her one day.
The book I’m recommending to a friend is …
Just yesterday I recommended Billy Ray Belcourt’s NDN Coping Mechanisms. You should read it too.
My favourite film adaptation of a book is …
Um, this is a hard one! Not a big film buff. Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman, based on Ron Stallworth’s memoir? A hard premise, but a great follow-through. Or Greta Gerwig’s Little Women — but I’ve never read Little Women!
The last literary event I attended was ….
A fundraiser poetry night with a small press here called Subbed In, raising money for water runs to Aboriginal nations in NSW who are being deprived of potable water.
One dead author I’d like to have met is …
Too many! I think of the esteemed Oodgeroo Noonuccal and Ruby Langford Ginibi, both poets who left a mass legacy in their wake. Oodgeroo Noonuccal wrote the first real poem I ever heard, Son of Mine, and I was so struck by it. Evidently others were too and it has an intergenerational resonance like no other. In her memoir, Don’t Take Your Love to Town, Ruby Langford Ginibi writes briefly of the reserve where my Pop grew up. It is the only literary reference to it I have ever seen.
A line or two of writing I just really love is …
The first one that comes to mind is one I really liked when I was younger, in Alan Turing’s postcards to his friend (and lover, I think) Robin Gandy in the final months of his life. They were just elaborate codes and in-jokes about sex with men and other mathematicians but really stuck with me for some reason.
Hyperboloids of wondrous Light
Rolling for aye through Space and Time
Harbour there Waves which somehow Might
Play out God's holy pantomime.
The books on my bed side table right now are …
Tracker, by Alexis Wright. It’s a hefty and beautifully cacophonous book, and one I’m only now about half-way through. Nice to savor things sometimes.
