Vivian Blaxell presents "Worthy of the Event" in conversation w/ Rahne Alexander
Set against a backdrop of trans life that begins with her own transition in the 1960s, Vivian Blaxell takes us on a witty and expansive sweep through history, from Australia to Japan, to Hawai’i to Mexico, to heretofore unmapped regions of the mind.
In seven devastatingly intelligent parts, her essay covers a vast range in time and space — from the arson of a Japanese temple to a transformative encounter with a coral reef, from Nietzsche and Hegel to Indigenous metaphysics, from a perplexing relationship with a beautiful man to the unknowable minds of animals. Fleshy and philosophical, searching and exalted, utterly distinctive and assured, Worthy of the Event belatedly establishes Vivian Blaxell as one of the major writers of her generation.
Vivian Blaxell grew up in rural Australia and co-founded Tiresias House, Australia’s first shelter and resource centre for and by trans people. Her essay "Nuclear Cats" was shortlisted for the 2021 Melbourne Prize for Literature. She lives in Naarm/Melbourne, VIC, Australia.
Rahne Alexander is an intermedia artist and writer from Baltimore, Maryland. She is a 2021 graduate of the Intermedia+Digital Arts MFA at UMBC, and a 2021 Baker Artist Prize Awardee. Her works in video, performance, music, and painting have been exhibited across the U.S. and around the world, including the Baltimore Museum of Art, Tephra Institute of Contemporary Art, and MIX NYC. She performs music as 50 Foot Woman and as the front woman of the rock band Santa Librada. She is a regular contributor to BmoreArt and UMBC Magazine, and her writing has been anthologized in OnCurating #42, Love, You (Urban Ivy, 2020), and the Lambda Literary Award-winning anthology TAKE ME THERE: TRANS AND GENDERQUEER EROTICA (Cleis, 2011). Her OutWrite-award-winning chapbook of collected essays HERETIC TO HOUSEWIFE was published by Neon Hemlock in 2019.
