Speakeasy at the Wheaty: aka The Night Riana's Mother Turned Up for Twenty Minutes and Won the Raffle

Mid-November of last year saw our wonderful Speakeasy family flock in waves of goodwill and excitement to our favourite backyard in Adelaide—the outside area at the Wheatsheaf Hotel. Our second public event of 2015 was set to be an absolute cracker, with an array of our favourite speakers set to return, as well as a few undergraduates more than ready to pop their Wheatsheaf cherry.

We had Riana Kinlough’s famously funny prose, which flowed seamlessly into Kayla Gaskell’s masterful excerpt from a larger body of work. Cameron Lowe did not disappoint for lovers of horror, whilst Lise Van Konkelenberg bared her soul in an exceptionally brave performance.

Our first break saw the long-awaited presence of pizza and the chance to buy a copy of our fresh-off-the-presses zine, which was in colour for the very first time—and in two styles of colours at that! As always, thanks must go to our marvellous and very hard-working Zine Team for giving up their time to edit, contribute, craft and print our zine into colourful being.

Our lovable regular Richard Falkner kicked off the second set with an exciting foray into the second-person technique; Taeghan Buggy’s poetry was as stunning as ever, and Amelia Hughes wowed us in her first Wheatsheaf performance! Sean Stockham proved himself a worthy Speakeasy veteran, closing off the set with his famously calm and chilling on-stage demeanour.

Ordinarily, this would be the end of our night—but this was no ordinary event. Our fearless retiring Director Lauren Butterworth then took the stage as our Very Special Guest, treating us all to a slice of her PhD novel in what was, oddly enough, only her second Speakeasy performance as a reader.

As Lauren’s applause at last died down, there was only the raffle to go, after which, with a bundle of fond new memories and a handful of inspiration for new creations, we scattered into the night towards our beds.

A gigantic thank you to everyone who read, listened, zined and helped out in any way—and a very special thanks to our MC CJ McLean who entertained us all from start to finish. Our readers are growing more electrifying, our zines are growing more impressive, our pizza orders are growing more expensive, and our little club is growing the fastest of the lot—who knows the talent and fun that 2016 has in store!

Words by Jess Miller