Never too late
A6 32pp IBSN 978-0-9873057-9-4
$9.90 including postage
Beth Spencer is an award-winning author of poetry, fiction, essays and writing for performance.
Her previous books include the verse memoir, Vagabondage (UWAP), a bilingual collection The Party of Life (Flying Islands) and the short fiction collection, How to Conceive of a Girl (Vintage/Random House).
Her awards include The Age Short Story Award, The Dinny O'Hearn Fellowship, a Varuna fellowship, various shortlistings for poetry prizes, runner-up for the Steele Rudd Award (for How to Conceive of a Girl) and several fellowships from the Literature Board of the Australia Council.
Beth Spencer was awarded a PhD for 'The Body as Fiction/ Fiction as a Way of Thinking', and she has been a guest at Sydney, Adelaide and Newcastle festivals, at conferences, and has read and performed her work widely at venues throughout Australia and on ABC Radio National. A double CD of her ABC radio pieces, Body of Words, was published by Dogmedia in 2004.
In 2018 she was the inaugural winner of the Carmel Bird Digital Literary Award for her short fiction collection , now a Spineless Wonders ebook.
She lives on the Central Coast, NSW and at www.bethspencer.com
Sample poem
Ex-centric
I used to be the weird blonde one in the Munster family
(Grandpa down the cellar always scared me)
But now I’m Granny with her rocking chair
roped up high on the back of the pickup
Samantha and Tabitha dropping by for a spell
(Take a load off your feet!)
So we mosey on out by the ce-ment pond
where Wednesday and Lurch dance a little dance
while Uncle Fester tests light-bulbs in his ears (safety first!)
and Cousin Morticia is in the conservatory
clipping rose stems, with Gomez kissing
feather-light
down her black-clad arms
And Thing (darling Thing)
does his Thing-thing:
pointing, beckoning.
Other publications
The Age of Fibs - winner of the 2018 Carmel Bird Digital Literary Award (available as an ebook from Spineless Wonders, Amazon, Kobo and Booktopia)
The Party of Life (Flying Islands, 2015)
Vagabondage (UWAPublishing, 2014)
Body of Words double CD of ABC Radio pieces (Dogmedia, 2004)
How to Conceive of a Girl (Vintage/Random House, 1996)
Things in a Glass Box (SCARP/Five Islands New Poets Series 2, 1994)
Some comments on Vagabondage
I'd like to nominate Beth Spencer's Vagabondage as my best read for 2014… It's beautiful, it's funny, it's sad, and it speaks to all of us who aim to age disgracefully.
Suzanne Donisthorpe, Books & Arts Daily, ABC-RN
This lovely collection of poems is at times hilarious and poignant… The book is rather like a good concept album – the pofound,' as Claudia Taranto has noted on the front cover. – Geoff Page, The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald
Yesterday I sat under some tea trees at Kennett River reading Vagabondage and weeping. I love this book so much.
Sian Prior
A joy to read… light as a breeze, and dark as a buried bone, and it tells you the whole story – without boring you for a minute. Quite a feat that. Quite a coup.
Jennifer Compton, Stillcraic
Have just laughed and cried my way through a day with Vagabondage. Loved its audacity, courage and wisdom.
Gail Hennessy
It's as if Spencer has opened the door of her little van and ushered us in; we knock knees, smell each other's emotions, and laugh in embarrassment and recognition... [But while] searingly honest and sometimes darkly funny... it is the interplay between the particular and the general that is most invigorating about Vagabondage... We observe the landscape through windows that always reflect back our own image.
Andy Jackson, Australian Poetry Journal
Vagabondage is much more than a travellers tale…Each poem builds up to a memoir of deep self-reflection on what it means to be alive on this earth. The book is a joy to read, mingling lighthearted observation with deep, warm and above all intimate introspection that the reader is invited to join, so that the journey becomes a shared one between the poet and the reader.
Magdalena Ball, Compulsive Reader
Aiming to explore not only the idea of home but The Big Questions: love, family, the whole catastrophe… this slim volume displays Spencer's talent for catching moments in time and transforming them. Verdict: Dreamy. – Susan Johnson, The Sunday Territorianoems stand alone well enough – but reading them as a collection (in order, as laid out in the book) adds a level of depth and connection that makes you feel as if you have travelled awhile with this person, and know them as a friend.
Library and Computing News
An unexpected gem … a memoir of moving spiritually and geographically, told in verse! Utterly unique, so Australian and such a beautiful work of art, Beth Spencer's tale of selling her house and becoming a nomad spoke to me with a vivid kind of wanderer's call.
Walter Mason, My Favourite Books of 2014
There are authors for whom writing functions as a form of truth-telling… We look to them for insight and intelligence and good humour, and a willingness to share – and Beth Spencer is one of them… -- Angelo Loukakis
This book doesn't belabour its wisdom, but instead opens us up through humour to all aspects of humans' being. – Angela Gardner, Cordite Poetry Review
My latest favourite read. Thank you Beth Spencer for delighting me, making me sad, making me think, and making me laugh, with this graceful, multi-layered verse memoir – succinct, rich, beautiful. I'll be dipping in and out for years to come. – Dianne Touchell
[A] kind of 'road movie' – or 'road journal', to be more accurate. …Many of its poems play with the crucial difference between solitude and loneliness and Spencer is not afraid to expose her vulnerability in this regard… 'Warm, witty and profound,' as Claudia Taranto has noted on the front cover. – Geoff Page, The Age & SMH
Yesterday I sat under some tea trees at Kennett River reading Vagabondage and weeping. I love this book so much.– Sian Prior