Angelo Loukakis launched Beth Spencer’s verse memoir, Vagabondage UWAP, 2014 / Dogmedia e-book, 2015 at Better Read than Dead, Newtown on 9th October 2014
There are authors for whom writing functions as a form of truth-telling that requires art, but humanity as well. We look to them for insight and intelligence and good humour, and a willingness to share – and Beth is one of them.
In Vagabondage – Beth’s memoir about the year she lived in a campervan — you will find again the particular characteristics of her writing that readers have so admired in her previous books, How to Conceive of a Girl and Things in a Glass Box.
To nominate some of the themes in Vagabondage, I would say the search for a sense of home is right up there.
In this she is a female Odysseus, and one very much for the times. She negotiates a route that is at least as tortuous as that hero of Greek myth. She must find a way past her own six-headed Scylla, and past her own rocks of Charybdis. But Beth’s are modern perils — hers is the journey to Ithaca taken via Bondi… the Great Ocean Road… and the Hume Highway… among other very Australian hazards.
There are adventures and misadventures aplenty on this particular journey. And some of the misadventures struck me as very typical of Beth’s writing: prosaic and mythic at the same time.
At a certain point in her travels, for instance, she has the misfortune of colliding with and killing three stray birds on the road. Now tell me THAT doesn’t trigger grief and guilt in the contemporary voyager!
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