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Beth Spencer in Conversation
with Warrick Wynne

about her new Body of Words
and Box of Words CDs

First published in the Victorian Association of Teachers of English -
VATE - Newsletter, July 2004. Also in Metaphor (NSW), and in Opinion (SA).

 

Beth Spencer is a Melbourne writer who has produced a double audio CD and a CD-ROM of her writing, designed as a teaching resource for secondary (and tertiary) students. Warrick Wynne is a Melbourne poet and English teacher. They spoke about her project.

 

Warrick Wynne: Beth, you've always been a writer who's crossed boundaries and genres in your writing. You've also never been easily categorised as one particular style or content. You've written poetry, prose, non-fiction and sometimes inter-mingled them all at once, often in confronting and powerful ways. You had a short collection of poetry Things in A Glass Box, which interested many people, and then your collection of short fiction in How to Conceive of a Girl.
      And then there's been the way you've translated your work into radio, and it seems to work beautifully in that medium. So, in many ways a CD-ROM bringing together all these aspects of your work isn't that surprising. Nevertheless you're the first writer I've seen to offer a package that brings together a large body of work in text and audio format, particularly aimed at student audiences, and with a large body of resources to support it. What made you want to bring this together in this way?

Beth Spencer: In some ways it grew out of the kind of responses I've had from having some of my writing on my webpage.
      Like the email from the scientist in Texas who read the poems in his lunch hour and wrote to say he was going down to his local Barnes and Noble to buy a copy… And he's not going to find it of course. It's hard enough to find a book by an Australian poet in an Australian bookshop (and even when it's first published, let alone several years later).
      And then the email from some year 10 girls in Western Australia who had to write an assignment about their favourite Australian poet and chose me. I wasn't too flattered at first as I figured that it had more to do with being able to email me some questions, but it turned out they really did love the poems. (My favourite part of their email was the last line: 'We were surprised to find someone your age dress so funky and be tolerant'.) And a woman in Perth who had me listed on her website as one of her three favourite poets: the other two being Judith Wright and Dorothea McKeller!
      But you see I think people really do love poetry when they get access to it. But through the normal route of books and bookshops, that's becoming harder and harder.

Warrick Wynne: Accessibility is an issue isn't it? It's difficult to set contemporary Australian poetry in schools often because publishers simply can't guarantee copies of the books will be available. This approach changes all that.

Beth Spencer: One of the things I wanted to be able to do was to make the work available, to anyone in Australia, no matter where they lived, and to keep it available. And this is a lot easier with CDs because even a small print run can be economically viable. With over 700 pages of text material on Box of Words, for a small edition it would probably cost about $80 a copy to print as a book, and about half that much again to post across the country. With a CD, if sales slow down I can still print 100 copies at a time to keep it available, and if there's a sudden demand, I can get as many as I need printed within two weeks. And I think this is very important. Teachers don't want to spend valuable time and energy learning how to work with a text only to find out that it's out of print.
      Also it's often the very forms that are most suited for teaching that are the most difficult to source. Poetry, short stories and essays are all notoriously difficult to publish in Australia, and almost impossible to keep in print. And yet I think it's really important that students have access to a wide variety of contemporary work in the forms they are being asked to write in.

Warrick Wynne: CD-ROMs have been around for a while now but this is quite different; you've given the reader the full text and the audio and workshops for teachers. It's very flexible and not at all linear or directed.

Beth Spencer: I think a problem with a lot of CD-ROMs is that they've over-used the graphics and video and whiz-bang effects, because that's the idea of what an interactive CD-ROM should be. When sometimes this just complicates it all without necessarily adding value, and can often slow the process down when you just want to get in and get some information and get out again.
      And the other problem in using a CD-ROM for teaching is that you have to have a room with computers in them.
      So what I've aimed for is a resource that can be used in a variety of ways, a variety of situations, and that can be adapted to a range of teaching strategies. So this comes in two parts -- the Box of Words CD-ROM, and then the Body of Words CD.
      So one idea is that you can listen to the CD over breakfast or on the way to work, choose the piece you want to use, then pop the CD-ROM into the computer, read the background notes on that piece, print out the text, the discussion questions and writing exercise sheets to photocopy as handouts, and collect a CD player to use on your way to the class.

Warrick Wynne: It's interesting too that you've not been afraid to enhance these audio pieces with different voices, sound effects, and in some cases professional actors. In many ways there's a real production component to this isn't there?

Beth Spencer: I love working with sound, and I love working with voice too. Having all this material that had already been produced to a high quality for ABC Radio over the years was the other main impetus for the project. And it seemed a really good use of the medium that audio-book publishers are just not exploring. All they seem to be interested in doing is taking a best-selling book and making an audio version of it. But just because something was good in print doesn't necessarily make it a good audio experience. It's much the same as with films -- they are different mediums, different experiences. And because short forms rarely become best-sellers in print, then almost all audio books are novels. Yet a short piece of fiction, or poetry, or an interesting and thoughtful essay, seems to me to be much more suited to audio.
      I like the idea of being able to listen to an interesting essay while doing the dishes, or a story while getting ready for bed. Or to listen to a poem just for the sheer joy of it, as a momentary relaxation in between your work. Something that you can dip in and out of, select a track, and even walk away from and miss a bit and still come back and tune in again… that to me seems a much better use of the medium.
      And then there's all the possibilities of using sound. For this CD I worked with a sound engineer, Stuart Ewings, to produce a series of the poems from Things in a Glass Box with a range of sound-effects. And he's done a wonderful job. Using sound to work with the poem, enhancing its meaning and effects, rather than just to illustrate it or as some kind of distracting background. One of the poems in particular, a long piece called 'The Museum of Fire' now has trains rushing in and out of it to really locate the way it moves in and out of the present and the past, which is what it always needed. (These poems are due to be broadcast on ABC-RN's Poetica in February.)
      Quite a few of the pieces have been produced as sound pieces. Some other lovely work by ABC Radio's Claudia Taranto, for instance.

Warrick Wynne: Your writing seems to move between traditional and separate forms: poetry, short stories, non-fiction etc. These labels don't seem to matter much to you. In fact there's a kind of power and significance gained through the inter-textual connections of these works brought together don't you think?

Beth Spencer: In a way it's the very thing that's worked against me over the years as a writer -- having scatter-gunned across so many genres and styles and topics rather than stuck to one form and become known for that -- that makes the CD-ROM format so ideal. I've been able to design it with lots of cross-linking's, and been able to include very disparate pieces -- or pieces that are disparate in one way, in style for instance, but actually have a lot of connections in other ways.
      One example that comes to mind is the way a rather straight essay on the Grim Reaper campaign of the late 1980s here acts as a kind of subtext to a later piece of fiction, called 'Fatal Attraction in Newtown' which is about different ways that people respond to and perceive a threat. In fact a lot of the time all I'm doing is using different forms to explore similar issues. Tracking back and forth across a range of themes and ideas, like notions of history, representation, the way authority is constructed, and so on.

Warrick Wynne: There's a freshness and directness I see here in these pieces. Part of it comes from the way you seem to effortlessly integrate the popular culture into the fabric of these stories in ways that raise questions without ever being hectoring. Does some of this freshness also come because you've had direct control over the construction and the editing rather than put it through the editorial 'committee' approach? Is that why you've put this together yourself?

Beth Spencer: It's certainly given me a lot of freedom (although it's also been a horrendous amount of work doing it this way). But on the other hand, it's only because all of the material has already been through the publishing process in one form or other -- on ABC Radio, or in books published by Random House and FIP, or in the case of the essays, they've all been published in magazines and journals -- that I've been able to put it together like this. Knowing that it's already been through that quality-control gatekeeping process, and commented on by critics and reviewers and so on, and passed those tests… I think it would be very difficult to publish something like this that was untried in that way.

Warrick Wynne: One of the things that strikes me about an approach that moves away from the traditional and the 'published' as if they are fixed and unchangeable cultural high-points is that your work, gathered together in this way, gives a real sense of the fluidity, the inter-connectedness and the emerging process of a writer at work, as themes recur, ideas re-shape and morph into something else. I can see, for example, young writers, finding a lot to work with, and be inspired by here.

Beth Spencer: Well I hope so. The proof is in the pudding and if it gets more students writing in a greater variety of ways, and writing more thoughtfully, and with more excitement about their writing, then I'll be very happy. I think being able to write is a very empowering thing.
      And I think writing should be a participatory thing. After all, not everyone who plays tennis is going to end up as a professional tennis player, and yet we recognise the benefits of doing this as an amateur activity. And I think writing -- and creative writing -- should be seen in the same way. There are lots of benefits, pleasures, and challenges involved in writing even one reasonable story or poem. And when literature is a participatory activity, it is going to be much healthier overall.

Warrick Wynne: You're not a teacher yourself, so it must have been something of a challenge to put together some of the exercises and response questions to the various pieces. How did you go about that?

Beth Spencer: I did talk with teachers, and piloted the texts and notes and got feedback and advice, but mostly I just decided to write the kinds of questions and writing exercises that I'd find interesting. Personally I always hated those comprehension questions at the end of a story of poem…

Warrick Wynne: Like "Why did the gulls mew?"

Beth Spencer: Yes, those impossible to answer things and that in attempting to answer killed any enjoyment or emotional involvement you'd had in the first place. Or the really plain dull easy to answer ones there to show that you did really read it.
      So rather than model my worksheets on what others have been doing, I just wrote the kinds of things I'd love people to think about or discuss or do after reading one of my stories or poems. And the kinds of things I'm interested in as a writer, so it's really about treating students as creative beings, as writers, rather than just seeing if they really did pay attention or really did read that homework. I mean, if they didn't read it because they enjoyed reading it or found it interesting, then I'm not sure how much they'd be learning from it, so can't see the point of those 'prove you read it' kind of questions.
      I'm much more interested in having them read a story of mine so that it can trigger their own thinking, and so they can explore their own responses, rather than forcing them to try to work out what was going on in my mind when I wrote it.

Warrick Wynne: So what's next for you; you're writing a novel about the history of the bra aren't you?

Beth Spencer: Yes, A Short (Personal) History of the Bra and its Contents, which is also my Phd. So I'm keen to get back to it.
      But I'm also interested to see how this goes, and be involved with it in an ongoing way, maybe do talks in schools and so on.
      Also there'll be a guestbook-kind of forum on the Dogmedia webpage, so it will be interactive beyond just clicking buttons on a CD-ROM. For instance teachers could share their ideas of how they used some of the pieces, or students could ask questions -- not necessarily to be answered by me, but other students and readers might be able to answer them or share their views.
      I like the idea of sharing and building a knowledge resource around it, so others who come along and want to make something like this can tap into this and see what works and what is still needed.

Warrick Wynne: There's so much here then that's really 'value-adding' isn't there? It seems to me as an English teacher that, unless we can find new ways such as this to bring contemporary voices into our classrooms, we're going to be condemned to having to work with old anthologies and serendipitous finds in magazines and journals. Good luck with the project.

Beth Spencer: Thanks Warrick.

 
Go to more information about Body of Words and Box of Words

Go to Beth Spencer's website

Go to Warrick Wynne's website and blog

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