Magdalena Ball: The Age of Fibs is a wonderful collection, with most pieces previously published in other contexts. Talk to me about the process of creating this as a book, and how it became something, in many ways, quite different than the sum of its parts — a completely new entity.

Beth Spencer: There’s always been a blurring of boundaries in the way I write — between story, memoir, essay and poetry — so it took a long time and a lot of experimenting to work out how to build this material into a book.

A few years ago I won a prize for a shorter manuscript, which was then published as an ebook. But I wanted it to be something more, with other pieces that were left out due to word limits, and for it to be something more deliberate in the way the themes and cross-references worked.

I wasn’t sure if there would be enough interest in such a hard-to-categorise book. But one of the things I’ve learned is that my writing has much more impact when I can bring it together into a body of work. I think even when you’re writing separate pieces for different reasons, there’s still that underlying consciousness and recurring concerns that each person has as a writer. And a body of work can come alive in a new way. So I love that you see it as an entity. And that’s how I feel about it — that it is something apart from me now, with its own life and energy. 

Magdalena Ball: Some of the pieces I knew quite well, but I was seeing new things in them and new correspondences, and thinking about the connections between them, it was like there was a new liminal space between each piece that didn't exist when they were on their own, or even in the shorter ebook.

Beth Spencer: A lot of my work is montage in some form or other. Within the individual pieces, and in the ways they work off each other. I like to come at a story or idea from different angles, and piece it together from fragments. So while there’s usually a narrative pull, there are also lots of gaps and spaces and contradictions. I like to think this allows others to bring in their own experiences as they read; and that it can be different each time you read it. Which I think is how memory works.

Magdalena Ball: It’s wonderful for a reader because it allows for multiple pathways through the world of the book. You always bring something to what you’re reading, you have your own unique perspective, and so this is a kind of collaborative experience with your writing in the reader’s mind, which is really quite delightful.

Beth Spencer: I always feel with a piece of writing that, while there’s a benefit for me in writing it, particularly if I'm exploring an aspect of my personal history in relation to public history, there's a whole other thing that happens when it lands and gets read, and you get the responses and discussions that go around it. I find that's when something really shifts in me and I hope in readers too.

It’s like something happens when readers put their energy into it. It comes alive in a new way. So, I love that. Thank you.

Magdalena Ball: You wrote new pieces for the book, but one of the pieces in here, ‘Bewitching’, is on, I think, its third iteration. I remember watching the Bewitched tv series as a kid in my grandparents’ bed when I was sick. So I’m just wondering how much that piece has changed in each of the different incarnations and why you chose it to begin the book.

Beth Spencer: There are a few pieces in here that came out of what I think of as ‘the Golden Age’ of ABC-Radio National. Pieces which were either commissioned for radio, or which began as text and then had a second life as a sound piece. I was very fortunate to work with some great people at RN — like Claudia Taranto, Brent Clough, Robyn Ravlich, and others— who created an amazing and nurturing space for freelance writers. And that way of working with text and sound and performance — it’s so intimate, and can go back and forth between the cultural and the personal. And the writing has to be so precise, as you always having to hold the listener’s attention.

Sadly, that’s changed, and there’s almost no room now for freelance writers or text-based ideas at Radio National. Which I think is a great loss, as they really did nurture a lot of writers in the past.

But… regarding ‘Bewitching’, I think that began as an interview I did with Claudia Taranto for a radio program she made. Then, when the movie came out, I wrote a piece for The Age newspaper. Then I rewrote it as a poem for a Heroines anthology. And then, when I started building Fibs into a book, I began to recognise that one of my recurring themes was the way we use popular culture to create ourselves, how it blends in with our own stories and our own histories, and how we use those stories to work out who we are.

So I reshaped it again as a microlit to fit this book.

Magdalena Ball: There is a line in it which I particularly love, and which I feel colours the rest of the book: ‘The feminine, the queer, the magical. The irruption of the repressed right here in my living room every night at six o'clock. Busting open all the doors and windows. Letting in the stars.’

Beth Spencer: TV was magical in those early days. (Well, still is, really.) We didn't have many books in my home, and I was a TV baby. So that narrative language of TV is what I cut my teeth on. Scenes splicing in and out, and then between them, you have ads popping up, and then it might go to a news flash. I think that has really influenced my montage writing style. And when you look into those mid to late sixties sit coms, they were quite radical in a subtle way in how they talked about gender and class and authority and social change.

Magdalena Ball: Throughout the book, you often take this kind of kitschy 60s, 70s and 80s pop culture — like Bewitched, and of course, Fatal Attraction, The Monkees, and so on — and elevate them to something that's really quite extraordinary. And there's all sorts of artefacts — photos, a therapy drawing, the Fibs bra… There’s a kind of referencing here that conflates memory and the fictive, and this is another of the themes that ties the book together.

Beth Spencer: Memory is such a complex thing. We re-write memories every time we bring them to consciousness. Every different thing that triggers a memory leads you to draw something different out of it. And memories (and histories) gain and lose information over time.

And as you pointed out, when these pieces are put in a certain order together in a book, they react off each other, and that’s what memory does; it's always re-inscribing the past, recreating molecules that no longer exist and splicing them into the present.

I mean you can just re-trigger a memory over and over again and just repeat it in the same way. Or you can play with that memory, and turn it slightly, and interrogate it, so the meaning you attach to it — and your beliefs around it — can shift. And that can expand how you might choose in the future. So, I love consciously working with memory — with public memory and private memory, and the way they intersect and play off each other.

Magdalena Ball: Wonderful. And you're working with tv shows that are so much a part of a certain generation that they’ve become an inherent part of who we are. And you even bring in TV references in your final piece so that in a way it circles back to Bewitched in the opening.

Beth Spencer: There’s a form that's come out in the past few years called ‘Autobibliography’, where someone will take a famous book — like George Eliot’s Middlemarch — and weave that into a personal memoir. I guess I’m doing that, but using popular culture instead of ‘high’ culture.

The piece at the end — ‘The True Story of an Escape Artist’ — began from five family photos that were evocative to me in different ways. It was a commission for a book called Family Pictures, and it ended up being an extremely challenging piece to write. Everyone else chose dead people, whereas I chose people very much alive and going through some major family dramas at the time.

So I had to use some writing tricks to be able to tell my story in a way that was honest and vulnerable, but at the same time, not actually spill the beans on personal things that affected others.

So somewhere along the way I decided to recreate the photos using my friends. So, for instance, the first photo is the 21 grandchildren when I was a baby. And at the end of the piece, there’s a photo where I got 21 of my friends together. And they were fantastic. Each of them was assigned a person to copy in the photo and they did the exact actions and expressions. And there just happened to be three babies born around the right time to match the three babies in the photo. It worked out beautifully.

And one of the things that came out of this process was seeing the way we so often recreate challenging family patterns and dynamics in our later relationships. I had created a new family when I went to Uni and I met some wonderful people — and many of them are still part of my friend-family — but it was interesting to notice how often I still slotted myself in as the youngest sister.

Magdalena Ball: And that’s another theme that works through the book — and this is one of the things that ties the fiction and the nonfiction together — the idea of identity as a construct. And you play with that in so many different ways.

Beth Spencer: Yes, identity is not a solid fixed thing. It’s always relational.

Magdalena Ball: And those relationships change.

Beth Spencer: Everything is constantly changing. And it’s the small variations that provide the opportunities for change.

Magdalena Ball: I love a line in ‘The True Story of an Escape Artist’ where you say, ‘Every family member is a competing family historian’. Which is, of course, true. And then you follow with: ‘I make no claims to be objective. I am a habitual fiction writer and rewriter of history.’

And then, regarding the title, there is a history of saying ‘the true story’ for things that are wildly not true...

Beth Spencer: Absolutely. And it’s also a nod to ‘bullshit artist’.

Magdalena Ball: Yes, exactly. There’s so many lovely plays happening.

I think we could talk for about three hours. But one of the pieces that stood out for me because it is quite different is ‘In the Hologram Forest.’ It’s the only Sci-Fi, but it does work beautifully to my mind. How did you work out what was needed to fill the gaps? At what point did you go, I need a piece that's going to do X?

Beth Spencer: This is actually a fragment that I lifted out of a novel that I might write one day, called ‘I Make the Beds They Lie In.’ Set in 2042, from the point of view of an indentured servant who works in one of the bunkers of the rich. And I liked that little moment in it — where she is talking with the coder who has created a Hologram forest. And with the television connection, the way the servants watch old 1960s sit coms at night, it felt like it also belonged in here. It also just seemed impossible to write a book at the moment without referencing the climate crisis in some way. So there are these microlit pieces scattered throughout.

I found it interesting to see how many of those 1960s series were both conscious of and anxious about the future. The Jetsons, The Flintstones (being back in the Stone Age but with modern accessories), I Dream of Jeannie with the astronauts. And The Beverly Hillbillies, which is mentioned in this piece, is of course about the discovery of oil, and about extreme wealth and the choices we make.

And then the idea of a hologram forest, which is a different kind of fictive space. One that references a real space, but is also predicated on its absence.

I'm really glad you picked that up and felt that it does fit.

Magdalena Ball: Such a powerful piece. And by having it in that spot in the collection, it really does raise this question about responsibility, and loss and trauma and what remains. And this colours the pieces around it in such a beautiful way.

Beth Spencer: And I think that goes back to that issue about how we remember things — and that’s what writing history is, a public remembering — how we choose to do that.

So even though there's this terrible grief and feeling of powerlessness about what's happening with the climate crisis, every time we remember something — or write about something — we're also changing the kind of choices we offer to ourselves. So thank you for recognising that.

Magdalena Ball: It’s also a little bit of hope. It’s a weird kind of hope. But there is a hope even in that piece, that something has remained, that it's not all lost. And I think that colours the other pieces around it, including the final piece, which is quite a long one. You are very subtle with it, but there is this sense of a kind of trauma running through it. An unspoken undercurrent, the flip side of the family secrets. You’ve talked a little bit about this notion of coming at things in piecemeal and slant and allowing it to unfold. So maybe just finish off by talking a bit about that.

Beth Spencer: It’s so interesting that you raise this in the context of the Hologram Forest because one of the things I find extraordinary about the planet is that things come back. Even when you think things have been eradicated or become extinct, if you do provide a bit of space and habitat and context — and the thought is the start of that — things do sometimes come back. It's amazing how things can regenerate.

Even with this piece about my family, this was written at a time when I really did just want to escape my family of origin and create a new family with my friends. But since then I’ve found that if you hang in there long enough, that some things can shift.  So there are a few things that have happened in the past decade, which I might write about some time, that have profoundly altered my relationship within that family.

And I guess that fits with my idea that if you just keep going, and you keep playing with things, and you play in an intentional way, if you're always doing it with curiosity and question, then it can often open up into something different.

Magdalena Ball: There is this sense of almost decolonizing the language that runs through your book, and that’s there right from the beginning with Bewitched —  this queer, magical undermining of that world that Darrin represents.

Darrin? Darwin? Derwent?

Beth Spencer: Yes, I love the way his mother-in-law Endora always got his name mixed up.

Magdalena Ball: And he is like a representative of the straight, patriarchal capitalist structures. And this again, is an undercurrent throughout the book, almost a kind of mystical quality to it, that subversiveness, which is really quite beautiful.

Beth Spencer: That’s a really great way of looking at it.

Magdalena Ball: We could talk for hours about this, but we’re out of time. Congratulations on The Age of Fibs; it’s a fabulous book.

 This text is adapted from an interview for Compulsive Reader Talks podcast.