Hello again.
It's Ruby Jones and I'm back to share another episode of Read This, Schwartz Media's weekly books podcast, hosted by editor of Monthly Michael Williams. It features conversations with some of the most talented writers from Australia and around the world. In this episode, Michael is chatting with Australian writer Josephine Rowe. As always, Michael is here to tell me a little
bit more about the episode and Michael. Ruby Jones Hello, So, Michael, As a podcast host myself, I know that there is something really special about learning the guests of the show actually listen to it regularly, and I believe you had that experience with your guest Josephine Rowe.
Yes, I'd like to think Ruby, it's more than just vanity. You know, there is something very nice when someone comes in to do the show and they're already a listener, but there's this added element to it with writers, because we know that writing is such a kind of solitary pursuit that in many ways writers are doomed to labor on their own until the end when they finally get
to come out and talk about it. And the idea that a writer and in the case of this week's guest, a writer of the caliber of Josephine Rowe is listening to Read This and finding stuff in it that resonates for her creatively, intellectually, emotionally, is a very rewarding thing. The first episode where she had that experience with Read This was when we had on as a guest, the singular Gerald Manaine, and Gerald tells a story about how his creative process works and compares it to looking out
at a line of trees in the middle distance. And while listening to this, Josephine Rowe was working in her own house in coastal Victoria, and she had more or less the literal embodiment of that experience. She was looking out at a similar kind of horizon, a similar set
of distant trees. And to me, there's something really lovely about the fact of two different writers, different experiences, different points of their career, but somehow in communion with each other look out of a similar rows of trees, both literal and figurative. That seems nice to me.
That's really special. So onto Josephine and her latest novel, Little World. Can you tell me a bit about it?
Yeah, Little world's actually only. Josephine rose second novel, her Verse, was called A Loving, Faithful Animal, and it was long listed for the Miles Franklin Award back in twenty seventeen. It was described in The New York Times as gorgeous and having precise language, and that really does sum up Josephine Roe's particular gift. In between, she also published a
collection of short stories similarly. Gorgeous Little World is a small book, a slender volume, as publishers like to say, but as with all of rose writing, it's much deeper and denser than its limited page count might have you expect. At the center of it is the story of a saint, a young girl we don't know what age she is, whose body remains incorruptible and whose mind remains conscious. And the story stretches across continents and eras from the nineteen
fifties to the present day. There's a retired engineer who unwittingly becomes a custodian, a woman driving across the Nullibor in the mid seventies, and then at all the ends in contemporary Victoria with COVID lockdown, Josephine wrote, is just so kind of thoughtful and sharply intelligent, and her books demonstrate the ways in which she is an author who is acutely aware of the traditions into which she's writing, but also at the same time she's someone who is
resolutely carving out her own imaginary landscape. And it was a treat to talk to her.
Coming up In just a moment, Josephine wrote, isn't interested in efficiency.
I didn't intend to write this book.
Necessarily.
I had to write this book so that I could get back to writing the book that I was meant to be writing. And I think at this particular time in my life, where it was sort of late thirties, I felt like i'd sort of maybe most people, most writers feel this between books, you just completely drop off the map. Unless your book is a raging success. You kind of dip in and out of obscurity. And I
think that's really fertile and important. So that plus being kind of late thirties and I was very transient, kind of moving around a lot. Nobody knew where I was living, and I was kind of like, nobody's looking quick, nobody's looking.
You can do whatever you want, and I didn't.
Actually there were central images in this book that were just so resident that I had to had to kind of follow through them. But I didn't expect to be writing about leprosy colonies in Naaru and Panama and termite mounds and you know, and all of these other wild places I was to and I did not expect it necessarily to be published.
And that wasn't even the point.
It's nice to me that it wasn't the point. And it's nice to me that you're liberated by the idea that no one's watching, so you're allowed, almost as a permission thing, you're allowed to do it. Does that suggest that this kind of writing, when you're doing it, feels like an indulgence.
Which is not to say that it was easy. It took a long time. I tend to put things down for a while, put them in the third raw, let them, let them kind of mature a bit. And I'm a kind of ruthless condenser. So it's, you know, a very short novel, but it feels a bit. I hope it feels a bit like it's eaten a larger novel, because that's pretty much the breadth of it in terms of writing. Maybe on some level, writing always feels like an indulgence.
It is an amazing thing to be able to kind of make any sort of livelihood of It's something that feels so necessary to you as a form of expression, to be both the means and the end.
So that relationship between that idea of necessity and the idea of doubt. Do you remember for you the moment if there was such a moment when you developed the muscle of self belief where you were like, this is worth pursuing. This is a thing that I am going to do, regardless of the doubt.
I guess I started writing quite young, and started publishing quite young, and before that there was music. I was in bands a lot in my teens and early twenties and was writing as well, And there was a point where I suppose I felt well, partly, I was surrounded by brilliant musicians who really spoke music as a first language,
and I did not have that background. And perhaps it's easier to feel conviction being a self taught inverted commas writer, and it is to feel conviction being a self taught musician. I don't know if that's true. That was true of me maybe, or maybe it was just in terms of the people I was in relation to and making music with, who I saw as being far, far more talented and natural in that than I was. I do love music, and I sing and while a lot, but I don't
write music anymore. There was a point where music sort of took the backseat, and then it got out of the car al together and I just really focused on.
Words.
So the idea that perhaps amongst musicians you felt it wasn't your native tongue or your native form in the same way it was for some of the people you revered when you made that move from music to the written word. Were there traditions you found you wanted to belong to. Were their writers you found yourself as a young writer trying to emulate before you found your own voice.
Oh who do I?
I feel is like deep in the fabric, you know, when somebody asks your favorite book and you kind of like reach back to the favorite books that have been your favorite books for twenty twenty five years. But coming through Slaughter by Michael and Datcha is a big one for me. And again that sort of that conviction to start a book with Dolphin Sonar to write about this life.
You know, the early nineteen hundreds Corner Player in Your Orleans that you have a handful of facts about and then just to that kind of like wonderful, fragmentary, illuminative narrative that he builds from that. And that was a book that I read with like, oh, you can do anything, you.
Just have to.
I can so see that in your work, sincerely, and in that thing of One of the feelings that I most am seeking out is that feeling you get of I didn't know you could do that. You know, that idea that they somehow a license somehow. What's happening with the form, what's happening with the sentence on the line is confounding my expectations. And the older I git the more I read, the rarer it is to get that thing of the surprise of the possible.
Yeah, I think that's writing it.
It's best as well when you kind of come to that junctuary like, well, I didn't.
Know I could do that? Am I allowed to do that?
And you have to sort of turn off that critic that is kind of policing what is permissible. Maybe sometimes I think that that term to give permission or to take permission is kind of problematic. Because if I think for myself, if I was waiting for permission, I would never have become a writer. I just don't come from that sort of background. I was raised by libraries. I would be nowhere without libraries. I grew up in the outer Eastern suburbs in a commission house. There were not
a lot of books in the house. There was not a lot of money for books, but there was, you know, the Country Gully Library where I was taking out Leonard Cohen poems from the age of about you know, thirteen
or something like that. And then that sort of trajectory to twenty twenty one, twenty twenty two being on a research fellowship at the New York Public Library, which is I used to get tiery walking into the New York Public Library, just the idea this is for everyone, and that it's just a great equalizer.
Do you a linear writer? I mean you described this as a small book that has swallowed a big book. Do you do you write and then cut down? Do you write in fragments and then work out how they fit together? Is it a combination?
I think anybody who was at all interested in efficiency would be horrified by the way that I write. I write longhand a lot. I think there's just part of my brain that completely shuts down if I'm looking at a laptop, So I try to leave it out of the process for as long as possible. But you know, I do think that all of the best thoughts happen on the back of an envelope or a piece of
scrap paper. Hotels stationary Gold. Literally think there was a hotel notebook from a while ago that it's felt like every every time I wrote something onto that particular notebook, it was like a little midas like it turned into it bloomed into an idea. Actually, a lot of little world was kind of written on that particular hotel station.
Are you superstitious?
Yeah, very sorry.
I was just picking up the vibe from several of your answers.
I think I think I inherited that from my mother.
Was she superstitious?
She was very superstitious. Absolutely.
Did she apply that superstition to kind of the way she lived her life or did it constrain the way she lived her life?
Mmm?
I would say it did constrain in some ways. But she did have a certain sort of spookiness about her as well, in terms of like knowing what you were thinking.
Maybe that's just do.
You think writers have to have that slight spookiness about them, like that idea that there are forces beyond their control that they are trying to harm s rather than I've had.
That conversation with Rodney Hall actually about these, you know, the sort of coincidences that you are dealt and then you can choose to do something with or not, but you don't really have a choice. You have to kind of follow them through. I don't know if spookiness affects writers anymore so than anybody else. Maybe writers are just the people who are kind.
Of like, I'll take an idea wherever I can get I'll take direction wherever I can get it. Let's let's go with this.
You do hear it though from writers all the time is Oh, that character developed a life of their own, and I was surprised to see what happened on the page. And you know, I looked up out of a few sat and I had twenty thousand words or whatever. That idea is the idea that creativity and belief in the book have to rely on a kind of more things in heaven and earth.
Yeah.
Yeah, well then I think with most, with most are forms, I think an artist would say, you know, the best experience of making anything is that feeling of being a conduit, that you're not entirely at the wheel, or you're at the wheel, but you're not you know, you're not necessarily in charge.
When we come back, Josephine shares how her relationship with saints began and the one thing she can't live without. We'll be right back.
The very first image. And it doesn't spoil it because it is the first image. That's the image that opens the book, in the first couple of pages, is a man standing in the Australian desert waiting to receive the body of a child's saint, or who he has been told as a child saint, delivered by horse float somewhere in like mid twentieth century. That's that's what I had a very I'm quite a visual writer, and that that was the image that found me sometime in twenty eighteen.
I actually like flipped back to my notebooks because I can't exactly pass how we get from there to Naaruru and leprosy.
And I think I was thinking a lot about about.
Naru, about what would make a nation amenable to how Australia has used it to. Even the term offshore processing is such a bloodless, cruel, dehumanizing term. But what makes a nation so desperate for revenue that that is the industry that they are open to. And so I got very interested in Naru's past in terms of phosphate mining and I kind of deep dived on that and in
terms of those unintentional echoes. I went to you know, Broom and north of Broom for the first time, and that landscape just absolutely fused with this with this opening image, I can't remember which came first, and even the kind of visual of termite mounds and how those recall the pinnacles of limestone that are left over from gouging for a phosphate and what top side looks like on Naru. Now that was not an intentional visual echo, but that is kind of I think aspects of that reoccurred all
through the book. Things that I didn't set out to kind of mirror or to recall, they just happened that way. So that was that was the opening image. I wrote the first section of the book, which is said in the nineteen fifties in the Kimberley and kind of reaches back to Naaru in about the nineteen thirties of leading up to the Second World War.
And I wrote the final.
Part of the book, which is set in an unnamed central Victorian town at the outset of the coronavirus, and I had an idea of what the sort of middle section would be, but it did take a long time to write, partly because that middle section, which is a bit of a extended fever dream or screenwriting friend told me the term vast desert, like the second act being a vast desert, and it's from the perspective of the driver and she has not slept for a long time,
and Mattils is the name of the protagonist in that section of the book. She is pretty much where I channeled all of my own insomnia or I wanted to do something with that particular state of mind where you're so tired that it really does affect your perception and it feels like the edges of things kind of start to break down. And that is like a really great state to be reading Spinosa in, because you're just kind of like, oh, there's no there's no me, there's no youth, there's not even us.
There's just this.
I've got to say, I'm very impressed with the idea that insomnia might be a generative state. That's never been my experience. Tell me, what role does emotion play for you when you're right?
I think I'm somebody whose emotions are quite close to the surface in lots of ways, or at least it feels that way, to the extent that maybe I kind of I'm careful of what I let show it this offa sometimes I don't know, maybe we're getting into the weirds a bit here, but I think I'm often trying to kind of find the root cause or the root causes for yeah, forefeeling.
So what about then, through the lens of someone like Matilda and a conception of a character like that giving her self knowledge, giving her the language to describe what she's grappling with? Yes, how much do you want to give that over to your character? And how much do you accept that as unspoken or at least assumed.
Yeah, sure, I mean I think something that I hope I am getting better at is allowing characters to not be articulate, to not have infinite self knowledge. I think there's an awful lot that Matilde can't bear to look at or even name about her experience, you know, violences, harms that she has simply just completely disconnected from as
a survival mechanism. And I think what were allowed through the sort of semi omniscient view of this other character who's who i'll refer to as a maybe saint, is kind of insight around those things Matilda hides from herself were back in her past somewhere.
Tell me about that maybe saint, and tell me about your relationship with saints as an idea.
Yeah, I think that the first intimation of a saint that was interesting to me was in Lenard Cohen's Beautiful Losers. I read it at fifteen, and I tried to reread it recently, and it is I had to stop after a certain point, but there's a there's a saint in that book that I, you know, later in life. I was really interested in it. It's an caterrat to cock with her, who's an indigenous saint or a First Nation saint.
She was called the Lily of the Mohawks. And I was just kind of curious and kind of repulsed about what goes into sainthood, I suppose, And in this case, it was you know, on death she turned white, which is troubling in itself, and that all her small pox scars disappeared. Well, I was like, oh, okay, and it's like, for whose sake is that? It's forgiveness, it's atonement for
you know, for things that maybe oughtn't be given. And I guess traveling through Europe and kind of walking into churches cathedrals where where saints will often be just laid out and displayed. In the case of this, I'm going to call her a maybe saint. Her body is not broken down, so she's kind of like arrested between this world and whatever comes after, but her consciousness is still intact.
I think I had an idea of that when I sat out writing the book, but at the start I didn't realize that she was going to be such a strong voice in the book. Again, it was kind of like, oh, I didn't know. I didn't know I.
Could do that. Okay, oh wait, we go.
I Actually I was kind of ashamed of myself and afterwards because I was like, well, of course she has like she has to have autonomy of some kind, even if it's like rage, even if it's interior because otherwise she's a girl in a box that stands for what other people have decided she stands for and represents. And so yeah, I became integral that she have a person who had a history.
That makes a lot of sense. That is not if it's not an offensive parallel, that's not income system with the way. In interviews in the past, you talked about the responsibility of depicting animals in your work, that if they were only there as a symbol of something rather than as a living being, that somehow you were doing them an injustice. Yeah.
Absolutely, I think maybe it just comes down to I'm not especially interested in human beings as a superior species, and definitely no kind of person as being superior to another, and maybe no narrative or story as being We have like an attachment to particular narrative arcs of people who overcome, and that you know, people are strong. We consider characters strong or their lives meaningful only if they sort of tick these boxes and if there is a positive change,
and otherwise is the story not worth telling? Is the person less vulnerable if they don't overcome, if they just endure. I think I've always been interested in telling those stories from the margins. But even that word is wrong because it's like the word remote, remote to where, marginal to whom? Yeah, you know, they're the center of their own life.
Yeah, No, that resisting the idea of the kind of dominant or normal narrative. Is that resistance an active act for you when you write? Or do you find that the sense of kind of creative fulfillment organically comes from approaching a story slantwise?
Probably a mix of both. I think I think I see myself as being kind of an outsider in lots of ways. Again, maybe that's typical of a lot of writers and big readers. That's sort of why we show up in the first place.
They were kind of that's why you meet the best people in libraries.
It's funny you said earlier that sense of between books, the possibility, even the likelyhood of falling off the map when you're between books. You're a peripatetic writer, and I'm curious about the effect that's had on your writing, on your creative process, on the different lines of trees that you're looking at at when you right.
Yeah, that's a really good question. I like the one about the trees.
I do think the trees and the landscape that you're in do shape your your perception. That's part of me that really sort of graves grounding actually of one kind or another. You know, on my birth certificate the address of my mother is a caravan park in Queensland and the address of my father is a different caravan park in Queensland. And I think that is like a self fulfilling prophecy. I mean, that's like the wires in the house.
And I don't I don't make the rules. I'm just laying it's pretty much set out, you.
Wash up wherever. The best public libraries, that's all about it.
Yeah, yeah, I think a library card is probably that's probably the most thing.
I respect, that commitment to grammar and passport, library card and the passport. What more do you need?
Not much good parashoes?
Yeah, that'll alert well. Look, thank you so much for joining us today. I really I love this book and it's a treat to change.
You so much, Michael, really really honored to be here. Thank you.
Josephine Rose new book, Little World is available at all Good bookstores now.
Thank you so much for listening to another special episode. To read this as always, if you want to dive further into the show, you can search for it wherever you listen to podcasts. There are more than eighty episodes in the Read this archive for you to enjoy. See you next week.