There's kind of a little ritual I've evolved around listening to read this. I'll be sitting on the bench in my kitchen looking out over two hundred acres of wetlands, and in the distance there is this line of trees. They're so far away I can't tell what they are. But every morning I'll get up, I'll look out towards these trees, and I will kind of immediately physically realign stand properly just by looking at them.
Writing is It's clear a resolutely solitary pursuit. Different writers approach it differently. They have different interactions with peers and mentors, and different ideas about kinship with other writers, But by and large, their rituals, their approaches when deep in the writing bunker are theirs alone, and I'm not going to lie.
There is something very gratifying about discovering that for some writers, read this has become part of that ritual, That hearing other writers talk through their own thinking forms a basis for a sense of creative connection, That listening to these conversations creates a framework and a community around what they're doing. For Australian author Josephine Rowe, it was our episode with the brilliant, idiosyncratic Gerald Manain the quarter her attention.
There's a point where he's talking about the mind and consciousness and individuality and where that sort of meets infinity, and he describes this barren stretch of land, and in the distance there is this line of trees. I was like, looking out over pretty much what he was describing. It just felt this kind of beautiful echo.
The mind. Now, some people say there's a super ego and unconscious. I have never found any evidence for that view of the mind. My view of the mind is rather like the view that I can see around me all day in the western womroom, mostly level landscape with a line of trees in the distance. I think that's what my mind really is. The next christion is what's
behind a line of trees. Well, if you go through the trees, you're in another sort of beer landscape, and ten kilometers further over is another line of trees.
Two authors, two lines of trees in the middle distance, Two conversations about creativity and imagination and how we might conceive of our place in things. Josephine Rowe hadn't yet turned thirty when she published her first collection of short stories, Tarcuta Wake. It's a gorgeous book, delicate glimpses of lives and fragments of human experience, all about those things that are left behind, souvenirs and scars and shadows of prejudice. Her next book was a novel, A Loving, Faithful Animal.
It was long listed for the Miles Franklin Award in twenty seventeen. The New York Times described her language in the book as gorgeous and precise. Her latest book, Little World, is another slender volume, but, as with all of rose writing, a deeper, denser exploration of ideas than its modest page count might suggest. At the center of the book is a Saint, a young girl of unknown age whose body
remains incorruptible and whose mind remains conscious. Stretching across continents and eerrors from the nineteen fifties to the present day, we encounter the lives the Saint touches, from the retired engineer who unwittingly becomes her custodian, to a woman driving across the nullible plane in the mid nineteen seventies with a pair of young lovers. The whole thing ends in contemporary Victoria with the COVID lockdowns, casting a shadow across
all proceedings. Josephine Rowe is a deeply thoughtful, sharply intelligent writer whose books suggests an author acutely aware of the traditions into w she's writing, while at the same time resolutely carving out her own imaginary landscape. I'm Michael Williams, and this is Read. This a show about the books we love and the stories behind them.
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 whatever you want, and I didn't actually there. 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 Naru and Panama and termite mounds and you know, and all of these other wild places I was taken 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 draw that 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.
Is an amazing thing to be able to kind of make any sort of livelihood out of it, 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 develop the muscle of self belief where you're 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 that a lot in my teens in 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 than 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, you know, seeing and whittle 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 altogether and I just really focused on words.
So then I 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 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 Dutchey is a
big one for me. And again that's sort of that conviction to start a book with Dolphin Sonar to write about this life, you know, 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 there's 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 its 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.
Are 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 happened on the back of an envelope or a piece of
scrap paper hotel 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 kind of 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 inherited that from my mother.
Was she superstious?
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?
M 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 harness, 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.
If you do.
Hear it though from Randers 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 saint 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 art 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 saint, or who he has been told as a child saint, delivered by horsefloat somewhere in like mid twentieth century. That's what I had. I'm quite a visual writer, and 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 Naru 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 Nauru'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 dover 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 the opening image. I wrote the first section of the book, which is said in the nineteen fifties in the Kimberle and kind of reaches back to Naru in about the nineteen thirties,
kind 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 mere's 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 with the surfa. Sometimes I don't know, maybe we're getting into the weirds a bit here that I think I'm I'm often trying to kind of find the root cause or the root causes for yeah, for feeling.
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 except 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 Matild 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. We're back in her past somewhere.
Tell me about that may be 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 Lennard 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 saint in that book that I, you know, later in life. I was really interested in it. It's an Caterra de cock witha 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 it south, and that all her small scars disappeared as 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 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 inconsistent 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 as a living being, that somehow you're 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 in a 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're writ or do you find that the sense of kind of creative fulfillment organically comes from approaching a story slant wise?
Probably a mix of both. 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 likelihood 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're 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 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 wise
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.
Where the best public library is, that's all about it.
Yeah, yeah, I think a library card is probably that's probably the most valuable thing.
I respect that commitment to Grammar passport, library card and the passport. What more do you made?
Not much good parashues?
Yeah, that'll loert. Well, Look, thank you so much for joining us today. I really I love this book and it's a trait 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.
Before we go, I wanted to tell you what else I've been reading this week and back at the end of last year when we visited Fitzroy Pool, one of the people poolside was reading an advance copy of a debut Australian novel that was due out this year. That novel was called Ritual by Chloe Elizabeth Wilson, who's a Melbourne writer, and it's a lot of fun It's a darkly comic novel that basically takes at central conceit. What if one of those wellness brands that functions more or
less like a cult was actually a cult. It's funny, it's dark, it's very kind of relatable and very familiar and sharp satire. Such a nice thing to discover. Chloe Elizabeth Wilson's Ritual well worth a read. You can find it and all the others we mentioned at your favorite independent bookstore. That's it for this week's show. If you enjoyed it, please tell your friends and rate and review us. It helps a lot. Next week I'm reading this I'm
joined by Jessica Stanley. Her new novel, Consider Yourself Kissed, is one that's going to capture your attention and maybe even your heart. Read This is a Swartz Media production made possible by the generous support of ar Group. The show is produced and edited by Clara Ames, with mixing by Travis Evans and original compositions by Zalton Fetcher. Posey Makake edits our transcripts. Thanks for listening, See you next week.