April 30, 2025 • 27 mins
Josephine Rowe’s writing has been described by the New York Times as “gorgeous” and “precise”. This is particularly evident in her latest novel, Little World, a slender book that offers a deeper, denser exploration of ideas than its modest page count might suggest. This week on the show, Michael sits down with Josephine to discuss the genesis of Little World and why a library card might be her most prized possession.
Reading list:
Tarcutta Wake, Josephine Rowe, 2012
A Faithful, Loving Animal, Josephine Rowe, 2016
Here Until August, Josephine Rowe, 2019
Little World, Josephine Rowe, 2025
Ritual, Chloe Elisabeth Wilson, 2025
You can find these books and all the others we mentioned at your favourite independent book store.
Socials: Stay in touch with Read This on Instagram
Guest: Josephine Rowe
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
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
(00:21):
these trees, and I will kind of immediately physically realign
stand properly just by looking at them.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
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.
(00:50):
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.
(01:10):
For Australian author Josephine Rowe, it was our episode with
the brilliant, idiosyncratic Gerald Manain the quarter her attention.
Speaker 1 (01:18):
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
(01:39):
just felt this kind of beautiful echo.
Speaker 3 (01:43):
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
(02:05):
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.
Speaker 2 (02:19):
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
(02:41):
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,
(03:06):
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
(03:28):
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
(03:50):
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
(04:11):
we love and the stories behind them.
Speaker 1 (04:17):
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.
(04:38):
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
(04:59):
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
(05:22):
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.
Speaker 2 (05:32):
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.
Speaker 1 (05:49):
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
(06:12):
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.
Speaker 2 (06:33):
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.
Speaker 1 (06:52):
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,
(07:16):
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
(07:40):
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.
Speaker 2 (07:59):
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
(08:19):
young writer trying to emulate before you found your own voice.
Speaker 1 (08:22):
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
(08:44):
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
(09:09):
a book that I read with like, oh, you can
do anything, you just have to.
Speaker 2 (09:13):
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
(09:35):
more I read, the rarer it is to get that
thing of the surprise of the possible.
Speaker 1 (09:40):
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
(10:02):
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
(10:24):
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.
Speaker 2 (10:46):
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?
Speaker 1 (11:00):
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
(11:22):
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
(11:44):
of little world was kind of written on that particular
hotel station.
Speaker 2 (11:47):
Are you superstitious? Yeah, very sorry. I was just picking
up the vibe from several of your answers.
Speaker 1 (11:53):
I think I inherited that from my mother.
Speaker 2 (11:56):
Was she superstious?
Speaker 1 (11:57):
She was very superstitious. Absolutely.
Speaker 2 (12:00):
Did she apply that superstition to kind of the way
she lived her life or did it constrain the way
she lived her life?
Speaker 1 (12:09):
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.
Speaker 2 (12:21):
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.
Speaker 1 (12:32):
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
(12:54):
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.
Speaker 4 (13:00):
If you do.
Speaker 2 (13:00):
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
(13:21):
Heaven and Earth.
Speaker 1 (13:22):
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.
Speaker 2 (13:43):
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.
Speaker 1 (14:05):
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
(14:29):
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
(14:53):
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
(15:18):
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
(15:38):
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
(16:00):
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,
(16:23):
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
(16:44):
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,
(17:05):
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
(17:26):
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
(17:48):
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.
Speaker 2 (18:02):
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?
Speaker 1 (18:12):
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
(18:36):
to kind of find the root cause or the root
causes for yeah, for feeling.
Speaker 2 (18:45):
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.
Speaker 1 (19:03):
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
(19:24):
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
(19:47):
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.
Speaker 2 (19:58):
Tell me about that may be saint, and tell me
about your relationship with saints as an idea.
Speaker 1 (20:05):
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
(20:28):
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
(20:52):
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
(21:15):
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.
(21:38):
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
(22:00):
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.
Speaker 2 (22:21):
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.
Speaker 1 (22:41):
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
(23:03):
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
(23:24):
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.
Speaker 2 (23:38):
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?
Speaker 1 (23:58):
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.
Speaker 2 (24:18):
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
(24:39):
you're looking at at when you're right.
Speaker 1 (24:41):
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
(25:03):
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.
Speaker 4 (25:17):
You wash up.
Speaker 2 (25:18):
Where the best public library is, that's all about it.
Speaker 1 (25:22):
Yeah, yeah, I think a library card is probably that's
probably the most valuable thing.
Speaker 2 (25:28):
I respect that commitment to Grammar passport, library card and
the passport. What more do you made?
Speaker 1 (25:32):
Not much good parashues?
Speaker 2 (25:34):
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.
Speaker 1 (25:41):
You so much, Michael, really really honored to be here.
Thank you.
Speaker 2 (25:46):
Josephine Rose new book, Little World is available at all
Good bookstores.
Speaker 4 (25:51):
Now.
Speaker 2 (26:05):
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
(26:26):
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
(26:48):
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
(27:12):
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.
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
(00:21):
these trees, and I will kind of immediately physically realign
stand properly just by looking at them.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
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.
(00:50):
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.
(01:10):
For Australian author Josephine Rowe, it was our episode with
the brilliant, idiosyncratic Gerald Manain the quarter her attention.
Speaker 1 (01:18):
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
(01:39):
just felt this kind of beautiful echo.
Speaker 3 (01:43):
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
(02:05):
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.
Speaker 2 (02:19):
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
(02:41):
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,
(03:06):
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
(03:28):
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
(03:50):
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
(04:11):
we love and the stories behind them.
Speaker 1 (04:17):
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.
(04:38):
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
(04:59):
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
(05:22):
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.
Speaker 2 (05:32):
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.
Speaker 1 (05:49):
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
(06:12):
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.
Speaker 2 (06:33):
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.
Speaker 1 (06:52):
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,
(07:16):
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
(07:40):
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.
Speaker 2 (07:59):
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
(08:19):
young writer trying to emulate before you found your own voice.
Speaker 1 (08:22):
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
(08:44):
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
(09:09):
a book that I read with like, oh, you can
do anything, you just have to.
Speaker 2 (09:13):
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
(09:35):
more I read, the rarer it is to get that
thing of the surprise of the possible.
Speaker 1 (09:40):
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
(10:02):
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
(10:24):
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.
Speaker 2 (10:46):
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?
Speaker 1 (11:00):
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
(11:22):
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
(11:44):
of little world was kind of written on that particular
hotel station.
Speaker 2 (11:47):
Are you superstitious? Yeah, very sorry. I was just picking
up the vibe from several of your answers.
Speaker 1 (11:53):
I think I inherited that from my mother.
Speaker 2 (11:56):
Was she superstious?
Speaker 1 (11:57):
She was very superstitious. Absolutely.
Speaker 2 (12:00):
Did she apply that superstition to kind of the way
she lived her life or did it constrain the way
she lived her life?
Speaker 1 (12:09):
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.
Speaker 2 (12:21):
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.
Speaker 1 (12:32):
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
(12:54):
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.
Speaker 4 (13:00):
If you do.
Speaker 2 (13:00):
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
(13:21):
Heaven and Earth.
Speaker 1 (13:22):
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.
Speaker 2 (13:43):
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.
Speaker 1 (14:05):
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
(14:29):
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
(14:53):
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
(15:18):
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
(15:38):
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
(16:00):
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,
(16:23):
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
(16:44):
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,
(17:05):
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
(17:26):
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
(17:48):
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.
Speaker 2 (18:02):
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?
Speaker 1 (18:12):
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
(18:36):
to kind of find the root cause or the root
causes for yeah, for feeling.
Speaker 2 (18:45):
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.
Speaker 1 (19:03):
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
(19:24):
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
(19:47):
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.
Speaker 2 (19:58):
Tell me about that may be saint, and tell me
about your relationship with saints as an idea.
Speaker 1 (20:05):
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
(20:28):
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
(20:52):
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
(21:15):
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.
(21:38):
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
(22:00):
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.
Speaker 2 (22:21):
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.
Speaker 1 (22:41):
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
(23:03):
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
(23:24):
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.
Speaker 2 (23:38):
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?
Speaker 1 (23:58):
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.
Speaker 2 (24:18):
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
(24:39):
you're looking at at when you're right.
Speaker 1 (24:41):
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
(25:03):
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.
Speaker 4 (25:17):
You wash up.
Speaker 2 (25:18):
Where the best public library is, that's all about it.
Speaker 1 (25:22):
Yeah, yeah, I think a library card is probably that's
probably the most valuable thing.
Speaker 2 (25:28):
I respect that commitment to Grammar passport, library card and
the passport. What more do you made?
Speaker 1 (25:32):
Not much good parashues?
Speaker 2 (25:34):
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.
Speaker 1 (25:41):
You so much, Michael, really really honored to be here.
Thank you.
Speaker 2 (25:46):
Josephine Rose new book, Little World is available at all
Good bookstores.
Speaker 4 (25:51):
Now.
Speaker 2 (26:05):
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
(26:26):
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
(26:48):
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
(27:12):
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.
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