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 Transcript: JOSEPHINE: 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 200 acres of wetlands and in the distance, there is this line of trees, like 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 and 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 Murnane that caught her attention. JOSEPHINE: 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. GERALD: The mind: now, you know, some people say there's a superego and an id and an 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 Wimmera. Mostly level landscape with a line of trees in the distance. I think that's what my mind really is. And the next question is, what's behind the line of trees? Well, if you go through the trees you're in another, sort of bare landscape, and ten kilometres 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 30 when she published her first collection of short stories, Tarcutta 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 longlisted for the Miles Franklin Award in 2017. 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 Rowe’s writing, a deeper, denser exploration of ideas than its modest page count might suggest. At the centre 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 eras, from the 1950s 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 Nullarbor Plain in the mid-1970s 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 suggest an author acutely aware of the traditions into which 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. JOSEPHINE: 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 30s, 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 is looking. You can do whatever you want. And I didn't actually…. there were central images in this book that were just so resonant that I had to kind of follow through them, but I didn't expect to be writing about leprosy colonies in Nauru and Panama and termite mounds and all 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. MICHAEL: It's nice to me that it wasn't the point, and it's nice to me 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? JOSEPHINE: Ooh, which was 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 drawer, let them, kind of, mature a bit, and I'm a kind of ruthless condenser. So it's 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's 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. MICHAEL: 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 the thing that I'm gonna do regardless of the doubt. JOSEPHINE: 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” 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 sing and whistle a lot, but I don't write music anymore. There was a point where music sort of took the back seat and then it got out of the car altogether and I just really focused on words. MICHAEL: So that 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 there writers you found yourself, as a young writer, trying to emulate before you found your own voice? JOSEPHINE: Hmmm, who do I feel is deep in the fabric? Um, you know when somebody asks for your favourite book and you kind of like reach back to the favourite books that have been your favourite books for 20, 25 years. But Coming through Slaughter by Michael Ondaatje 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, early 1900s cornet player in New 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 and was like, “Oh you can do anything, you just have to…” MICHAEL: I can so see that in your work, sincerely, and in that thing of one of the feelings that I'm most seeking out is that feeling you get of, “I didn't know you could do that.” That idea that there's somehow a licence, somehow what's happening with the form, what's happening with the sentence on the line is confounding my expectations. And the older I get, the more I read, the rarer it is to get that thing, the surprise of the possible. JOSEPHINE: Yeah, I think that's writing at its best as well. When you kind of come to that juncture, you're like, “Oh, 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 little money for books, but there was the Ferntree Gully Library where I was taking out Leonard Cohen poems from the age of about 13 or something like that. And then that sort of trajectory to... 2021, 2022, being on a research fellowship at the New York Public Library, which is, I used to get teary walking into the New York Public Library, just the idea that this is for everyone and that it's just a great equaliser. MICHAEL: Are you a linear writer? I mean, you describe this as a small book that has swallowed a big book. Do you write and then cut down? Do you write in fragments and then work out how they fit together? Is it a combination? JOSEPHNE: I think anybody who is 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. You know, I, I do think that all of the best thoughts, uh, happen on the back of an envelope or a piece of scrap paper, hotel stationery gold. I literally think there was a hotel notebook from, from a while ago that it 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 stationary. MICHAEL: Are you superstitious? JOSEPHINE: Yeah, very. MICHAEL: Sorry, I was just picking up the vibe from several of your answers. JOSEPHINE: I think I inherited that from my mother. MICHAEL: Was she superstitious? JOSEPHINE: She was very superstitious. Absolutely. MICHAEL: I love that. Did she apply that superstition to kind of the way she lived her life or did it constrain the way that she lived her life? JOSEPHINE: 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. MICHAEL: 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? JOSEPHINE: 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 any moreso 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 direction wherever I get it, let's go with this.” MICHAEL: 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 fugue state and I had 20,000 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. JOSEPHINE: Yeah, well then, I think 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, 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. [Advertisement] JOSEPHINE: The very first image – and it doesn't spoil it because it is the first image that with 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 is a child saint, delivered by horse float, somewhere in like mid- 20th century that's that's what I had a very… I'm quite a visual writer and that was, that was the image that found me sometime in 2018. I actually like flipped back to my notebooks because I can't exactly parse how we get from there to Nauru and leprosy and um I think I was thinking lot about, about Nauru, about what would make a nation amenable to how Australia has used it to, even the term offshore processing is such a bloodless, cruel, dehumanising 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 echos, I went to, you know, Broome and North of Broome 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 topside looks like on Nauru 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 uh I didn't set out to to kind of mirror or to recall they just happened that way. So that was the, that was the opening image. I wrote the first section of the book which is set in the 1950s in the Kimberley and kind of reaches back to Nauru in about the 1930s, 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 an extended fever dream, or a 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 Matilde is the name of the protagonist in that section of the book. She is pretty much where I channeled all of my own insomnia. 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 Spinoza in because you're kind of like, “Oh there's no there's not me there's there's no you that's not even us that's just this…” MICHAEL: I’ve got to say I am 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 write? JOSEPHINE: 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 at the surface sometimes, I don't know, maybe we're getting into the weeds a bit here. But I think I'm often trying to kind of find the root cause or the root causes for feeling. MICHAEL: So what about then through the lens of someone like Matilde, and a conception of a character like that, giving her self-knowledge, giving her the language to describe what she's grappling with, 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? JOSEPHINE: 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 we're allowed through the sort of semi-omniscient view of this other character, who I'll refer to as a maybe-saint, is kind of insight around those things Matilde hides from herself or back in her past somewhere. MICHAEL: Tell me about that maybe-saint and tell me about your relationship with saints as an idea. JOSEPHINE: Yeah, I think that the first intimation of a saint that was interesting to me was in Leonard Cohen's Beautiful Losers. I read it at 15 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 Indigenous… Katerita Kakwatha, who's an indigenous saint or a First Nations 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 as well and I was like, oh, okay. And it's like... Who, for whose sake is that? It’s forgiveness, it's atonement for, you know, for things that maybe oughtn't be forgiven. And I guess travelling through Europe and kind of walking into churches, cathedrals, 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 set out writing the book, but at the start I didn't realise 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 could do that. Okay, away we go.” I actually I was kind of ashamed of myself afterwards because I was like, well, of course, she has to have autonomy of some kind, even if it's like rage, even if it is 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, it became integral that she have a personhood, a history. MICHAEL: 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 living being, that somehow you were doing them an injustice. JOSEPHINE: 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. You know, they're the centre of their own life. MICHAEL: Yeah, no, 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 fulfilment organically comes from approaching a story slantwise? JOSEPHINE: 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. It's like we're kind of, that's why you meet the best people in libraries. MICHAEL: 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 when you write. JOSEPHINE: 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. There's part of me that really sort of craves 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 like… it was pretty much set out. MICHAEL: You wash up wherever the best public library is, that's all that matters. JOSEPHINE: Yeah, I think a library card is probably… that’s probably the most valuable thing and a passport. MICHAEL: I respect that commitment to groundedness and a library card and a passport. What more do you need? JOSEPHINE: Not much, good pair of shoes. MICHAEL: No, that'll do it. Well, look, thank you so much for joining us today. I really, I love this book and it's a treat to chat to you. JOSEPHINE: Thank you so much, Michael, really, really honoured to be here, thank you. Josephine Rowe’s new book Little World is available at all good bookstores now. [Advertisement] 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 advanced copy of a debut Australian novel that was due out this year. That novel was called Ritual by Chloe Elizabeth Wilson, who is a Melbourne writer and it’s a lot of fun. It’s a darkly comic novel that basically takes as its 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 favourite independent book store. That’s it for this week’s show. If you enjoyed it, please tell your friends about it – and rate and review us. It helps a lot. Next week on Read This I’m joined by Jessica Stanley her new novel Consider Yourself Kissed is one that will capture your attention and maybe even your heart. Read This is a Schwartz Media production made possible by the generous support of ARA Group. The show is produced and edited by Clara Ames, with mixing by Travis Evans and original compositions by Zoltan Fecso. Posy McCaughey edits our transcripts. Thanks for listening. See you next week. Woff: Michael sits down with Josephine to discuss the genesis of <em>Little World</em> and why a library card might be her most prized possession.Author: Read ThisApple News: {"edition_hold":false,"featureable":true,"node_changed":1746071203,"publish_date":1745946960,"sections":["5f599232-5ebf-41dd-fce3-05ae04eb7551","b55c3d85-fa8b-4a8c-b076-3a3b8330011e"],"status":true}Host: Michael WilliamsGuests: Josephine Rowe