Josephine Rowe: On Climate Grief, the Lost Art of Meaningful Introspection, Writing Away from Academia and Her Short Story Collection, "Here Until August"
Josephine Rowe’s recent short collection, Here Until August, transcends across a global landscape as we follow the fates of characters who are navigating their grief, displacement, humanness, and their boundaries, physical and mental. These quiet but powerful stories are crafted with Rowe’s sharp, delicate and precise prose that takes the reader on an emotional and revelatory journey. This Australian, wonderfully idiosyncratic writer is one to watch and read over and over again.
I had the privilege of speaking with Josephine via email where she so generously and thoughtfully discusses the recent Australian bushfires and writing about climate grief, the problems with our modern versions of introspection, her journey to writing without university, the misrepresentation of class in fiction and how the stories from her collection, Here Until August, took form.
One of the things I loved about this collection, is that it's about people who are in limbo, in between or at a crossroads in their lives. Your atmospheric and lush writing creates such a beautiful narrative around this kind of self-reflection. Do you know why you are drawn to these moments in a character’s life? In our society that is obsessed with constantly being in motion and being productive, do you think we can often miss these powerful moments of introspection in our own lives?
Absolutely, we miss those opportunities. Or we go out of our way to avoid them. I do think there’s less space for introspection, especially for prolonged introspection. For the most part, introspection seems truncated to the length of a shower, or a swim; wherever we might be briefly out of grasp of the technologies that shape our current modes of connection.
There’s less space for substantial solitude, and by extension, I also mean a certain amount of loneliness, which can be more beneficial than it’s given credit. We are utterly terrified of being stranded with ourselves. There are people who make a living out of locking other peoples’ phones in safety deposit boxes. It might be funny if it weren’t so damn sad—disconnection having to be endorsed as an active, empowered, commodified choice in order for it to be agreeable.
But the intrinsic value of introspection is still being acknowledged there, is literally having a monetary figure placed on it. So collectively we still recognise, or at least have heard rumours about its importance.
As you say, there’s an obsession with being in motion and being productive and being—not only happy, but visibly happy. Tangibly, Instagrammably fulfilled and with having that witnessed by as many people as possible. But introspection isn’t really sharable.
Related to this, I think we have a very compromised attitude towards psychic or existential discomfort of any kind. We are so readily encouraged to apply the word “trauma” to an unpleasant experience, even when it exists in a lineage of common human pain, and that extreme diagnosis carries with it the impetus to respond with equivalent intensity, to blot it out or tranquilize or extinguish the unwanted feeling, regardless of its source. Ultimately this undermines our capacity to recognise and to speak to the gradients within the full range of the human condition, as language—this already notoriously limited tool we have for understanding ourselves and each other—does shape our thinking and with it our capacity to verbalise and process life-altering events.
A while back a friend and I were talking about rascinating trauma; his term (or at least, his neat précis of my lengthy grappling) to mean something like the opposite of uprooting. An experience that may be deeply destabilising, one that changes something in your fabric, but is ultimately grounding—brings about dimension and depth, and a kind of anchorage, not simply for having survived it, but for having examined it across increasing distances. You certainly don’t wish to relive it, but nor do you want to go back to being the person who had not lived it.
In Here Until August, some of the stories are set in the aftermath of an unambiguously traumatic event, while others are in the wake of everyday loss or pain. And that’s ultimately what I’m drawn to, the How? in each of these circumstances. The way through, whether a character is clear-eyed or in complete denial, refusing to meet that moment of reckoning face on until all possible tactics of avoidance have been exhausted.
Place is very important to this collection as each story brings us a new setting, from Australia to Canada to America to Wales [Scotland?] and beyond. What drew you to the idea of featuring multiple cultures and places within one story collection? Do the places you set your stories in have special meaning to you?
I've moved around a lot over the past several years, and I tend to write about a place as a way of navigating it—as with everything—whether this is intended for fiction or just as personal record. I’ve never kept a diary as such, just notebooks with real-life observations and overheards, fictional ideas, drafts, shopping lists, directions to good swimming holes, and the names of impressive trees all flown together. So perhaps my fiction elides these ‘commonplace’ elements; there’s the strata, a core sample of a place and a particular lifestyle that translates, hopefully, to a reader.
Each place imprints upon you, to a greater or lesser degree, whether in the short or longer term. Each casts certain truths or longheld ideas of truth into different lights. So writing is a means of discovery, of orienting to these new circumstances, and of more fully inhabiting—but also a way of recovering, of reinhabiting; most of the stories in August have a particular real-world spark that anchors them in a particular landscape or city, but most were written at geographical and emotional remove from that place, that landmark or event. I wrote about an island off the coast of Western Australia from an industrial inner suburb of Melbourne; the intentionally flooded towns of New South Wales from an apartment in Montreal; a polar vortex in Montreal from the height of a Californian summer. (Admittedly, I wrote about the Catskills from the Catskills.)
Certain details crystallise, taken at a remove. It’s the distance itself that clarifies, sharpens things—not necessarily longing, though often that, too; the immediacy of what we cannot immediately have, or in any case will never again experience in the same way.
I don’t think you need to leave a place in order to write about it, that’s just the way it trends for me, a kind of addendum to Wherever you go, there you are.
But even if I had stayed put, geographically, I think my fiction would still have been restless.
How do you know when you have an idea for a story? Are you drawn to writing characters or setting first?
On the origin of ideas, I don’t know that a writer has a more satisfactory answer to this than does anyone else. Maybe some just become better at analogising it so that it sounds special and particular to the form.
To a non-writer I might ask; where do your dreams come from? Who knows what the subconscious launches at us, or why. There’s what we know and have experienced, those experiences that are refracted in dreams, and then there is… that greater, deeper unknown at work, that we’d be lying if we said we understood. We can read all the Jung we like; we’re still in the shallows.
Say you dream of a house that you’re told is your childhood home, and you—or your dream self—accepts this, while at the same time you’re positive you’ve never set foot in it. From the window you see a lake and you know that something sinister has happened at the lake. How is it you know this, within the dream? How does it become apparent? Only that it does, it becomes apparent, and you go from there. (And then, what does the lake really represent, so on and so on.)
Either a human protagonist or the place might come first, but it doesn’t really matter how vivid either of them is, a story doesn’t really move until the voice speaks up, be it human or other, until writing feels more like following and listening—like being led—than it does directing and scripting. Until it becomes more like dreaming, albeit with some measure agency, of lucidity. Which isn’t to say that it comes easily. You still have to show up and be very, very present. Lose your way, retrace. Writing is a constant precarious wavering through that expanse that exists between humility and grandeur. Between omniscience and the small, fatally limited ‘I’.
How did these stories come about for you? How long did it take you to write them? Also, how did you go about putting them together to form this collection?
There are stories in August that I started seven or eight years ago, and they might have been through several versions and redirections—a couple started out as very devicey, until thankfully those devices became absorbed, or were kicked away as you would any kind of scaffolding. And there were others, intended for the collection, which didn’t arrive at where they needed to be in time for the final manuscript. And another, longer work that just mutated, quite unhelpfully, into a novel. (Actually, that happened twice.)
The story that came swiftest into full was Anything Remarkable, which was written in the weeks leading up to the marriage equality vote in Australia. Frustration as a means of propulsion.
As to what links the ten stories in Here Until August, I set out with a commonality in mind, but I’d say the stronger connective threads have emerged organically by virtue of the things that have concerned me during the past seven years—including those that I wasn’t entirely conscious of being preoccupied with in the going, but which now seem glaringly obvious. Climate change and solastalgia have been pointed out—I do feel that more keenly whilst living in Australia. I didn’t explicitly set out to write about climate grief, in any of the stories here; I was just paying attention. But more overtly, one of the ways I think that subconscious anxiety presents in Here Until August is in the recurring question about children, their presence or loss. As well as the usual, biological dilemma that many women encounter in their mid-to-late thirties (Is it now or never?) we’re being faced with a more ominous question: Is it already too late? Or, is there a kind of biological overdrive where one decides to not know what they know? Where is the line between hope and delusion?
As to whether this sounds fatalistic; it really does depend on where you’re standing, where your house is. It’s this aspect of the collection that interests me most right now. In the months since the book’s release, there have been unprecedented bushfires in Australia. Unprecedented, but (tragically, infuriatingly) not unpredicted. Even within major cities—which are usually buffered from the direst effects of bushfires—people are now acutely aware of conditions, with air quality being a daily, lifestyle-affecting concern. We all have air quality apps on our phones. Smoke masks are typical attire. Some mornings you’ll wake short of breath, with this taste in your mouth, and realise: Oh, okay, we’re up in the 500s today, we’re in the purple zone. And you’ll get up and shut the window.
But in the midst of this, I’ve encountered people who seem completely walled off from the severity of it. They might say, “I don’t know why I feel so bad, I must be coming down with something.” Never mind that you can physically point to the white blur in the sky, where the sun is failing to penetrate the smoke haze, they’ll insist, “No darling, it can’t be that. Maybe it’s something viral?”
It’s like On the Beach, people referring to radiation poisoning as “this cholera thing.” Again, the line between hope and delusion. Perhaps individually, there’s a functional emotional necessity to consider a state of emergency as temporary. I get that. But this very wartime, British-colonial Keep Calm and Carry On attitude isn’t going to get us very far as a species. Collectively, governmentally, if it’s not treated as the beginning of more and worse, then large-scale mitigating changes won’t be brought in—aren’t being brought in—with the urgency that’s called for.
Did your short story writing process differ from writing your novel? Do you keep a specific routine or practice? '
Common to both: waking alone, not checking my email, coffee and straight back to bed with books and notebooks, a few pages of something—poetry, or prose with a lot of white space—that acts as a kind of intermediary between sleep and work, a pilot light. Then I work longhand on whatever seems the most insistent. I avoid looking at a screen for as long as possible. Something vital vanishes as soon as I look at a screen. So I try to keep it to as little as possible, just transcribing, trying to corral the chaos into something like order.
My process for short stories remains frenetic, heavily palimpsestic; I write mountains, much in longhand, envelopes and note pads that get recycled later. Often I wander off on extensive research tangents for minor aspects, only to cut the findings from the final draft. (The conviction remains, though, as a kind of mortar). And I edit obsessively. What could almost be called a pathology when it comes to word choice and the slight variants of a phrase. But I think it’s fair to say that I enjoy this; the feeling, at last, of a neat click, when it does come. And there’s probably that autodidactic chip on my shoulder that pushes me a little deeper into areas beyond my immediate ken, because part of me is always going to feel like I’m playing catch up.
My approach for writing the novel was much the same, only that after a certain point, I started working on a manual typewriter for my drafts, as it forced a more linear approach. The novel itself is still anything but linear, but in terms of a process, I had to circumvent my tendency to flit.
I’ve come to realise that another important factor was staying in one place long enough to really sink down into it. The novel, for me, was more heavily dependant on establishing routine, and that was linked with residential security. So, various ways of forestalling my natural predilection for flight, intellectual and geographic both.
I’m in the very early stages of another novel (which also started out innocuously, as a long story, before showing its stripes) and I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to feeling daunted—something akin to vertigo, or maybe its inverse?—at the prospect of anchoring for the years it will take to see it through. Maybe I can negotiate a series of anchorages.
Can you speak about your writing journey? Did you always want to be a writer?
The short and honest answer is that I’m a writer because I’ve needed to be. I’ve gone into the whys of this elsewhere, but here I’ll abbreviate here to saying that there was a lot I needed to make sense of, from a very young age—and perhaps to gain some agency over, as well as some narrative distance from—and that I owe a great deal to the sanctuary of public libraries. I’m thinking mostly of the modest brick outposts of my Australian, outer suburban childhood. But even now, one of my favourite things to do in New York City is to go and work in the Rose Main Reading Room at the NYPL. It never fails to move me, each time I enter, that something so magnificent is for everyone. This maybe sounds very Country Mouse of me, but it’s true. Also there’s something about silent, collective industry—being in the presence of hundreds of others at thought, an allied introspection that really seems to charge an atmosphere.
I didn’t go to university. It’s not that I said, fuck it, I don’t need it—I might have gone if it was an opportunity that was available to me, but it wasn’t, for various reasons, mostly due to mental health and longstanding issues with sleep. As it was, I was incredibly envious of friends who complained about their theses.
In my late teens and early twenties I worked a string of means-to-end jobs at bookstores and cinemas—gigs that meant late starts, cheap books, free movie tickets—and I lived alone in a crumbling, very haunted apartment; part of a subdivided mansion where, coincidentally, an estranged aunt had lived in the 1950s. I read and I wrote voraciously at whatever hours offered themselves. I started publishing in major Australian journals and anthologies at 18 or 19, and sometimes there’d be a cheque or a commission or a speaker’s fee.
My first real experience of universities wasn’t until my mid 20s, guest lecturing (a book of my stories had been set as a text) and consequently teaching. And then in my later 20s through fellowships at The University of Iowa, and at Stanford for the Wallace Stegner Program, where I finished my first novel, A Loving, Faithful Animal.
Ironically, the only reason I came to those major US universities was because there was nowhere I could find in Australia that seriously valued artistic merit so much as academic standing, of which I had none. I’d love to see that change, or better, to help bring in that change. Meantime, while I remain incredibly grateful to those institutions who have supported my writing based solely on the writing itself, I don’t want to promote this as the only route, or even the best route—especially in the US, where university can be prohibitively expensive—or that we should ever be too reverent in regarding academic pedigree, or prizes, or other forms of accolade. They’re helpful; they’re not everything. The work itself has to be the point.
There are so many other ways to get there, so many people writing at kitchen tables after their kids are asleep, or in their car between shifts, determinedly carving out space and time, where another person might see no space to be carved. The short story and poetry in particular have many patrons of this kind of tenacity and artistic opportunism. While I’m not advocating for anyone to go out looking for economic struggle, the more stories that speak to it—and from it—the better, because there is still an astonishing imbalance in the way class is represented in fiction.
Not studying writing in a tertiary sense doesn’t have to mean writing in a vacuum, either, or without guidance. (Case in point: Write Or Die Tribe, and other endeavors like it). But there’s also something valuable in starting out without anyone looking directly over your shoulder, or too closely guiding your hand. There needs to be space to fail, unobserved and without repercussions (grades, shame, etc.). Maybe you write a lot of awful shit that nobody ever has to see, and this, too, is important. You learn to sharpen your own instruments, your instincts, grow a spine. You’re not preoccupied with pleasing or impressing anyone else, at least not in the immediate, or with engineering some mythical armadillo of a story that will prove impervious to all the imagined onslaughts of a workshop. Not least of all because vulnerable, risky stories are better. They just are. Stories of which we can ask—How did they get away with that? These are the stories that stay with us.
JOSEPHINE ROWE was born in 1984 in Rockhampton, Australia, and grew up in Melbourne. In the United States, her writing has appeared in Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, The Iowa Review, The Paris Review Daily, The Common, and Freeman’s. She holds fellowships from the Wallace Stegner program in fiction at Stanford University, the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, the Omi International Arts Center, and Yaddo. She was the winner of Australia’s Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize in 2016 and has been named one of The Sydney Morning Herald's Best Young Australian Novelists. Her debut novel, A Loving, Faithful Animal, was long-listed for the 2017 Miles Franklin Literary Award and selected as a New York Times Editors’ Choice.
