What do we mean when we call a fiction writer “poetic” or “lyrical”? Often, I think we just mean a prose writer who applies a lot of candied metaphors to their sentences. Josephine Rowe is something different: she is a lyrical fiction writer in the tradition of Grace Paley and Elizabeth Hardwick, meaning that her language is radically compressed and distilled, purged of banalities and tedious expositional details. The kind of fiction that is incarnated out of totemic objects and dreamlike images and that is tethered to an overpoweringly vivid landscape, in Rowe’s case often rural Australia. She tends to dwell on interstitial moments and on ignored or underseen characters—loners struggling to survive the weight of the past (of loss, guilt, and inheritance) and whose lives are often shaped by violence.

Rowe started out as a songwriter, became a published poet, and has now authored five works of fiction: three story collections and two novels, the most recent of which is the lambent and rangy Little World.

Little World is a triptych that begins in the 1950s Western Australian desert, as a sixty-something hermit named Orrin Bird receives a strange bequest from his former employer: the body of an apparent child saint, clad in antique finery and housed in a box made of tamanu (canoe timber). Where did this girl come from and why has her body never decayed? What does it mean for an assaulted child to persist, after death, as both symbol of protection and object of contemplation? The maybe-saint goes on, over the course of the novel, to touch the lives of two other outsiders: Matti, a 36-year-old woman driving two spoiled hippies across the Nullarbor Plain in the mid-70s; and Syb, a young woman grieving her lover’s departure in Covid-era Victoria. Along the way, we visit a Micronesian leper colony and a midcentury home for unwed mothers; learn about the incredible devastation wrought by phosphate mining on the island of Nauru; and experience the flickering, cosmic anger of the not-quite-dead girl’s consciousness. Little World is a slender, vast, visionary book about interdependency, predation, and the hunger for grace. It’s about the confounding experience of being a cosmic speck and yet still contending with what the saint dismisses as “the idiot anguish, the small stupid sorrow of the self.”

Rowe and I were Stegner Fellows together, and I once told her that her writing made me feel like a “galumphing Clydesdale” in comparison. Ten years later, not much has changed. I was so honored to correspond with her via email about her uncanny new work.

Mark Labowskie: Little World is about the traveling body of a saint who is revealed—very early on—to not be a “real” saint at all, but the body of a young girl, a victim of sexual violence, who has (for unknown reasons) not “corrupted.” But she is costumed and presented and perceived by the world as a child saint, possibly from centuries past, who has performed miracles. I’m curious what made you want to write about a “fake” saint? 

Josephine Rowe: I really didn’t set out to write about saints. Or even maybe-saints. I came in with about as much knowledge of sainthood as Orrin has, where we meet him, and where we meet him is immediately out of his depth.

The book began and was contained in that opening image: a man in the Western Australian desert, waiting to receive the body of an alleged child saint delivered by horse float (horse trailer in the US). This image first appears in one of my notebooks in late 2018, and for whatever reason it keeps burning. Then, in 2019, a visit to the Kimberley region in Western Australia positively ignites it.

From there on the writing was a matter of uncovering: where the girl has been brought from, what her brief life and the nature of her death has been, the inner logic or the “rules” of her phenomenal state, and what history these two people—both in different kinds of exile—could possibly share. 

I knew that they were linked, that Orrin understands himself to be complicit in something he cannot and may never entirely grasp the long-term ramifications of, and that he is atoning for this, in his secular way, or at least opting out of complicity in further harm. 

And I knew that the girl was not going to be as she appeared (so to speak; we don’t actually see her at that point) or as we might expect of a traditional saint, or the myths that amount to one.

ML: Is the book’s project—depicting the search for atonement or grace or protection in a secular way—at all related to what Matti later refers to Yeats poems as doing: “speak heterodoxically of God”?

JR: I wasn’t raised in any particular faith. How much is this book just the author hashing out her own questions about mortality? I think it’s more the author hashing out her ideas about relationality. In truth, I’m not particularly concerned by the idea of my consciousness winking out like a dead bulb. (Which is not to say that I’m not attached to my life. I am. But there’s also a general curiosity for what next, if anything.) 

Pantheism and panentheism seem much more compelling than the autocratic, man’s-own-image, disappointed father God of most scriptures, and the need for the invocation of an afterlife—as reward, as punishment, as comfort, as control. Because isn’t what we live with and within already enough, already so far beyond our fathoming? 

God in nature, the illusion of divisibility…the acceptance that there is probably no hereafter, or that the hereafter is here, in which our present selfhood will not be sustained. I’m interested in belief systems that recognize or at least allow for sentience, life force, soul (whatever we call it) in all non-human forms, and the interdependency and the flow between these. If the hereafter is here, then that redirects our accountability to here (Soliphilia, in Glenn Albrecht’s term), rather than some moral abstract, and along with that perhaps our units of measurement, beyond our own lifetimes or our kids’ lifetimes.

Ultimately, the book is—as I am—interested in the faith of the secular, the belief of the non-believer. Also, the courage and ingenuity of the ex- or the lapsed believer. Because it must take immense courage, and imagination, I think, to have access to the solace and structure and kinship of those answers, and to say, no, and to hand them back.  

ML: The book focuses on three living characters—Orrin, Matti, and Syb. How did these characters develop? Did you think, on some level, who might be in need of interaction with a quasi-saint?

JR: I wrote the first and final sections simultaneously—reaching across about a 70–100-year span, with the sense that the book would be a triptych, but with only a hazy understanding of the intervening events that would connect them over time and space.

Some facets of a story arrive as vivid, fixed, audible. It’s a simple matter of transferal into language—while others exist as distant, indistinct intuitions. Sixth magnitude stars. You have to coax them into relief, tune them in like you would a radio, or like sharpening the focus of a lens.

Both Orrin and Syb—along with the saint—were already embedded in the landscape, part of the narrative firmament, and writing was a process of uncovering who they were to one another. 

Mathilde was more of a rumor at that point and is the only character I wrote with any intentionality towards what might be mutually needed or recognized between herself and the maybe-saint. There was some question of experiential worthiness, in the echoes and mirrorings between their histories, of what kind of person would have had the life, the salt, to see or believe she sees through to the will of this stranded, aged child (without wanting to say too much more to this end—for all that it’s a book of atmosphere and immersion, it’s still spoilable).

I wrote Mathilde backwards, in a sense. As in, I met her old, or I glimpsed her, as others did—as the town and Sybil see her in the third section of the novel, somewhat foreshortened or abbreviated by the same pre-assumptions that hinder older solitary women everywhere. (Sexless, pastless, etc.) 

Then I covered a lot of sleepless kilometers with her, travelling the 1970s insomniac Nullarbor highway from insomniac Omicron Manhattan, looking out at water towers and seeing drought-buckled water tanks… 

ML: Early on, the not-exactly-dead girl thinks, “it’s best not to get too attached, to dogs or mountains, anything at all.” I thought about this statement a lot because the book’s human protagonists—Orrin, Matti, Syb—all seem to desire intense social isolation, living in rural areas with few traditional human relationships. And yet they are attached to things—to dogs, to trees. As you said earlier, you were interested in writing about relationality, the belief of the non-believer—how do those concepts relate to the question of attachments?

JR: I started writing [Little World] in 2019, so that was in the lead up to Covid and throughout the height of the pandemic, also in the tapering of. In that sense you could call it a pandemic novel, even though the on-page representation of that time is brief, something of a coda. I was clearly thinking a lot about the ways in which sickness shapes societies: in lasting structural, concrete ways, as well as interpersonally, our stigmas and fears along with our obligations to one another (to overcome those stigmas and fears). 

Quite likely the isolation of that time contributed to those depictions of solitude, even in the non-contemporary sections of the novel. And the claustrophobia, the immobility, the lack of agency, the hearing for certain tactile experience…as we’re talking about it, yes, of course it must have. (Though at the same time, writing from solitary or marginalized perspectives is pretty on brand for me.) 

In Syb’s case, that solitude is neither wanted nor sought after, and she feels her loneliness fiercely, as an abandonment (we never find out for certain whether that’s the case). But it’s a unidirectional loneliness: for her lover, Maree. As for the other people of the book, they’re not experiencing their aloneness in the same way, with the same discomfort, and perhaps would not even consider themselves as lonely, because, exactly as you say, they are keenly aware of and invested in their connections to the immediate, non-human world, and are striving to understand the nature of that entanglement.

Perhaps Tilde might have once considered herself lonely but has grown into a self-sufficient and self-actualizing solitude. Solitude can be like that. An existential Type 2 thing. Perhaps uncomfortable or even agonizing initially, especially when not as we would choose it, but—beyond conditioning or resignation—it can become a preference, even a necessity. It opens up. You feel yourself backed into a corner, and at some point, you turn around and realize: Jesus, what a view. 

In revisiting that final section during edits, I’ve sometimes wondered whether Tilde should be considered as a cautionary example, or an aspirational one. 

ML: My favorite part of this book might be the passages evoking the incorruptible girl’s post-mortal consciousness: “her awareness is disengaged from human senses, is beyond human senses, but only so far.” There’s this human-but-not-quite-human demi-sentience that is unlike anything else I’ve read, and that to me is connected to the book’s interest in environmental devastation and the never-endingness of warfare and violence. Something about the steely tranquility of the narratorial gaze makes individual human striving seem less important than a termite mound. I wonder—did you feel as if you were writing in a different literary register than before, given the novel’s scope and concerns?

JR: That post-mortal or limboed consciousness of the maybe-saint, her demi-sentience (great term for it) is playing on the mind-body connection, that the body itself is a plurality, and the self we are so attached to is comprised of a multitude of entities we don’t entirely comprehend or are completely unaware of. 

That narrative positioning and the embodied logic (of the maybe-saint) wasn’t planned as a device, but it does allow for a kind of intimate (occasionally ragey) omniscience, providing the book with its broader spatial and temporal framework, along with a vantage that renders taxonomy and clock-time as somewhat flimsy or arbitrary—the boundaries between things so fleeting and insubstantial as to be approaching meaninglessness. 

As to whether I felt myself to be working in a different literary register than with previous works…I’m not so sure on that. I felt pulled along, beyond myself—out of depth, as perhaps all of the book’s people are—to decisions and directions that seemed outside my scope, which would steadily go on to make sense, knitting together in a spooky confluence. 

I’ve had that now and again with other works. Perhaps what I do have this go-round is more conviction than ever about disregarding traditional narrative trajectory: the shapes a story may be expected to take, how characters are supposed to change, where they’re supposed to end up. Overcoming. Oh my god. Overcoming is just not available to everyone, and it doesn’t make those experiences less story-worthy. I’m interested in writing about those who are working within limitations, working with what they have. 

We’re satisfied—or maybe I mean the industry is satisfied?—by a limited array of narrative configurations, and that bothers me, because they’re very often classist, reductive, and self-perpetuating, and I have no desire to reinforce that hardwiring, when as reader or audience I often find them insincere and unsatisfying, condescending. 

ML: You mentioned to me—I hope it’s OK to share this—that you wrote Little World in the shadow of a bigger novel that you were “supposed” to be writing. Can you talk a little about your experience of writing smaller, stranger, less ostentatiously “important” works? What is your relationship to The Traditional Novel at this point?

JR: The other novel has kept, and will keep, I feel very sure of that. Some ideas have that patience and longevity. Others, if you don’t immediately drop everything and run with them, threaten to slip back into the idea place, wherever that is. LW was somewhere in-between, patient and impatient—it did come together over several years, often around the edges of other projects. But it reached a point where I felt that I couldn’t properly focus on anything else until I’d carried it through, regardless of whether or not anyone published it.

I suspect there’s a relationship between the pull towards shorter forms as a kind of inner, creative transience, and actual physical, geographic transience—which in both cases I think owes to a mix of restlessness and curiosity. (Also, less sexily, economics). 

And while I of course read traditional-length, and traditionally structured novels, I do tend to gravitate more naturally towards shorter forms. I think I instinctively trust the integrity of a short book, the un-showiness of it, but also the conviction. Very likely the author has been urged, along the way, to pad it out a bit, and the author has clearly foregone that very commerce-oriented advice. Also, likely that the author is a poet, or has some flash of poet, and that always appeals. At the moment, I’m reading Anne de Marcken’s It Lasts Forever And Then It’s Over—which is actually another book about undeadness but striking a very different tone. 

ML: Little World is also a deeply queer work. All of the main characters are queer working-class outsiders who survive in rural areas. How do you see the presence of the incorruptible girl—and the connotations of grace and meaning (“Wanting something to call Holy, call Hallowed, but without all the rest of the bullshit” in Syb’s words) that a seeming saint inevitably brings with them—as being particularly important to these solitaires? Is there less-trod queer narrative ground you wanted to explore in this work?

JR: I think of “queer” as such a wonderfully spacious and permissive term; big enough to run around in, to shift, to be a selves. If pressed to check a box somewhere, to define myself, it’s the term I feel most comfortable in. 

But as to Orrin and Mathilde and Syb, there wasn’t a conscious or intentional link between queerness and the need for numinous guidance or presence. 

I say conscious, as I’m not ruling out that a valid argument for connection could be made. But their sexualities weren’t a decision to that end—the central characters arrived as queer because that seemed true to character in each case, although not all of them might identify that way, given times, or insecurity, or reserve. 

If there’s a line to be drawn perhaps it’s only inasmuch that in a book so concerned with dissolving arbitrary boundaries between people (and all else), reinforcing the idea of a sexual binary would be out of step. Although that’s possibly sidling closer to an even simpler why: that I just wasn’t moved to writing and reinforcing heterosexual sex and attachment—we’re so blitzed by those representations, as is. It wasn’t necessary or relevant here, to these people or this story. 

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