Josephine Rowe is a Melbourne-based writer of fiction, poetry and nonfiction. Her most recent short story collection, Tarcutta Wake (University of Queensland Press, 2012), was longlisted for the 2013 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. She talked with ABBW about killer opening lines and closing lines … and what all the best writing does in between.

You seem to have a wonderful knack for creating memorable opening and closing lines. For example: She took the “S” arm off her typewriter so she wouldn’t be able to spell his name. [Opening line of “Repair” in Tarcutta Wake.]

Do you have one or two favourite opening or closing lines from your own or other writers’ works? If so, which ones and why?

My absolute favourite closing line is in Stephanie Vaughn’s “Dog Heaven”: “It was a good day, it was a good day, it was a good day.” That ending undoes me. Although, the opening line is also genius: “Every so often that dead dog dreams me up again.” And pretty much all of the lines between those two lines … look, I’m not even going to talk about that story, as Tobias Wolff reads it beautifully and discusses it here with The New Yorker’s Deborah Treisman.

Instead, I’ll talk about Alice Munro’s “Cortes Island”, which ends with: “That had happened a long time before and the forest had grown up all around it.”

One of the things I love about Munro is how she draws us into a … maybe not comfortable, but fairly familiar, inhabitable space, then wham! She flicks the switch and suddenly everything is super sexually charged, often sexually disquieting, and that’s where “Cortes Island” goes. You don’t see the sexual element in that stand-alone line—you need the line before and the line before that and the line before that to understand how perfect an ending it is—but what you do get from this very last line is a sense of the way she can expand or collapse time with a grace that few other writers possess. She’s a magician when it comes to time.

That said, a first line doesn’t have to come in fire-twirling and lap-dancing and reciting from Gitanjali. And a last line doesn’t have to ride out on a grizzly bear while juggling eels. It’s whatever the story needs, and sometimes what the story needs is something simple, direct, informative. Eudora Welty’s “A Worn Path” begins with “It was December—a bright frozen day in the early morning.” The most powerful line in Denis Johnson’s exquisite novella Train Dreams is “But it was.” Again, that means nothing on its lonesome, so you’ll just have to take my word that its power is its simplicity. Within the context of Train Dreams, “But it was” is like being hit with a rock. Beautiful, lyrical sentences are magic, yes, but reinventing the most common, the most utilitarian of words so that they knock your breath out? That’s another kind of magic.

Tarcutta is the exact midpoint between Sydney and Melbourne and you’ve said that a lot of the stories in your most recent collection Tarcutta Wake reflect this “in between” space. Can you expand on this comment?

I always return to the notion of transience. The presence of those geographical or architectural “in-betweens”— especially hotels and motels—in Tarcutta Wake is simply a reflection of that. Although, really, what story is unconcerned with transience? Here is a story in which no distance is covered, nobody goes anywhere or does anything or is changed or effects any change. I can’t think of any, but would be interested to see how that might work.

In the collection I’m working on at the moment, I’ve realised I’m headed in the other direction; there’s a preoccupation with place, and with ideas of home. That question of what constitutes “home” is there to some extent in Tarcutta Wake, in stories like “All You Really Have to Do Is Be Here”, and “In the Mornings…”—and in “House”, of course—but in recent writing it’s really much closer to the surface.

Easy enough to establish the source of this preoccupation: I understand, abstractly, that deep connection to place, but it’s not something I’ve experienced firsthand. I have no love for the suburb I grew up in, for the things that happened there. If I drive through it now I get a sense of palpable sadness and dread. “Home is where one starts from” (thank you, T. S. Eliot, et al), so is this an effort at reconstruction, then—or rather construction, as I grew up thinking that ‘home’ was out there, ahead of me somewhere? Something that I would move towards, rather than starting from (sorry, this is all starting to sound a bit Dorothy Gale, I know).

But it doesn’t really matter where it stems from, the preoccupation with a theme. It’s how you go about interrogating it, what you make of it. We build things to fill the spaces those questions create. Stories are my way of doing that. And even if I fail to answer the question definitively —as I always, always do— I’m left with a better idea of the exact dimensions of the question; a concrete approximation of negative space. And temporarily, that’s enough.

Knowing your love of lists, can you create a list for ABBW readers? Perhaps: 1. A Josephine Rowe quick equivalent of Joe Brainard’s I Remember (I remember big brown radios … I remember fishnet. I remember board and brick shelves). 2. Books on your nightstand. 3. Top three Josephine Rowe stories to read from Tarcutta Wake and what to look for in them.

It was only a few months ago that I was introduced to Brainard’s “I Remember”. I read an excerpt in Five Dials, and it was like a caffeine hit. I remember pacing the room and practically shaking, it was so affecting. Then there was a kind of dreadful, leaden moment, a gut-punch when I realised I’d essentially used the same refrain and structure in the third section of “Souvenirs” (titled “Yes They Remember”). And it must look terribly derivative, as I Remember is seminal, and how could I have gone 27 years without reading it? But I hadn’t, somehow, even though the poem-as-list/list-as-poem is a structure I’ve always loved, and would probably be more comfortable with the title “list maker” than poet.

Here’s the beginning of “Yes They Remember”:

Yes they remember the dogs the smell of their paws and their sighs that meant nothing the sound of them clattering through the house and round the yard all things they helped to bury things no one will ever find now the bird bones the broken cups their grandfather’s watch with its tick slowed to the sound of a heart Yes they remember the yard lying face-down on it its earth and its secrets the dryness of their final summer smell of sunscreen rotting magnolia insecticide the dead-grass smell of circuses of animal pavilions Yes they remember the summer the scratch of split vinyl backseat on salt dry cheeks and the weight of the coats they slept under sand pouring from the pockets on the way back from the ocean Yes they remember the ocean

On the Sydney Writers Festival blog you say: “The reason we all write is because we can’t not write.” When did you realise that this was true for you and what has it meant for your life and writing discipline?

It sounds pat, doesn’t it? An insincere dismissal of the question, “Why do you write?” But I think it’s the most sincere answer you’ll get. Perhaps unilluminating, but sincere. Some people cite more pragmatic reasons for what brought them to writing, and these are typically political. But, even still, at the core of that you’ll generally find that inarticulable drive. If you’ve recognised an injustice and felt compelled to address it, why writing? There has to be some spark there in the first place.

A few years ago I asked my great uncle, an artist all his life, whether he still painted. He told me that he did not physically paint—he did not put brush to canvas, did not have the facilities he once had—but that mentally, yes; he looked at the world and imagined how he would paint it. And this is how I mean it: We write because we can’t not write. Even if I was unable to put pen to paper, there would still be the internal aspects of writing: recording, interrogating, analogising in order to better understand.

American writer Lydia Davis won the Man Booker International Prize this year and there has been some controversy about the brevity of some of her stories. For example she her story titled Index Entry is: “Christian, I’m not a.” How short is your shortest short story? When is a short story not a story? Does deciding when a short story is not a short story have anything to do with length?

The controversy of brevity! It’s baffling. What I can’t understand is that people talk about shorter stories as though they’re new, or as though they’re lesser literary animals that can just be cranked out (Flash! Sudden!). Or much, much worse—that they’re an attempt at subversion. To me this just screams that the detractors aren’t widely read enough to take seriously, as they’re ignoring the writing of Colette, Kawabata, Borges…

Word counts and dimensions are unhelpful and irrelevant. The smallest unit of measure for a story? As I mentioned earlier, only that some distance is covered. Beyond that I think that each story should be met on its own terms.

Tarcutta Wake, Josephine Rowe, UQP, 2012, $19.95.

More writing from Josephine Rowe can be found on her blog Everything but Snow.