AustLit

'Josephine Rowe’s stories are about time. Time as it is lived and as it is recounted; the way it doesn’t just progress, but speeds and slows, persists and lingers. Her characters are sometimes aware of time passing, almost as if they stand outside it, sometimes aware that the moment they are in is one that they will return to, again and again, across their later lives. Or else they are narrating from a position that is simultaneously in the present and in the future, looking back: ‘I will never see anything like it again,’ narrates a boy, suddenly a man, describing wading out to an island through a sea full of bioluminescent phytoplankton in ‘Glisk’; the story ‘What Passes for Fun’ begins with the phrase ‘somewhere close to the end of things,’ an opening that’s also a foreshadowing of an ending, although of what and of which nature the reader is never privy. Memory, in Rowe’s stories, works in anterograde, as well as in reverse.'(Introduction)

'The inciting incident in Josephine Rowe’s short story ‘Glisk’ (winner of the 2016 Jolley Prize) unpacks in an instant. A dog emerges from the scrub and a ute veers into oncoming traffic. A sedan carrying a mother and two kids swerves into the safety barrier, corroded by the salt air, and disappears over a sandstone bluff. Three-quarters of a family are erased. And it all happens ‘in a glisk’, Fynn, the driver of the ute, will say years later.' (Introduction)