Claudia Casper's Blog

Walt’s Head

Here’s a link to my short story commissioned by SubTerrain Magazine

It’s about the absurd hubris of life extension services. I can’t think of this story without laughing with wicked glee. Suggestions have been made to turn it into a novel. That thought rolls around my still attached head.

Online version, with illustrations by the brilliant Adam Meuse, the visual poet laureate of dark humour.

https://www.instagram.com/meusetrap/

The story can be found here:

https://www.sublimehorizons.ca/walts-head/

https://www.sublimehorizons.ca/walts-...

The post Walt’s Head appeared first on Claudia Casper.

My TedX Talk about Writing

In which I learn, after the alarming discovery that my mind tends to exhaustive lists of exceptions to any statement, the power of the declarative sentence.

The post My TedX Talk about Writing appeared first on Claudia Casper.

Winner of the Phillip K. Dick Award – The Mercy Journals

Claudia Casper’s third novel, The Mercy Journals (Arsenal 2016), first reviewed by Joan Givner in BC BookWorld, has won the 2017 Philip K. Dick Award for the best work of science fiction published in paperback for the first time in the USA in 2016.

The announcement was made on April 14, 2017 at the Norwescon 40 conference, in SeaTac, Washington. The Philip K. Dick Award is presented annually with the support of the Philip K. Dick Trust and is sponsored by the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society.

The Mercy Journals is a post-apocalyptic story set in the future after a third world war was waged because of a water crisis. One of the few survivors, Allen Quincy is a former soldier nicknamed Mercy who meets a singer named Ruby. His long-lost brother Leo arrives with news that Mercy’s children have been spotted, setting the two on a long journey to find them. 

http://bcbooklook.com/2017/04/19/mercy-journals-wins-big-in-usa/ new novel

The post Winner of the Phillip K. Dick Award – The Mercy Journals appeared first on Claudia Casper.

Lit-Hub: The Weirdness of Literary Awards

philip k. dick, literary awards, science fiction, the mercy journals

“I think of writers as mostly a horizontal tribe, people who work beside each other, people who avoid hierarchies. And then we publish a book, if we’re lucky, and our publishers, if they’re good publishers, enter our book into contests. And suddenly, we’re pitted against other writers for a prize that only one of us can win.”

Attending a Literary Award Ceremony Held in An Alternate Universe

The post Lit-Hub: The Weirdness of Literary Awards appeared first on Claudia Casper.

Trump’s Wall Foretold

Reviewed by Joan Givner, Jan 20, 2017

Link: https://bcbooklook.com/2016/07/21/trumps-wall-foretold/

Claudia Casper’s new novel adds to a growing body of work designated as “cli-fi,” a genre distinct from sci-fi and fantasy, because the horrors described are not futuristic fantasies but predictions of a certain future.

Fans of Casper’s highly successful first novel, The Reconstruction, will find The Mercy Journals (Arsenal Pulp $17.95) darker and more complex.

Both explore what it means to become fully human and, specifically, the part played by memory in that process.

In the earlier novel, Casper focuses on the memory of humans’ evolutionary past. Her main character, a sculptor, reconstructs her shattered life as she assembles an anatomical replica of the primate, Lucy, for an anthropological museum. “We want visitors to connect themselves to the history of their bodies,” says her supervisor.

In The Mercy Journals Casper’s focus shifts from the distant past to the future; memory is not a benign but rather a crippling force.

The year is 2047; climate change, “a threat multiplier,” has spawned hundreds of global catastrophes—floods, fires, food shortages, new diseases, war and genocide.

We meet Allen Levy Quincy, a veteran of the Third World War and an amputee, who lives amid the remnants of a ruined world. Most of his family has disappeared or perished in the big die-off. It is Quincy’s psychic wound rather than the lost limb that threatens to destroy him. He carries a heavy burden of guilt for his part in an atrocity—the genocidal slaughter of migrants who were trying to breach the wall that was built between Mexico and the United States.

Can there ever be forgiveness for such cruelty?

Casper’s study of humanity involves a comparative look at non-human behaviour. In the first half of the novel she describes Allen finding solace in observing three beautiful goldfish he keeps in a tank (an illegal possession since pets are forbidden). His pleasure sours when he sees the two healthy, well-fed fish tormenting a sick and dying one by taking bites out of its flesh. This image of gratuitous savagery resonates throughout the book, a possible commentary on both species.

As he sinks into a suicidal stupor of drugs and alcohol, Allen stumbles on a way to obliterate his nightmares. On his mobile, he learns of the idea, attributed to Socrates, that writing weakens the mind by making people cease to exercise memory. It also falsifies inner processes, turning them into artificial, manufactured things.

Trees are no longer cut down, and paper and pens are unavailable in the new world order, policed by The Green Planet Brigade and vigilantes. Luckily, Allen finds two blank notebooks and some pencils among his mother’s remains. He hopes that writing a diary will pry loose the death grip of memories on his mind. And there is another element in his healing process—a vital sexual relationship.

Allen appears to be on the way to recovery until he discovers that intimacy precludes secrecy and he can’t avoid confiding the enormity of his guilt to his lover. His confession precipitates a crisis, alienating her and reviving his despair.

Even the act of writing, formerly therapeutic, becomes repellent when applied to the atrocities in his past. He concludes that describing the agonies of helpless and desperate people is a violation of their most private moments, a form of pornographic voyeurism. In another powerful image he compares it to a death-camp guard’s demand for a striptease performance before sending a victim to her death.

“Salvation comes in many ways,” Allen writes in his diary, and for him it is the reappearance of his brother and nephew and the prospect of finding his lost sons that once again revives his will to live.

The second half of the novel is more subdued in tone, and framed in references to ancient myths. With his newfound relatives, he travels to the family’s cabin in a remote northern corner of Vancouver Island, hoping that his sons might have made their way there. Although the cabin is named Nirvana, it is echoes of the Old Testament that predominate. Life on the island starts out as a kind of Eden, in which they live simply, tilling the soil and living off the land. A young woman, already there, adds to the sense of a new beginning because, in violation of the one-child law, she is about to give birth.

Although Allen sustains new injuries, inflicted by a predatory cougar, the wounds, can be viewed as fortuitous. His three companions tend to him protectively, and Allen, in turn, rather than hating the beast becomes protective of the cougar and her cubs.

Echoes of the book of Genesis, and especially the references to the story of Cain and Abel, give the violent climactic events in The Mercy Journals a sense of inevitability. “Were we ever going to act differently?” Allen asks rhetorically when he contemplates the global devastation. It appears humans are programmed to cause universal destruction.

The ending is rich in moral ambiguity and irony arising from Allen’s statement that, although bearing the mark of Cain, he has survived.

A theme throughout is the healing potential, the morality, the danger and the power of writing. Alone on the island, Allen finds a different method of writing; he laboriously chisels in stone a message to the world, using an omniscient voice and cadences reminiscent of the Bible.

In the beginning was the Word, and it seems that after all the destruction, devastation, and death, it is the word that will endure.

Link: https://bcbooklook.com/2016/07/21/trumps-wall-foretold/

Tags: Trump’s WallThe Mercy Journalscli-finew novelThe Mercy Journalsby Claudia Casperbuy now!

Reviews of Claudia’s workFive Stars in ForewordTrump’s Wall Foretold – BC BooklookThe Rumpus – Amina Gautier Reviews The Mercy JournalsQuill & QuireBooklistPublisher’s WeeklyThe Vancouver SunPublishers Weekly: Starred Review, The Reconstruction The New York TimesKirkus Reviews: Starred Review, The ReconstructionBooklist: The Reconstruction The Independent: The ReconstructionThe ObserverThe Globe and Mail: The Reconstruction Maclean’sThe Financial Post Quill & QuireThe Globe and Mail: The Continuation of Love by Other Means The Sun TimesThe Vancouver Sun The Georgia Straight The Times Literary SupplementThe Edmonton JournalThe Vancouver ReviewThe Sunday Oregonian

The post Trump’s Wall Foretold appeared first on Claudia Casper.

Why I Go to Writers Festivals

Published Jan 24, 2018

So a few months ago, I attended an event at the 2017 Vancouver Writers Festival where my close friend, poet, novelist, and educator Aislinn Hunter, was interviewing renowned author Eileen Myles. I went, not because I was familiar with Myles’ work, though what I found on YouTube more than piqued my interest, but because I was intrigued to see what would happen when these two writers tangled minds.

The conversation moved gymnastically through the subjects of the souls of dogs, puppetry in all its forms, gender pronouns, poetry, loneliness, love, death, and how to live. The exchange had a lively push and pull, Aislinn pushing toward the intellectual, Eileen pushing back toward the earthy, both with enlivening gusts of irreverence, pith, and play.

After the event, I was waiting for Aislinn so we could walk together to the hospitality suite at the other end of Granville Island before we drove back to the North Shore of Vancouver. I would have more fun than usual there, talking with Nathan Englander about the dirty war in Argentina, John Vaillant about parental sadness when your kids break up with someone you’ve come to care about, wondering with Jon McGregor if there’s any connection between the experience of sexual harassment and physical fights between males. I talked both with Hal Wake, the outgoing creative director and Leslie Hurtig, the incoming one. I chatted with new friend Elee Kraljii Gardiner and spoke with Claire Cameron, a fellow fan of anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy’s work, about my recent visit with Hrdy.

I waited for Aislinn to finish talking to her friends and admirers, hovering by the line of people waiting for Eileen to sign their books. My friend, Betsy Warland, was in the line. We hugged and chatted, and it happened that when it was Betsy’s turn to connect with Eileen, I was there. Aislinn had given Eileen Betsy’s new book, Oscar of Between: A Memoir of Identity and Ideas, a highly original work that is both memoir, poetic essay, poetry, a deep dive into identity, camouflage, self and its fraught relationship with the world outside. I was witness not so much to what they said, as I am at least superficially discrete, but their eye contact. In the Buddhist view of the world where we are all one, Betsy and Eileen might feel that about each other more smoothly than many of us.

As I get older I am experiencing more and more moments of surprising conflation, when a memory from the past meets a moment in the present and a vibration starts up between the two events, like the aura before an epileptic episode or when you first get an idea for a story, a small hit of the oceanic feeling. The vibration of the two moments coming together like some kind of nuclear fusion of time causes a feedback loop of building resonance. These moments are like a foretaste of the completion of life, when a person’s story is finished and everything inside the story starts interacting and bouncing around like electrons in an atom.

I am pretty sure everyone in the audience – straight, gay, intersex, trans, male, female, lesbian, bull dyke, in a long-term relationship or single, was a little in love and turned on by Eileen at least once during the evening. Eileen is a charged being. They have shoulder-length, straight gray hair, a haircut not a salon visit, and wear jeans, boots, a loose plaid shirt over a body that is lean and strong. They are a clear-eyed, knife-edge, disarmingly honest bundle of physical and intellectual energy. Eileen seems like a fully actualized sexual being who sees the sexual being in everyone, which is alluring and charming in itself.

I first met Betsy when I was broke, living in the warehouse of Pulp Press, in a bad relationship, learning how to typeset, and writing short stories I showed to no one. I remember her striding into the office delivering her manuscript of poetry with a freedom and confidence I envied and admired. Ten years ago she invited me to work as a mentor for Vancouver Manuscript Intensive, a program she originated and runs, giving writers a way of leveling up their manuscripts through the close mentorship of another writer. Since then we have seen each other through deaths, the coming of age of our children, personal health crises, and the crises of our friends, we have shared the journeys of manuscripts that weren’t easy sells for the marketplace but were ambitious and as deep as we knew how to make them. We had drunk and been merry. This last year, a lot of Betsy’s close people had died. So had Tom Petty, a death Eileen called unbearable. So had Gord Downie, so had Leonard Cohen, so had David Bowie. Last week, so did our friend Nancy Richler, a wonderful writer and kind, incisive, thoughtful human being. This week, so did the groundbreaking Ursula Le Guin. Cancer was kicking us all in the balls, and if it wasn’t cancer, it was something to do with the circulation of blood.

I witnessed that moment of connection between Eileen and Betsy, a moment that may not travel further than itself, and glanced across the room at Aislinn, with whom I share both toughness and extreme vulnerability, mischief and reverence, and her husband Glenn who had radiation and chemo for a brain tumour this year, and Elee, who almost died last year, and Ingrid, Betsy’s partner, the twin sister of the husband of my first friend in Vancouver, and I, who had my own tangle with breast cancer a couple of years ago, and I felt myself part of a community that extends loosely over time, that is a community that has no use, no self-reinforcing ideology, that is not an army, or nationality, or culture, or religion, but is a community of words and ideas and bodies and memories and experience and love, and I felt a charge in the room, in the way I felt the charge of the future in my adolescence. This is why I go to writer’s fest events. For this kind of surprise. This kind of beautiful confluence.

The post Why I Go to Writers Festivals appeared first on Claudia Casper.

Five Stars in Forword

Reviewed by Christine Canfield on Feb. 18, 2019

This complex tale puts global crises and personal crises hand in hand, and questions if morality must adapt.

Many dystopian novels feel distant, taking place in a time far from now, but Claudia Casper’s The Mercy Journals feels like it’s just on the other side of the door. Current global issues collide, causing disastrous wreckage out of which emerges a new social order, in this roller-coaster ride through the mind of an ex-soldier with PTSD.

Casper offers up the journals of Allen Quincy, an ex-soldier nicknamed Mercy. In the aftermath of war and a massive human die-off, Mercy has whittled what’s left of his life down to the smallest common denominator, moving between work and home and keeping to himself as much as possible. Until Ruby comes along. And then his long-lost brother, Leo. Convinced to travel into the wilderness in search of other lost family members, Mercy must confront his past and question the moral stance it has caused him to take.

There is a deftness to Casper’s writing that allows her to maintain control while juggling numerous complex layers. The combination of global problems explored here—climate change, war, refugees, famine—could easily become overwhelming, especially when combined with the sometimes erratic diary entries of a traumatized man, but each is given its place in the narrative, intertwined with Mercy’s own issues of loss and mental illness. Likewise, while many post-apocalyptic stories have a cast of characters that all feel the same way about their new world, here there are a number of reactions, often falling along generational lines. This complicated web is weaved with Casper’s lyrical prose: “Every movement she made, every sound she uttered was heightened, stripped bare, exposed in a raw clarity.”

This complex tale puts global crises and personal crises hand in hand, and questions if morality can stay the same or must adapt. It interweaves destruction with hope, individualism with socialism, and bouts of mental illness with moments of clarity, all while maintaining a strong plot and protagonist that carry the story forward. It will be an excellent addition to any science-fiction library.

https://www.forewordreviews.com/reviews/the-mercy-journals/

The post Five Stars in Forword appeared first on Claudia Casper.

A Small Story for Your Christmas Stocking

Here’s the link to my story in the Globe and Mail newspaper:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/holiday-guide/holiday-survival-guide…

Not included were two tidbits. One – Bryan, unbeknownst to us, was suffering from a hyperactive thyroid and was never cold during this adventure, making me wonder what the hell was wrong with me. Two – Bryan and I had converted to Judaism the year before, so being turned away at the inn in White River had extra spice!

Why I go to Writers Festivals

Discussed: 


Aislinn Hunter,

Eileen Myles,

Betsy Warland,

Nancy Richler,

Vancouver Writers Festival,

cancer,

community

So a few months ago, I attended an event at the 2017 Vancouver Writers Festival where my close friend, poet, novelist, and educator Aislinn Hunter, was interviewing renowned author Eileen Myles. I went, not because I was familiar with Myles’ work, though what I found on YouTube more than piqued my interest, but because I was intrigued to see what would happen when these two writers tangled minds.

The conversation moved gymnastically through the subjects of the souls of dogs, puppetry in all its forms, gender pronouns, poetry, loneliness, love, death, and how to live. The exchange had a lively push and pull, Aislinn pushing toward the intellectual, Eileen pushing back toward the earthy, both with enlivening gusts of irreverence, pith, and play.

After the event, I was waiting for Aislinn so we could walk together to the hospitality suite at the other end of Granville Island before we drove back to the North Shore of Vancouver. I would have more fun than usual there, talking with Nathan Englander about the dirty war in Argentina, John Vaillant about parental sadness when your kids break up with someone you’ve come to care about, wondering with Jon McGregor if there’s any connection between the experience of sexual harassment and physical fights between males. I talked both with Hal Wake, the outgoing creative director and Leslie Hurtig, the incoming one. I chatted with new friend Elee Kraljii Gardiner and spoke with Claire Cameron, a fellow fan of anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy’s work, about my recent visit with Hrdy.

I waited for Aislinn to finish talking to her friends and admirers, hovering by the line of people waiting for Eileen to sign their books. My friend, Betsy Warland, was in the line. We hugged and chatted, and it happened that when it was Betsy’s turn to connect with Eileen, I was there. Aislinn had given Eileen Betsy’s new book, Oscar of Between: A Memoir of Identity and Ideas, a highly original work that is both memoir, poetic essay, poetry, a deep dive into identity, camouflage, self and its fraught relationship with the world outside. I was witness not so much to what they said, as I am at least superficially discrete, but their eye contact. In the Buddhist view of the world where we are all one, Betsy and Eileen might feel that about each other more smoothly than many of us.

As I get older I am experiencing more and more moments of surprising conflation, when a memory from the past meets a moment in the present and a vibration starts up between the two events, like the aura before an epileptic episode or when you first get an idea for a story, a small hit of the oceanic feeling. The vibration of the two moments coming together like some kind of nuclear fusion of time causes a feedback loop of building resonance. These moments are like a foretaste of the completion of life, when a person’s story is finished and everything inside the story starts interacting and bouncing around like electrons in an atom.

I am pretty sure everyone in the audience - straight, gay, intersex, trans, male, female, lesbian, bull dyke, in a long-term relationship or single, was a little in love and turned on by Eileen at least once during the evening. Eileen is a charged being. They have shoulder-length, straight gray hair, a haircut not a salon visit, and wear jeans, boots, a loose plaid shirt over a body that is lean and strong. They are a clear-eyed, knife-edge, disarmingly honest bundle of physical and intellectual energy. Eileen seems like a fully actualized sexual being who sees the sexual being in everyone, which is alluring and charming in itself.

I first met Betsy when I was broke, living in the warehouse of Pulp Press, in a bad relationship, learning how to typeset, and writing short stories I showed to no one. I remember her striding into the office delivering her manuscript of poetry with a freedom and confidence I envied and admired. Ten years ago she invited me to work as a mentor for Vancouver Manuscript Intensive, a program she originated and runs, giving writers a way of leveling up their manuscripts through the close mentorship of another writer. Since then we have seen each other through deaths, the coming of age of our children, personal health crises, and the crises of our friends, we have shared the journeys of manuscripts that weren’t easy sells for the marketplace but were ambitious and as deep as we knew how to make them. We had drunk and been merry. This last year, a lot of Betsy’s close people had died. So had Tom Petty, a death Eileen called unbearable. So had Gord Downie, so had Leonard Cohen, so had David Bowie. Last week, so did our friend Nancy Richler, a wonderful writer and kind, incisive, thoughtful human being. This week, so did the groundbreaking Ursula Le Guin. Cancer was kicking us all in the balls, and if it wasn’t cancer, it was something to do with the circulation of blood.

I witnessed that moment of connection between Eileen and Betsy, a moment that may not travel further than itself, and glanced across the room at Aislinn, with whom I share both toughness and extreme vulnerability, mischief and reverence, and her husband Glenn who had radiation and chemo for a brain tumour this year, and Elee, who almost died last year, and Ingrid, Betsy’s partner, the twin sister of the husband of my first friend in Vancouver, and I, who had my own tangle with breast cancer a couple of years ago, and I felt myself part of a community that extends loosely over time, that is a community that has no use, no self-reinforcing ideology, that is not an army, or nationality, or culture, or religion, but is a community of words and ideas and bodies and memories and experience and love, and I felt a charge in the room, in the way I felt the charge of the future in my adolescence. This is why I go to writer’s fest events. For this kind of surprise. This kind of beautiful confluence.

 

 

 

 

Teaser: These moments are like a foretaste of the completion of life, when a person’s story is finished and everything inside the story starts interacting and bouncing around like electrons in an atom.

The Weirdness of Literary Prizes

Discussed: 


Philip K. Dick,

literary awards,

Science Fiction,

The Mercy Journals

"I think of writers as mostly a horizontal tribe, people who work beside each other, people who avoid hierarchies. And then we publish a book, if we’re lucky, and our publishers, if they’re good publishers, enter our book into contests. And suddenly, we’re pitted against other writers for a prize that only one of us can win."

http://lithub.com/attending-a-literary-award-ceremony-held-in-an-alterna...

 

Teaser: I think of writers as mostly a horizontal tribe, people who work beside each other, people who avoid hierarchies.