Claudia Casper's Blog, page 2

Hypertext Interview

Discussed: 


memory,

PTSD,

the future,

climate change,

cli-fi,

US Election

"Claudia Casper’s prescient and lyrical novel, The Mercy Journals (Arsenal Pulp Press), builds on the rich speculative canon of Mary Shelley, Claire Vaye Watkins, Jules Verne, Margaret Atwood, and George Orwell, among others, in its terrifying exploration of the future..."

https://www.hypertextmag.com/hypertext-interview-with-claudia-casper/

 

Teaser: Claudia Casper’s prescient and lyrical novel, The Mercy Journals (Arsenal Pulp Press), builds on the rich speculative canon of Mary Shelley, Claire Vaye Watkins, Jules Verne, Margaret Atwood, and George Orwell, among others.

Winner of the Philip K. Dick Award - The Mercy Journals

Discussed: 


Philip K. Dick,

Trump's Wall,

The Mercy Journals,

climate change

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/

Teaser: Mercy Journals wins big in the USA

Finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award - The Mercy Journals

Discussed: 


Trump's Wall,

The Mercy Journals,

The Reconstruction,

climate change

Claudia Casper’s futuristic third novel, The Mercy Journals(Arsenal  2016) foretold Trump’s threatened wall between the U.S. and Mexico. It has been shortlisted for the Philip K. Dick Award in the US for the best work of science fiction published in 2016.

The Mercy Journals is a post-apocalyptic story set in the future after a third world war has been waged due to 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.

Givner's thoughtful analysis iof The Mercy Journals linked below. "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 darker and more complex. Both explore what it means to become fully human and, specifically, the part played by memory in that process."

http://bcbooklook.com/2017/01/20/76-trumps-wall-foretold/

Teaser: January 20th, 2017 Claudia Casper’s futuristic third novel, The Mercy Journals (Arsenal 2016) foretold Trump’s threatened wall between the U.S. and Mexico. It has been shortlisted for the Philip K. Dick Award in the US for the best work of scifi

Reaction to "Publishing Heavyweights Stand by Joseph Boyden" in Jan. 6th Globe and Mail

Discussed: 


Joseph Boyden,

CanLit,

Ryan McMahon

I cannot speak for the publishing industry, I definitely cannot speak to First Nations issues with regard to Joseph Boyden, but I can speak as a member of the CanLit community. In fact it feels like cowardice not to.

I was hiking with a friend and our dogs, talking about how disheartened and disillusioned I felt after reading the article in Friday, January 6th’s Globe and Mail, ‘Amid Heritage Controversy Publishing Heavyweights Stand by Joseph Boyden’, outlining how everyone contacted in the publishing establishment with the exception of Heather Reisman who had no comment, were making blanket statements of support. I thought if I, a privileged, upper middleclass, white female writer starting to veer off the cliff of middle age can’t take the risk to speak, who can. And yet, it feels risky.

I really wish CanLit spokespeople would stop making public statements of support for authors involved in difficult conflicts. While it is understandable that people feel loyalty, admiration, concern, and affection for their friends and colleagues, the subtext of these statements is that the perceptions and experiences on the other side of the conflicts are somehow less valid, frivolous, disingenuous, or misguided. As someone tweeted several days ago (I can no longer find it in the threads), and I’m paraphrasing, we all have friends who fuck up, and of course they are still our friends. In fact, we humans screw up all the time. If the results are not irrevocable, it’s the corrections that matter.

Public statements from people who are (though they may not necessarily feel like they are) the gatekeepers of our small industry, have a “chilling” effect both now and in the future on people, particularly young or unestablished writers, who may have complaints to make against “beloved literary icons” or “the most popular and beloved writers”.

As writers we know that where human beings are concerned there is always more than one truth. When part of your discipline is putting yourself in the shoes of every character in a situation, you understand that each has their story and each story has its truth. In a family, for example, every child will have a different version of an event, and every version will have an emotional truth for that person. CanLit spokespeople are not speaking from that consciousness when they issue blanket statements of support, statements that read like ad copy on book jackets or blurbs. Surely more nuanced responses are possible, responses that acknowledge the complexity of moral and cultural conflicts.

I respect what Ryan McMahon, an Ojibway writer and comedian, said on CBC’s The National’s Sunday Panel “Taking on an Identity”: “Had the publishers and the festivals said, ‘This is a fascinating, valuable conversation adding to the discourse in the country right now, one that we’re listening to closely and we hear you, however we accept him (Joseph Boyden) as an artist and a writer and a human being most importantly,’ that would be okay by me, but to speak over the indigenous community’s concerns over the issue is troubling.”

We are wordsmiths, in the business of promoting as much clarity as is within our reach at any given time. Probably nobody in Canadian publishing feels particularly powerful in an environment where a tsunami of content is arriving every minute via the internet and the competition for people’s leisure time is fiercer than ever, but the CanLit establishment does have great influence over writers’ careers in this country, particularly unestablished ones. Public pronouncements by the gatekeepers of our national industry, where there is at most one degree of separation, create an unnecessary dynamic of in-group, out-group.

Teaser: It is understandable when friends are criticized in public to want to be loyal and stand with them, but in the small world of Canadian Literature, when many of those people are gatekeepers of the industry, it is problematic.

I Am My Own Pet

Discussed: 


dogs,

dogfood,

digestive flora and fauna

Walking in the forest with my 7-month dog, Lucy. The rain has let up for a spell. Blue sky cuts through the mist and big dark cloud. I’m thinking about the huge bags of kibble I feed Lucy and the microbe environment  created in her stomach and intestines, and I think how little the company that makes that food knows, how little I know, or vets know, about what the food we give our dogs does to them. About what they really need to be healthy. And then it comes to me. I am my own pet. I feed myself, groom myself, and take myself out for exercise. I really don’t know how my digestive systems works, not in the tiny exchanges of energy, minerals, the chemical reactions of amino acids. I have no idea what kind of microbe biome I'm creating in my guts or how painkillers, antihistamines, drink, sleep and stress affect it. We are loved for a while, and we love. We take our best guess, and throw our fate out there to the same forces that govern our pets.

 

Teaser: I'm thinking about the huge bags of kibble I feed Lucy

Cain and Abel, The Rumpus

Discussed: 


Cain and Abel,

The Rumpus,

the Jewish Independent,

Amina Gautier

Barbara Buchanan and I go deep into the Cain and Abel story: "I read the story of Cain and Abel closely, using the Jewish Publication Society of America translation, and studied the midrash on the text. The language is so rich and layered, from “Am I my brother’s keeper?” to “You shall be more cursed than the ground, which opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand.” The story in the Torah is short but its power resonates throughout our literature and our culture.

In The Mercy Journals, I sewed in references to Cain and Abel throughout the text. At one point, when Leo, the long-lost, nihilistic brother of my main character, Allen Quincy, returns, Allen says wryly, “I suppose that means I have to keep you?” The earth drinking blood, also an image I use at least twice. The final scene, which I cannot give away, reenacts Cain going out to the field.

What I wanted to do in this novel was bookend the Cain and Abel story with a metaphorical last murder, as opposed to the first murder, to write the murder of Cain by Abel, a closing of the circle."

http://www.jewishindependent.ca/can-murder-become-extinct/

 

"Casper’s scenario expands upon the lifeboat ethics question. What should and would people do in order to survive when resources are limited? What inherent savageries do we reveal when faced with threat of extinction? What do we evolve or devolve into when it is me versus thee?" - Amina Gautier

http://therumpus.net/2016/07/the-mercy-journals-by-claudia-casper/

Teaser: The future through the lens of Cain and Abel, and a place at the table at The Rumpus.net

Trump's Wall Foretold

Discussed: 


The Mercy Journals,

Trump,

evolution,

The Reconstruction,

climate change

Givner's thoughtful analysis iof The Mercy Journals s a gift. "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 darker and more complex. Both explore what it means to become fully human and, specifically, the part played by memory in that process."

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

 

Teaser: Trump's Wall Foretold -

CBC and Spotify - 7 Tangles with The Mercy Journals

Discussed: 


Send in the Clowns,

CBCBooks,

Spotify,

writing,

PTSD,

climate change,

sci-fi,

literature

Here are links and a few choice quotes from recent reviewers and Q&As

CBC SUMMER READING LIST

Great company - Louise Erdrich, Matti Freeman, Emma Straub, Alissa York, Carmen Aguirre:

http://www.cbc.ca/books/2016/05/cbc-books-summer-2016-reading-list.html

Excerpt from Q&A (linked below) with CBC Books' Jane van Koeverden ("Casper's fearless new novel"):

"Literature is the air we breathe. It's the background for our species in our culture. It contributes to change by changing the air we breathe, changing what's in our background sense of what is known, what is normal, what is experienced, what we're conscious of. It can galvanize change over a generation or two. What literature does, I think in some ways better than any other medium, is it takes you inside another mind and expands in a whole world in that character. Once you have that empathetic understanding of another character, it doesn't leave you, even if you don't remember the plot."

http://www.cbc.ca/books/2016/05/claudia-casper-the-mercy-journals.html

CONVERSATIONS:

David Gutowski's innovative blog where writers create and discuss a music playlist that relates to their books, (a playlist is simultaneously created on Spotify). The songs for The Mercy Journals I discuss are: Send in the Clowns, Mack the Knife, Take This Waltz, White Wedding - Part 1, Radar Love, Fado Portugues, In for the Kill (Skream remix), Come as You Are.

http://www.largeheartedboy.com/blog/archive/2016/05/book_notes_clau_2.html

I talk with Caroline about writing, the wreckage of the world, the origins of The Mercy Journals, the quality of mercy, the research, memory. "What we worry about most with regards to death, after our actual non-existence, is not being remembered. Is being erased from the planet."

http://carolineleavittville.blogspot.ca/2016/05/claudia-casper-talks-about-mercy.html

ONLINE REVIEWS:

Justus Joseph from Eliott Bay Book Company for Shelf Awareness (linked below): "Through the distressed voice of Allen, Casper creates a dystopian future that appears uncomfortably familiar as it echoes our own fears for the future." and "Both benevolent and autocratic, OneWorld enforces severe measures for humanity's survival, but can't dispel the tension between the old world's promise of prosperity and the new world's uncertainty."

http://www.shelf-awareness.com/readers-issue.html?issue=507#m8862

Christine Canfield for Foreword Reviews: "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."

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

Shane Jardine for The Arched Doorway (linked below): "The Mercy Journals is a dark and gritty psychological thriller that kept me on the edge of my seat from start to finish. It’s also one of those books that stays with you long after you have finished reading it. For days after after I finished the last page I would find my mind drifting off my task at work or whatever I was doing and back to the book. It didn’t take me long to decide it was time to read the book at least one more time, and I think I may have enjoyed it more the second time than I did the first."

http://archeddoorway.com/2016/05/22/the-mercy-journals-by-claudia-casper/

Teaser: CBC, Spotify - 7 new reviews and Q&As

Yiddish Policeman's Union: the Pleasure of Arriving Late to the Ball

Discussed: 


michael chabon,

yiddish policeman's union

I just finished reading The Yiddish Policeman's Union by Michael Chabon. That this novel exists feels like a kind of miracle. I want to send a cry of delight out to the universe of reader's joy. The mysterious alchemy Chabon achieves of Yiddishkeit, Jewish history, alternative history, Alaska, Tlingit culture, detective noir is like finding a diamond at the beach. It's an utterly subversive work. And so many lines you have to stop and grin at, and read out loud. Here's a mere smattering: "My homeland is my hat." "One thing about a Yeshiva bachelor, he knows his way around a question." "I'm like a cash gift. I'm always appropriate." "fluid pink giants with haircuts that occupy the neat interval between astronaut and pedophile scoutmaster." Comparing someone's skin to the colour of celery hearts. Coming to a novel this good this late, you get the volume of everyone else's earlier pleasure to amplify the experience. A ripe counterpoint to discovering a new, unknown artist.

Teaser: That Chabon's novel even exists is a kind of miracle of alchemy

Two Moleskine Journals Found in a Yellow Dry Box...

Discussed: 


The Mercy Journals,

fiction,

climate change,

PTSD

Quill & Quire Review

The Mercy Journals

reviewed by Robert J. Wiersema

We have seen the sort of world depicted in Claudia Casper’s new novel before: a near-future dystopia, wracked in the wake of a global war and an environmental cataclysm, with governments driven to extreme measures to protect the lives of their citizens. The great strength of Casper’s work, though, is that it doesn’t focus on the larger scale, allowing the political and ecological landscape to form a backdrop for the deeply immersive, character-based storytelling we have come to expect from the Vancouver writer.

Allen “Mercy” Quincy is a former soldier suffering PTSD. He works as a parking enforcement officer as he struggles to isolate himself mentally and emotionally from all aspects of his past – his life as a soldier, the loss of his family – in an effort to retain his sanity. When he meets Ruby, a singer and dancer with secrets of her own, his fragile protective shell is shattered. His life with Ruby, and its calamitous aftermath, are chronicled in the titular journals, two notebooks Mercy discovers among his mother’s belongings after her death.

The journals afford, as one would expect, emotional immediacy and directness, an insight into the fractured world of Mercy’s mind and soul. The form, however, doesn’t preclude a larger perspective: Casper has Mercy writing in complete scenes with a sense of narrative motion, stretching the journal form to its very limits without ever stepping over the line. The device never seems mannered or limiting, and suits the material, which circles around questions of truth and memory, trust and betrayal.

The Mercy Journals is a novel of slow revelation, focused on the careful unfolding of a character even as he comes apart, truths glimpsed obliquely in the wreckage where self-serving falsehoods no longer carry any force. Structured as something of a mystery – the two Moleskine journals are found in a “yellow dry box” near the body of a man, a pistol, and a dead cougar – the novel balances the inevitable, necessary question of what happens next with a deeper inquiry into the very nature of who we are.

http://www.quillandquire.com/review/the-mercy-journals/

Teaser: The great strength of Casper’s work, though, is that it doesn’t focus on the larger scale, allowing the political and ecological landscape to form a backdrop for the deeply immersive, character-based storytelling we have come to expect from the Vancouver