Writing was invented to augment memory. Financial dealings became too large and complex to be remembered by one person, and so writing was invented. First there is a need, then there is an invention. What need do novel’s fill? The need to see inside the life of a human being, to see the shape of it from the inside, as well as the outside. Poetry connects the inside to the ecstatic, the religious, the epiphanic, but not the day to day consciousness.
February 24, 2022
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 […]
February 24, 2022
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.
February 24, 2022
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 […]
February 23, 2022
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 […]
February 22, 2022
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 […]
February 19, 2022
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 […]