This year has been an eventful one for Kasia Van Schaik. On the heels of finishing her PhD in the Department of English, her debut story collection “We Have Never Lived on Earth” has been longlisted for the Scotia Bank Giller Prize.
We Have Never Lived on Earth follows the journey of Charlotte Ferrier, a child of divorce raised by a single mother in a small town of British Columbia after moving from South Africa.
We spoke to Dr. Van Schaik about the inspiration behind her work. Read our interview with her:
Q: We Have Never Lived on Earth has been described as a short story collection and “novel hybrid”. What led you to choose this form?
I have always been drawn to the short story, the fragment, the small moment. You hop in, you hop out. The sentences must be as precise as the lines in a poem. But I also love the languid emotional contours that the novel gives us: the enduring experience of a story told over chapters, even days in a reader’s life, the sustained contact with character. Why not loiter in the space between these forms? There is a beaded quality to the stories in my collection. Together they form a necklace, but the beads can also hang alone.
Q: Your book explores the universal experience of womanhood, specifically focusing on your protagonist, a young woman as she experiences ‘intimate and transforming moments of female experience’. How much of these stories were inspired by your life and the lives of the women in your life?
Readers are usually surprised to learn that many of the stories in the book are not autobiographical, at least, not in a factual sense. I wrote the book to sound like someone recounting intimate stories about her life, and there have been moments, after working on a story for many months, that I start to believe that maybe the stories are real. Maybe these things happened to me. That’s usually when I know that I’m doing something right.
I learned this technique from Alice Munro, whose stories often initially read as autobiography to me—sometimes, I even had the uncanny impression that she was relating details to me of my own life. How did she do it? I went through Munro’s work like a surgeon trying to reverse engineer the effect: how to incorporate these leaps of memory, these cadences of memory, into a story structure, to drop sharp true details into a mostly invented world.
Spaces and geographies hold memory too, and sometimes an emotionally charged setting is enough to fuel a story. Once when visiting my hometown in British Columbia, I ran into a friend at the lake who I hadn't seen in years. When I asked her about her family, I was shocked to learn that her mother, who I'd known quite well, had died suddenly months earlier. There was something so incongruent about the lively atmosphere of the beach-side park and this terrible news. I tried to translate that feeling into my book, how one can be dazed with grief amidst other people’s happiness. In the book, the details have changed though: my narrator Charlotte learns instead of the death of a childhood friend. The feeling is there though. The setting is the same. These were the autobiographical components of the scene.
With these stories of girlhood and womanhood, I wanted to explore collective, though distinctive, modes of female experience, hence the “we” in the title. But I also wanted to allow room for intersectionality and difference.
Q: You have previously addressed environmental concerns in your poetry chapbook “Sea Burial Laws According to Country), published in 2018. How are these concerns addressed in “We Have Never Lived on Earth”? How have your feelings or reflections on these topics evolved in these different forms?
I tend to shy away from writing—and reading—didactic stories about the environmental crisis, not because they are not valid but simply because I find that they don’t sustain my attention. I approach what we might call “big topics conversations” in a way that invites the reader to collaborate rather than be lectured, to fill in the blanks.
For the most part I’d say that my chapbook and my story collection approached the topic of the climate crisis indirectly—if it is possible to approach such a world structuring phenomenon. My book is a little less subtle though, as climate change becomes a little less subtle every day. There is one story in which a forest fire demolishes Charlotte’s hometown and another in which an artist has created an exhibition of vanishing islands. In this story, we even meet the destructive nature of the Anthropocene head on, as in the following scene, when Charlotte goes swimming off an island in Greece:
I watched a child kill an octopus with a stick. Wave spilling ink. The child was no more than 10 and resembled a ghost. That is to say, when he looked out at the waves at me I could see that he had already died several times.
I didn't reprimand him. What would I say? One day, he, like the rest of us, will take the place of the octopus. And we will be beaten under the water until our bodies dispel, in their last defence, a black wave.
There’s not much subtilty in this encounter. No subtext, all text.
Q: How have your stories resonated with readers, friends and family? What has it been like to hear how people responded to your stories?
To my delight I have found that the book has resonated with a wide range of readers. A friend texted me to tell me that her father had been reading my book on his beach vacation and had commented on how interesting it was to be inside the head of a young woman, to be seeing the world from such a different perspective. After a recent reading university student came up and told me that upon completing my book, she’d felt for the first time in her life that she might actually want to have a child. This was a surprise to me, as my character is so conflicted about that subject. But I was really happy to hear that for her the book incited a sense of hope.
I always love to hear from readers about which story in the collection they liked the most. Sometimes a reader will tell me with authority: ________ is clearly the best story in the book. But each time, it's a different story.
Q: You recently graduated from McGill with a PhD from the Department of English. How did you find a balance between your academic responsibilities and research and finding the time to write and publish a book?
I'm not sure that I ever did find a balance between my academic responsibilities and writing fiction. I worked late into the night, many nights; I worked on borrowed time. I also worked slowly: it took me almost 10 years to finish writing and editing my book. But there is a crossover of theme between my dissertation research and my book, particularly the theme of female dislocation. Though formally very different, in the end, the two projects weren't entirely foreign to each other.
Q: Throughout your time at McGill you’ve led creative writing workshops and courses for students. What inspires you to share your craft with a growing generation of writers?
I teach students from diverse academic backgrounds and am astonished every day by their talent and ingenuity. One of the joys of teaching comes from opening students up to new texts, new approaches to writing and reading. I believe there is still a lot of ground to uncover in the field of creative writing, many more forms and subgenres to explore and even invent. I see my classroom as a laboratory and the students, my fellow scientists. We have a lot of fun!
Q: What’s next for you?
Writing wise, I’m working on a fleet of projects: a book of cultural criticism, a poetry manuscript, the beginnings of a novel, and I’m editing an academic essay collection that emerged from my doctoral research entitled Shelter in Text. I’m also newly on the academic job market...it’s been a busy year!
Kasia Van Schaik is the author of the linked story collection We Have Never Lived on Earth, which was nominated for the 2023 Scotiabank Giller Prize, the 2022 Concordia University First Book Prize, and the ReLit Prize for short fiction. Poems from her chapbook, Sea Burial Laws According to Country, received the Mona Adilman prize for poetry related to ecological concerns. Kasia’s writing has appeared in the LA Review of Books, CBC Books, Maisonneuve Magazine, Best Canadian Poetry, Electric Literature, The Rumpus and more. Kasia holds a PhD in Literature from McGill University, where her dissertation Small dislocations: narrative acts beyond the home in North American women's fiction post 1945, won a 2023 Arts Insights Dissertation Award. She is currently working on a book of cultural criticism and memoir entitled Women Among Monuments, forthcoming with Dundurn Press in 2025. In 2021, Kasia served as a CBC QWF writer-in-residence.