Reading and Q & A with Kasia Van Schaik

Kasia Van Schaik is the author of the linked story collection, We Have Never Lived on Earth, and the poetry chapbook, Sea Burial Laws According to Country. Her writing has appeared in the LA Review of Books, CBC Books, The Rumpus, Maisonneuve Magazine, Electric Literature, the Best Canadian Poetry Anthology, and elsewhere.

A postdoctoral fellow at Concordia University, Kasia is currently working on a book of cultural criticism entitled Women Among Monuments and is also co-editing an essay collection, Shelter in Text, which interrogates the relationship between the physical and textual spaces we inhabit. Kasia lives in Tiohti:áke (Montreal).

"My collection of linked short stories We Have Never Lived On Earth explores the constraints facing young women at the beginning of the 21st century, which include the feminist backlash of the 1990s and early 2000s, and the growing recognition of climate disaster.

The main character, Charlotte, arrives in Canada as a young girl in the late 1990s where she must learn to navigate sexuality, friendship, gendered violence — both internalized and externalized — and cultural alienation during these formative years.

But the world around her is in trouble as well. Earthquakes, wildfires, disappearing islands and animal species, wounded sea creatures, trash-strewn shores and rising levels of microplastics make up the environments and textures of these stories. With this book, I want to reflect on how our sense of threatened ecological futurity echoes and amplifies the precarious position of being a woman in the world."