Claudia Casper

Claudia Casper
Born	1957 Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Occupation	Novelist
Nationality	Canadian
Period	1996 to present
Website
claudiacasper.com

Claudia Casper is a Canadian writer. She is best known for her bestseller novel The Reconstruction, about a woman who constructs a life-sized model of the hominid Lucy for a museum diorama while trying to recreate herself. Her third novel, The Mercy Journals, written as the journals of a soldier suffering PTSD in the year 2047, won the 2016 Philip K. Dick Award^[1] for distinguished Science fiction.

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My name is Yann Martel and I studied Philosophy at Trent. I had felt as good as the success of the book it's hard to make a living being an artist to write a book that connected with so many people was incredibly gratifying and then to have this secondary thing called a movie based on my book is also a wonderful adventure. Stories are important to us and whether stories are told in one form or another it's important that we hear stories and of course the movies differ from the book as one expects but if it brings more people to the book that's great and if people have read the book then I think they'll see the movie as a good companion piece. So no, I believe in artistic risks making that movie was a huge risk for the studio and for the director, for Ang Lee. And I'm grateful we did it, that the studio did it and I like the movie very much. It's a very good companion piece to the book. Well I have two small children so it's somewhat chaotic, but I try to get into my little writing studio as often as I can to work on my next book, hopefully more of the same. I love writing and I do it regardless of the success or the lack of success of the book. I do because I want to do it. So hopefully more writing more quiet times in my studio punctuated by laughter and screaming with my children. Well we're facing a lot of enormous challenges that will require that we change our behavior. We have a society that is incredibly materialistic and there's only so much materialism this planet can take. So we're going to have to overcome some great challenges which will mean re-thinking how we live, how we travel. Hopefully we're up to it. I like that it was small, it was intimate. I had easy access to my professors it was a very convivial informal learning experience. It's a lovely small University. I love the campus, the main campus. I love the architecture, Ron Thom's architecture is a lovely architecture. So it was an intimate stimulating experience. Well it taught me how to think, it taught me how to think critically. I had never taken Philosophy before and I actually loved it. I don't think we can be a --- I don't think someone can be a functioning citizen if they don't know how to think critically. And Trent taught me that, the Department of Philosophy taught me that. So I met a whole bunch of professors who were very bright, very engaging, very stimulating and it it just taught me how to think critically, how to parse through things and get to the essential. Well when you go to university you're usually a very young person, you know so Trent taught me a little bit about maturity about social relations. It taught me that I had a choice in life. You know when you go to high school it's sort of a, it's quite a regulated environment you have some choice but it's limited. Once you get to university the choices are enormous so you start discovering who you are who you want to be in a university milieu and Trent was a great place for that for me. I'd tell them that I had a wonderful time there, that it's a good University, close also to a very large city, Toronto, so it has a nice - it's nicely situated in the sense that it's removed from Toronto, it's in it's own environment but it's also close to a big city and all that a big city has to offer. And Peterborough is a charming city in a beautiful area, the Kawarthas are a lovely area...

Early life

Claudia Casper was born in Toronto, Ontario. She was her parents' only child, but she now has ten half-siblings. She says that her "siblings ... who often spoke no common language and three parents who couldn't be further apart on the introversion/extroversion continuum," helped her develop "an early ability to bridge realities." As a result of her diverse family, she learned German, Spanish, French and some Hebrew.^[2]

Casper attended Lawrence Park Collegiate Institute in Toronto, but then transferred to SEED Alternative School, one of Toronto's first free schools, which she describes as seeming like "a slightly scary hotbed of creativity, drugs and sex," where she learned at her own pace and chose her own curriculum.^[2]

Her first job in the literary world was at the age of 16, dusting books at Coles bookstore near Yonge and Bloor in Toronto. Casper used the earnings from this job to go on a solo bike trip in Germany on a three-speed bicycle. (Cycling continues to be a large part of her life. In 2010 she participated in the first Gran Fondo ride from Vancouver to Whistler, British Columbia.)

While completing her Bachelor of Arts at the University of Toronto, where she studied under Northrop Frye, Casper worked in the circulation department at The Globe and Mail.^[2]

After graduation, she applied for a copy-editing job with a Toronto publisher but failed their in-house test, so she moved to Vancouver and "crashed on the warehouse floor" of a small publisher, Pulp Press (now Arsenal Pulp Press). Stephen Osborne, co-founder of Pulp Press and founder of Geist magazine, taught Casper to typeset, and for the next ten years she made a living freelance typesetting and being a foster parent for at-risk teenagers.^[2]

Personal life

Inspired by Rabbi Daniel Siegel, Casper and her first husband, Bryan Wert, converted to Judaism.^[2] Over the years, she has veered toward a spiritually informed atheism, and says, "I don't worry about defining myself. Judaism will always be part of who I am."

Claudia's second husband is James Griffin, the founder and president of Vancouver Film School. They have two sons together.

Works

Casper first submitted her writing to Event magazine's creative non-fiction competition, where she shared first prize, and the Federation of BC Writers' short fiction competition, which she also won.^[2]

With the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts, Casper wrote her first novel, The Reconstruction, about a woman who is hired to construct a life-sized model of Lucy—the hominid whose fossilized skeleton and footprints are humankind's link to the other primates in the evolutionary chain—while trying to recreate herself after separating from her husband.^[3] Casper says The Reconstruction was "sparked by a desire to explore what it meant to be a woman living today who is descended from Lucy."^[2]

After a bidding war,^[4] The Reconstruction was published in 1996 by Penguin^[5] and became a bestseller. The New York Times called it a "probing book,"^[6] and The Globe and Mail said, "The writing is beautiful, with passages of dazzling poetic intensity on nearly every page."^[7] It was optioned for a film and published in the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany.^[8]

While writing her second novel, The Continuation of Love by Other Means, Casper also wrote book reviews for The Globe and Mail^[9] and The Vancouver Sun.^[2] She also published two short pieces, "Dad's Place" in Geist magazine, which also appeared in Best Canadian Stories 96, edited by Douglas Glover and published by Oberon Press in 1996,^[10] and "Victory," which appeared in Dropped Threads: What We Aren't Told alongside Margaret Atwood and Miriam Toews, edited by Carol Shields and Marjorie Anderson and published by Vintage Canada in 2001.^[8]^[11]

With friend Anne Giardini, Carol Shields' daughter, Casper created the Carol Shields Labyrinth, an interactive labyrinth website that honours Shields' life.^[12]

Casper's second novel, The Continuation of Love by Other Means, explores gender conflict through the relationship of a right-leaning father and left-wing daughter in Argentina during the Dirty War. It was published by Penguin in 2003^[5] to critical acclaim (Quill & Quire called Casper a "brave, subtle writer"^[13]) and short-listed for the Ethel Wilson BC Book Prize.^[14]

"Casper's third novel, The Mercy Journals, winner of the Philip K. Dick Award, was released in Canada and the U.S. by Arsenal Pulp Press. Mary Woodbury of eco-fiction.com wrote, "The Mercy Journals offers a view into the near future after climate change results in a far different world than the one we know today, a world in which a Mexican border horror wall comes alive, a world in which the surreal, bizarre, and beautiful begin to triumph via character redemption and hope."^[15] Christine Canfield at forewordreviews.com in a starred review wrote, "This complex tale puts global crises and personal crises hand in hand, and questions if morality can stay the same or must adapt."^[16] Casper sees her three novels as "a trio about our species: evolution, reproduction and war—light topics, every one."^[2]

She is currently co-writing a screenplay of The Reconstruction for a 3D feature film with French co-production partners, Jacqueline Farmer and Cyril Barbaçon.

Casper has taught writing for the Vancouver Manuscript Intensive, founded by Betsy Warland and at Kwantlen Polytechnic University,^[17] and was a faculty member at the 2016 Iceland Writers Retreat.^[18]

Bibliography

The Mercy Journals (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2016)
The Reconstruction (Penguin, 1996)
"Dad's Place". Geist magazine, and Best Canadian Stories 96 (Oberon Press, 1996)
The Continuation of Love by Other Means (Penguin, 2003)
"Victory". Dropped Threads: What We Aren't Told (Vintage Canada, 2001 and Canadian Content (Nelson Education, 2012))
The Mercy Journals (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2016)