Kasia Van Schaik is a South African poet and writer living in Montreal. Her first story collection, We Have Never Lived On Earth, which explores some themes pertaining to the universal woman experience, is on the 2023 Scotiabank Giller Prize longlist. The shortlist will be announced on Oct. 11.

We Have Never Lived on Earth is a short story collection and novel hybrid following the tale of Charlotte Ferrier, raised by a single mother in small town B.C. after immigrating from South Africa. Charlotte and her mother endure forest fires, disappearances and memories which transform them.

Van Schaik was a finalist for the 2017 CBC Short Story Prize for The Peninsula of Happiness. The Peninsula of Happiness is one of the chapters in We Have Never Lived on Earth. She also made the 2021 CBC Nonfiction Prize longlist for An Ounce of Care. The 2024 CBC Short Story Prize is currently open.

Van Schaik spoke to CBC Books about how she wrote We Have Never Lived On Earth.

"I would say the book is a series of moments of intensity in a young woman's life. Moments of testing, moments of crisis, moments of intimacy and moments of climate anxiety as seen through the eyes of a young woman.

"So other young women might see themselves in some of the stories, they might feel like the feelings there, the moments, the experiences are familiar to them and and I've had readers come out and say that they appreciated that or it opened something up for them.

"I hope that they can sit in the psyche of this character and maybe experience a different way of seeing the world."

"I often write my stories when I'm not at the desk, which is to say when I'm swimming at the public pool, when I'm doing my laps for 30 minutes, I'm thinking about this character and I'm thinking about the scene and how they would react to things and being in that world of those characters. So the stories haunt me beyond the desk. But then of course, sitting at the desk and allowing for that space to write is so important.

"Sometimes at midnight I'd find myself at my desk full of excitement and think I have 25 minutes now and I'm gonna put them into creating the nugget of something that will later on become the story. I took probably almost 10 years compiling these stories. I am a slow writer and basically my method is that I have so many little notebooks that I've carried around with me and in those notebooks, I'll jot down those images, ideas, thoughts that will later on feed the stories. So you would probably see me write a few sentences, then maybe erase them, reach for a notebook, bring something from that notebook that re-energizes the writing. And then I edit and edit and edit. Some of these stories I would write a first draft and, over the next two or three years, would be editing, taking away, making sure that every line counts in the story."

"I printed out the stories, rearranged them a lot. I knew which story would start it and I knew which story was going to end it. But there were a few in the middle that I moved around. I don't think I could have done that without actually printing it out and seeing it physically — sorry trees — but I had to physically see it in front of me. I would spread it out on the table, sometimes the floor, the biggest space I could find. I would look at the openings of stories and the endings of stories and think about how that flowed to make sure that there wasn't too much repetition.

"You don't want to end a story the same way three times in a row. You don't want to end with like moving out to a landscape shot at the end of three stories in a row because then it looks like a gimmick. So maybe end on dialogue instead or end on a memory or end on something else to change it up. So that was the organizing of some of the things I had in mind when I was spreading out the opening page and the last page of each story beside each other."

"I would definitely say that to have that story shortlisted was great because it meant that more people got to read it and respond to me. Being a finalist gave me a sense of permission as well. I can do this, I can write more stories like this. It's one of the darker stories in the book, actually. But I always intended to have that included in the book as a kind of central story.

"I'd written a lot of different stories with different voices, different perspectives and then I decided to cut all the stories that were from various different characters and perspectives and hone it in on Charlotte's perspective. So then I shifted some things around and tweaked in order to have that be her story. Initially many of the narrators were nameless and some of the stories were written in third person instead of first person.

"During the editing process, I kind of weaved those together to create one strong narratorial voice. So instead of becoming a short story collection, it became a book with chapters. From a story collection to something that resembles more of a novel. But it's not quite a novel because it still has these standalone stories in it, so it's kind of sitting somewhere in between the collection and the kind of seamless novel hybrid."