What Daniel Sarah Karasik learned from editing their younger self

Daniel Sarah Karasikis a Toronto-based writer, playwright and theatre artist. Theywon the 2012CBCShort Story Prizefor theirstory Mine,and their plays have been performed on stages in Canada, the U.S. and Germany. Theirdebut short story collection,Faithful and Other Stories, brings together some of the author's older work and follows complexcharactersas they search formeaning and connectionin a mystifying world.

In theirown words, Daniel Sarah Karasikexplains how they wroteFaithful and Other Stories.

• Explore the past winners of the CBCLiterary Prizes

Alienation as inspiration

"I think alienation is the fundamental human problem.I'm interested in how it's both a political creature the product of broken social relations that could be otherwise and should be fixed and also an experience to which political answers are always somehow asymptotic, almost adequate but never quite. I find the experience of alienation to be an inflection point between the political and the spiritual."

Grow with your work

"Ididn't conceive it as a book untilpretty late. I knew I'd written a lot of stories, but Iwasn't sure I had enough strong ones for a book.I realized there were some stylistic and thematic continuities, and that together they could comprise a suite. There was never any conscious attempt to make the stories in the book speak to each other, though in certain ways inevitably they do.

"Iwasn't very old when I began writing much of this work.The story in Faithfulthat won the CBC Short Story Prize, Mine,was recognizedwhen I was 25, but I'd written its first drafts six years earlier, when I was 19. But I couldn't have revised it effectively then.

"It was tricky to revise the stories so long after the moments that sparked their first drafts. I felt like I was editing someone else a younger brother. But part of mefelt like he knew more andhad better instincts than I did. A lot of later written work was more 'sophisticated,'but lackedemotional immediacy."

Author versus playwright

"I write a lot of dialogueand I skimp on exposition. I'd say both of those habits come from writing for performance. I think forms aren't just aesthetic propositions but also associated with particular classes and ideological systems that is, I think the artist's choice of form is political and right now I'm struggling to understand what I want art to do and what I think it's capable of doing, and for whom. But back when I was switching quickly between writing plays and fiction, that movement was mostly arbitrarysince my thinking about form wasn't particularly conscious, since my politics weren't."

Daniel Sarah Karasik's comments have been edited and condensed.