Every single day, I’m astonished that we even get to be here ...
I've been meaning to ask Caitlin Galway
I’ve been meaning to ask you is an interview series where Kathryn Mockler invites people to answer questions on being human
What is your first memory of existing?
My grandmother Shirley, sitting on the brown-tweed couch in our living room. The memory is warm and blurry. She’s giving me a doll wearing a yellow dress, and the doll seems giant because I’m just a toddler. It’s the only memory I have from a first-person viewpoint, other than an upsetting one, a few years later, involving a lot of blood. From then on, my memories appear as though I’m watching myself from overhead, so that first one is particularly important to me.
What is your first memory of being creative (writing, art making, etc.)?
I was maybe five years old, and I had a little hideaway spot between the back of the couch and the window. The view looked out onto our neighbour Barb’s garden (she was an artist and natural gardener, so the flowers were beautiful and abundant). I was sitting there, tucked behind these sheer white curtains, feeling like no one in the world could see me, and I was writing about rain. I remember thinking about how to describe the sound of rain hitting the flowers outside, and how that description might change depending on shape and colour. I imagined it being musical or like wind chimes. It’s a peaceful, daydreamy memory.
What is the best or worst dream you ever had?
One nightmare I’ve never forgotten was of a dark, muddy medieval town during the bubonic plague. It was hot and damp, and bodies were everywhere. Nothing happened in the dream. I just walked, feeling sick, and the sound of flies kept getting thicker.
Can you recount a time (that you're willing to share) when you were embarrassed?
I was in the sixth grade, and there was a school dance (a hotbed of adolescent humiliation). I usually didn’t attend school dances (I read and drew anime in the library), but some well-meaning popular girl said I should join, and she even offered to share her makeup. She was really sweet and gave me a little makeover. Then one of the boys in my class (Derek…) said my eyeshadow made me look like l’d been punched, and I was so embarrassed that I hid in the girls’ locker room until the dance was over. It was such a small thing, but I had never before considered the possibility that I could ever be pretty, and that one minor comment made me feel ridiculous.
What do you cherish most about this world?
The gift of consciousness. To be able to think, look around, feel, absorb. Every single day, I’m astonished that we even get to be here, that the moon exists, that there are mountains and depths of knowledge we can’t begin to understand.
Do you believe in ghosts? Why or why not?
I’m hesitant to rely entirely on logic in these matters, since that presumes some sort of fundamental understanding of the nature of the universe. We’re intelligent creatures, and I’m not going to roll my eyes at particle physics—but as a species, our knowledge is limited, and failing to see that only further limits us. For all we know, years from now, claims of experiences with ghosts might be explained in ways (even logical ways) that we can’t now grasp. So, my answer is less a yes or no, and more a dazed stare into the enormity of the unknown.
Caitlin Galway's new short story collection A Song for Wildcats has been featured as a must-read by both the Globe and Mail and the Toronto Star, and named an Indigo Best Book of 2025. Her debut novel Bonavere Howl was a spring pick by the Globe and Mail, and her work has appeared in journals and anthologies across Canada, including Best Canadian Stories, EVENT, and Gloria Vanderbilt's Carter V. Cooper Anthology, and on CBC Books.
A Song for Wildcats by Caitlin Galway Dundurn Press, 2025
An arresting, vividly imaginative collection of stories capturing the complexity of intimacy and the depths of the unravelling mind.
Infatuation and violence grow between two girls in the enchanting wilderness of postwar Australia as they spin disturbing fantasies to escape their families. Two young men in the midst of the 1968 French student revolts navigate—and at times resist—the philosophical and emotional nature of love. An orphaned boy and his estranged aunt are thrown together on a quiet peninsula at the height of the Troubles in Ireland, where their deeply rooted fear attracts the attention of shape-shifting phantoms of war.
The five long-form stories in A Song for Wildcats are uncanny portraits of grief and resilience and are imbued with unique beauty, insight, and resonance from one of the country’s most exciting authors.
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