10 Questions for Steven R. Kraaijeveld

66. IT SHOULD be noted that, to date, there is no physical evidence
that Anna Kavan had cats.
Her surviving letters, diaries, notebooks, marginalia, memorabilia,
and photographs contain no signs of felines. Nevertheless, a substantial
body of Kavan scholarship has formed around the question of Kavan’s
cats.
—from Steven R. Kraaijeveld’s “Anna Kavan’s Cats” (Volume 66, issue 3)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
I don’t have to rely on memory here: among the childhood paraphernalia tucked away in the boxes through which I was forced to rummage during a recent move, I discovered the first full-fledged story that I wrote in English. I must have been around eleven or twelve years old—several years after my family moved from the Netherlands to Prague. It’s called The Boy with Magic Hands and tells the story of a boy named Jim, who finds a barrel with a metal detector one day and has chemicals spill on his hands. When his sister cuts her knee on a rock later that day, Jim discovers that his hands have healing powers. The following week, Jim has to go to summer camp. The people at the camp aren’t very nice, so when he hears about a nearby train crash, he sneaks out of the camp and joins the doctors treating the victims. Jim manages to convince the austere and skeptical medical practitioners that he can help, and finally reveals his powers. From that day on, he travels the world to help people—known everywhere as the boy with the magic hands. Kudos to my teacher for crossing out an entire paragraph and writing “too much unnecessary detail.” She was right.

What writer(s) or works have influenced the way you write now?
There is no accounting for unconscious influence; and even explicit influence is never stable. The most accurate thing to say would probably be that everything that I’ve read from childhood on has had some sort of influence. There are books that I would read over and over again as a kid that likely still linger. Having said that, Dostoevsky’s Idiot rekindled my love of literature as a teenager. I do believe that every serious writer is a passionate reader first. Some writers that loom large in my mind, and perhaps in my work, include (in no particular order and next to Dostoevsky): Machado de Assis, Thomas Bernhard, Albert Camus, Knut Hamsun, Clarice Lispector, Franz Kafka, Osamu Dazai, Anna Kavan, Anton Chekhov, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Cesare Pavese, Yasunari Kawabata, and P. G. Wodehouse. Wodehouse might seem like the odd one out, but he may be more necessary than any of the others: the yang to the yin.  

What other professions have you worked in?
I’m an academic philosopher and ethicist by profession, not a fiction writer. I teach medical students about moral and conceptual issues in their profession—like how to be a good doctor, the meaning of autonomy, and so on. I also conduct research primarily within the fields of public health ethics and philosophy of technology. As a student, I worked in the kitchens of assisted living facilities and sometimes cleaned the rooms of residents, who were generally more interested in my conversation than my cleaning abilities (no comment about which of these is superior).

What did you want to be when you were young?
I wanted to be a veterinarian until I realized that helping animals also means watching them suffer.

What inspired you to write this piece?
First and foremost, I wanted to express my appreciation for the work and life of the British writer Anna Kavan (born Helen Emily Woods). I found an angle that also allowed me to give voice to my love of cats, as well as a specific form that let me play with—and satirize—academic scholarship. 

Is there a city or place, real or imagined, that influences your writing?
I’d say that two of the countries where I spent some of my formative years particularly influence my writing: Czechia and the Philippines. The old, baroque city of Prague with its cathedrals and cobblestoned squares; and the unbounded islands and tropical lushness of the Philippines. One could spend a lifetime exploring and going back to these places in fiction.

Is there any specific music that aids you through the writing or editing process?
Two of the stories that I most recently completed were written almost entirely to three songs from Freddie Gibbs’s album You Only Live 2wice. I don’t quite know how or why, because when I’m studying or grading, I can only bear music without lyrics (classical; jazz; lounge); but there is something about a certain kind of deep, melodic hip-hop that carries me to the setting and atmosphere of whatever I’m writing faster than anything else.

If you could work in another art form what would it be?
I’d paint ponds and the animals drawn to them.

What are you working on currently?
I’m always working on stories. There are several that are becoming more insistent; I’m hoping to complete them over the holidays. I’ve also been intermittently working on two novels over the past few years. One is set on an island in the Philippines, where a man goes to die. The other is a tribute to my grandmother and an exploration of uprootedness, which is taking a more intimately autobiographical turn than I initially intended.  

What are you reading right now?
I’m toggling between Jorge Luis Borges’s Norton Lectures—recently published by Harvard University Press as This Craft of Verse—and Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s Quicksand. Tanizaki is another writer whom I admire: The Makioka Sisters is among the most beautiful novels ever written.

STEVEN R. KRAAIJEVELD is a Dutch philosopher, ethicist, and writer. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in ANMLY, Chicago Quarterly Review, Epiphany, L’Esprit Literary Review, Massachusetts Review, MoonPark Review, and elsewhere. His work has been nominated for Best Small Fictions 2026 (twice) and Best Microfiction 2026. Find out more about him on Instagram @esarkaye or through his website: stevenrkraaijeveld.com.