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] 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.
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.
[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.
[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.
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.