Kika Dorsey expanded from poetry roots to conceive her first novel

Kika Dorsey is an author with a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature. Her books include the poetry collections “Beside Herself,” “ Rust,” “Coming Up for Air,” “Occupied: Vienna is a Broken Man” and “Daughter of Hunger,” which won a Colorado Authors’ League award. She has also written the novel “As Joan Approaches Infinity.” She is a lecturer at the University of Colorado. 

SunLit: Tell us this book’s backstory. What inspired you to write it? Where did the story/theme originate?

Kika Dorsey: I began writing what became my novel, “As Joan Approaches Infinity,” when I was writing a book of poetry that won the Colorado Authors League Award in 2021, “Occupied: Vienna is a Broken Man and Daughter of Hunger.” That book was a collection that explored the post-World War II experience of Germany and Austria. I researched that time period and tried to bring together portraits of characters based on my mother, who was a child in Leoben, Austria, and characters I learned about through research. 

I was managing the care of my mother, who had Alzheimer’s. It was a book written after her death and was a way of processing my grief and resurrecting her memories. At the same time, I wrote short stories based on a character, Joan, who is living in the suburbs and overwhelmed with caretaking responsibilities and pressure to financially succeed in a job force where being an educator, an adjunct at the community college, left her enervated and feeling unappreciated, especially since she also had full responsibility of raising her two children and running a household. 

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Those short stories were a way for me to vent some of my own frustrations. My mentor at the time, Sarah Elizabeth Schantz, who now teaches for Lighthouse and Naropa University, saw many of these stories in her Writes of Passage Workshops and told me that I had a novel. I didn’t really believe her at the time. I was just writing dark humor to balance the tragedy of the subject matter of my poetry manuscript, and I had always identified as a poet. 

However, when I had collected enough of these short stories, I realized that it was a novel, and I revised and combined them with a timeline to achieve a novel that may not be written with a traditional arc, but still contains growth of the protagonist, however spiral in form, and tension in the narrative while Joan moves from one escapade into another, trying to find fulfillment in acts that are sometimes absurd and sometimes motivated by compassion and desire to do the right thing. 

SunLit: Place this excerpt in context. How does it fit into the book as a whole? Why did you select it?

Dorsey: This excerpt is the opening of the book, where Joan, overwhelmed with her responsibilities as a mother and caretaker of her mother, gets a DUI and lands in jail. She is convinced she is like Jesus Christ, that her life has been a sacrifice of her body and soul. 

The combination of megalomania and dysfunction with her addictive behavior continues throughout the whole book. In this opening, she tells the policeman that she wants to be heard. This theme develops throughout the novel, where Joan is neither seen nor heard by her family or a society that still pays women less than men for their labor, partly because women tend to work jobs that are less lucrative, such as becoming educators or caretakers, which our society doesn’t value monetarily. 

She is invisible to her family, and each subsequent chapter is her attempt to break out of her mundane existence and become visible. She wants to make a difference and be applauded for it. If it doesn’t happen by doing the laundry and paying the bills, perhaps she will be seen skydiving and becoming an excellent bowler. Because this is dark humor, she is flawed, and many of her escapist tendencies are absurd or at worst destructive, especially her addictions. 

As a piece of literature, I intended the work to also be a satire of American suburban existence. When she’s arrested, she worries about who will pick up her children from the orthodontist and the money they may have to spend if incurred late fees are added to the exorbitant expense of braces. She is jealous of her husband’s friend and believes she smells her scent on him, even though it is she herself on the precipice of an affair, and she makes fun of the women in her neighborhood for their trendy sports fashion and perfect rose bushes. 

She worries about the cost of bail. The comments this novel makes about materialism and our culture, focusing on trendy Boulder, continue throughout the novel. That being said, most people are so involved with Joan as a character that I believe the novel spans between an exploration of character and satire, and maybe sometimes the satire becomes muted. 

“As Joan Approaches Infinity”

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SunLit: Tell us about creating this book. What influences and/or experiences informed the project before you sat down to write? 

Dorsey: I’ve always been interested in character-driven literature. Ellen Gilchrist in her exploration of Rhoda, also a flawed character, was a large influence. I’m also interested in nonlinear narratives or books that have a different shape than a traditional novel. 

I read Jane Alison’s book “Meander, Spiral, and Explode,” recommended to me by Heather Goodrich from Gesture Press, who eventually published my novel. My novel ended up being a character who grows in the shape of a spiral, which I believe all growth does. She ends up at a similar place but has expanded some beyond the confines of the ground of the former fall, and then she repeats some of her patterns, but there are still signs of growth. It also has the shape of waves in the actual structuring of the book, since each chapter has its own arc. 

I have a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Washington, Seattle, where I focused on modern and postmodern German and Italian literature and feminist theory. My dissertation was titled, “The House, the Labyrinth, and Fluid Forms.” So I’ve always been interested in the space a narrative creates. I tend to perceive novels I read as shapes. 

As far as personal influences, I was writing this book while an adjunct instructor at a community college and managing my mother’s care while she declined with Alzheimer’s, and at the same time raising two young children. As far as frame goes, this novel has autobiographical elements. However, it was also an escape. 

I could act out my alter ego through Joan. Instead of achieving all my tasks to be a responsible mother, daughter, and educator, I could experience flights of fancy where I was swimming to Alcatraz, skydiving, sniffing glue, and saving animals. There was a certain euphoria in writing this novel. Joan is my shadow self, which means she is me and everything that is not me. 

SunLit: What did the process of writing this book add to your knowledge and understanding of your craft and/or the subject matter?

Dorsey: I learned that I could write narrative as well as poetry. When I lived in Seattle in graduate school, I wrote and performed poetry with musicians and focused my studies on poetry. I identified so thoroughly as a poet that I couldn’t even imagine being anything else. 

When I wrote “Occupied,” I discovered the craft of creating characters, and this process eventually led me into writing fiction. I learned that if you want to develop the nuances of creating character, you can do that better with fiction. 

I also learned through research about the criminal justice system, glue-sniffing, the Alcatrez Sharkfest swim, skydiving, and other subjects pertaining to the novel. I love researching. It brings me back to my graduate school days and enhances my work. 

I also became aware that my life was part of a pattern that many women of the second wave of feminism found themselves in. There is a pressure to be a homemaker and have a career, and this is in a world where we have no nationalized daycare or a country that can’t even pass the Equal Rights Amendment. 

While much has changed in the domestic realm perhaps with current generations, the Boomers and Gen X were still a world where the women were mostly responsible for house chores and child raising, and at the same time were pressured to have a career. I also explore the invisibility of the middle-aged woman. Joan is going through an existential midlife crisis. She feels invisible and powerless and is trying to find meaning in her absurd existence. 

However, writing can write its way in and out of the absurdity of our ignorance. Writing is a way of engaging with your world and revealing its flaws and changing your reality. It’s a liberating process. You are able to transform material either through exaggeration or creating redemption where you might not see it in your life. It’s a promise of hope. 

While I do not follow the traditional tropes of sobriety ending in redemption or a perfect marriage that provides support and stability in the end, there is a signal of growth in the novel. I believe that’s the best we can hope for. However, we always focus on the individual needing to change, and sometimes it’s the environment we really need to focus on. That’s where the satire comes in, and that’s where I needed to end my novel with failure and promise at the same time. 

SunLit: What were the biggest challenges you faced in writing this book?

My biggest challenge was the critique I received from people who found Joan to be an unlikable character. Because I was attached to her, it felt like a blow, and I felt misunderstood. I felt the baby got thrown out with the bathwater, the character for her actions that were partly a reflection of the environment. 

In the origin of that idiomatic expression, the baby in the Middle Ages was always the last to be bathed, and the water was so filthy that it could be lost in the darkness of the dirty water and thrown out. While Joan is seriously flawed, I want people to see the innocence and heart in her character. 

In addition, there are enough parallels to my own life that my close friends and family felt uncomfortable with what they saw as a thin veil. I don’t necessarily paint the husband or children in a positive light. I make fun of trends that are precious, like radical sobriety or extreme sports. But when you write comedy, you always take the risk of offending people. 

SunLit: What’s the most important thing — a theme, lesson, emotion or realization — that readers should take from this book? 

Dorsey: First and foremost, we need to honor the women who do all the work that doesn’t provide a paycheck. We need nationalized health care. We need men to clean the toilets in a household and take care of infants. We need educators to be paid more. We need to honor the women who sacrifice their body and time to raise new generations. 

I also want people to learn that escapism in addictions or dysfunctional behavior will only result in temporary highs, and the change needs to happen on a macro level and not be based on narcissistic pursuits of pleasure. This is what we can learn from Joan’s faults.

SunLit: Why “Infinity” in the title?

Dorsey: Joan is obsessed with heights, with rising above her mundane existence. She is always striving for completion. She is always on the verge of a transcendence, always approaching and never achieving it. 

SunLit: Tell us about your next project.

Dorsey: My next collection of poetry, “Good Ash,” was released in December. It is an existential book and explores the vertical and directional metaphysics of the western world and turns it upside down. I explore my father’s suicide and the crescendo in the end is an ode to women: my girlfriends, my daughter, and the infant girls being born right now. 

I have also just completed a draft of my next novel, “The Ledge.” Like Ellen Gilchrist with Rhoda, I am sticking with Joan. She is 10 years old and growing up in Chicago to a Catholic family in the district of West Lawn. Like “As Joan Approaches Infinity,” the framework is similar to my life’s. She has a mother who is an Austrian immigrant and a father who has what they called at that time “paranoid schizophrenia.” 

This novel has required research and a trip to Chicago. It takes place in 1975-1976, after Watergate and Vietnam, when Gerald Ford was president and Richard J. Daley, who gentrified much of Chicago, was finishing his sixth term as mayor. Because the subject matter is serious and at times heartbreaking, and we have the limited omniscient point-of-view of a child, it contains less humor than my former novel, though there are moments of levity. 

While my former books, “Rust” and “Occupied,” explored my relationship to my mother and her struggles with Alzheimer’s and my coming to terms with her history and death, these two books explore my childhood growing up with a mentally ill father. My father was institutionalized after a suicide attempt when I was 11. Because of the stigma of mental illness, we were pressured to hide the horrible dysfunction of our family. 

I grew up being afraid of my father, who was brilliant, narcissistic, cruel at times, and crazy as hell. Because I want to honor the dignity of his ghost, instead of telling the details of my story, I’m more comfortable using some of it in fiction, and combining it with research and imagination of what could have happened, or what should have happened. My father committed suicide by flinging himself off the second floor headfirst from a homeless shelter in Vienna. My novel’s title comes from the name of the glass ledge of the Willis Tower in Chicago. 

All my books leave me liberated in ways. I used to reject the simplified belief that  my work is therapeutic because I wanted to see my messages as universal. But I believe most writing tells your very personal truth and transforms and releases it, and it speaks to others who have experienced something similar in its core emotional resonance. 

 A few more quick questions

SunLit: Which do you enjoy more as you work on a book – writing or editing? 

Dorsey: I enjoy the research aspect of writing and the brainstorming and the editing and revising. The writing can be painful. 

SunLit: What’s the first piece of writing – at any age – that you remember being proud of?

Dorsey: I wrote a poem that was published in my high school’s literary magazine about the “languid, liquid woman.” I was proud of my alliteration and the rhythm of the poem, and it was my first poem I published. 

SunLit: What three writers, from any era, would you invite over for a great discussion about literature and writing? 

Dorsey: Rainier Maria Rilke, Ellen Gilchrist, and Julie Otsuka. With Rilke we would discuss metaphysics and poetry. With Gilchrist her character development. With Otsuka, the point of view of children, as in “When the Emperor Was Divine.” 

SunLit: Do you have a favorite quote about writing? 

Dorsey: “A bird doesn’t sing because it has an answer; it sings because it has a song.” Maya Angelou

SunLit: What does the current collection of books on your home shelves tell visitors about you? 

Dorsey: It says that I have studied critical theory, poetry, ethnic literature, composition, and that I need to start culling myself of books. 

SunLit: Soundtrack or silence? What’s the audio background that helps you write? 

Dorsey: I wrote my dissertation in a noisy café. Now I need to write in silence. Music distracts me. 

SunLit: What music do you listen to for sheer enjoyment? 

Dorsey: Grunge, trip-hop, and classical music. Sometimes jazz. 

SunLit: What event, and at what age, convinced you that you wanted to be a writer? 

Dorsey: I started writing daily in a journal at the age of 14 but it wasn’t until I was 18 that I knew I wanted to be an author. 

SunLit: Greatest writing fear? 

Dorsey: I have no fears about writing. Even when I fail, between the pleasure I get from it and the confidence that some of it is good, my fears don’t focus on my writing or any of its success or failure. There are enough more important things to fear, like global warming, our country’s direction, financial concerns, and the existential consciousness of our mortality. 

SunLit: Greatest writing satisfaction? 

Dorsey: Finishing a revised draft. There’s nothing like completing a project and dreaming about bringing it out into the world.