We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Kika Dorsey. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Kika below.
Kika, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Learning the craft is often a unique journey from every creative – we’d love to hear about your journey and if knowing what you know now, you would have done anything differently to speed up the learning process.
I learned to be a creative writer as a teenager, when I started writing stories in a journal that described my experiences. At fourteen, these anecdotes were mostly about crushes on boys, food I loved, or beating a friend in a video game. As I reached eighteen, I began to write poetry, inspired by my English courses where I read Rilke, Neruda, Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, and other poets. It wasn’t until studying creative writing in elective courses at the university that I received formal training in the art. Although I was enrolled as a biology major, my passion was languages and writing, and after living abroad a year in Regensburg, Germany, I changed my major to German, and I eventually received a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Washington, Seattle. Although my degree was in literature, I continued to write poetry, and in Seattle composed and performed with musicians. This choice to pursue a literature degree and yet write literature instead of critical theory and literary analysis after my graduation is something I regretted for a few years. However, now it has served me. Through studying the masters, I was able to intuitively hone my craft. In addition, I am now qualified to teach both literature and creative writing classes at the University of Colorado.
To really perfect the skills in writing, one needs to write regularly. While I certainly had years where much of my writing consisted of philosophy and literary analysis, and this may have slowed me down in generating my own literature, I remained consistent in engaging with the written word. Because of my practice and absorption of other writers’ work, I learned the skills of figurative language; concrete, specific, unique details; symbol; and for my prose writing, plot and character development, all of which I believe to be the most essential skills one should have in writing. Because of the courses and writing in literary theory and my studies of philosophy, I believe I can establish a complexity and depth to my work that I may not have been able to achieve had I only studied creative writing.
The only obstacle, which resulted in not publishing an actual book until I was in my forties, was having children and then later needing to make money teaching. My son and daughter are sixteen months apart in age, and for seven years I set down my pen and changed diapers, nursed, did laundry, and in general was completely immersed in raising my children and working part-time in my small business as a dog trainer. Another obstacle, though I have found a way to work with it, is my demanding teaching schedule. Often I’m teaching my students to write and poring over their manuscripts, and I find little time to write myself. I still manage to write poetry, but my novels have to wait until the summer. I just don’t have the time.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.
I am an author of four books of poetry: Beside Herself, Rust, Coming Up for Air, and Occupied: Vienna is a Broken Man and Daughter of Hunger. Beside Herself is a chapbook that focuses much on the role of being a mother and raising children. Rust was written while I was managing my mother’s care. She had Alzheimer’s, and my father had just committed suicide, unable as a mentally ill man to care for her. Rust explores my anxiety and grief, and many poems are surreal. In Coming Up for Air, I wanted to rise from the ashes of Rust. It is a collection of travel, surreal, and love poems. I explore new forms in this book, like the haibun. I wrote Occupied: Vienna is a Broken Man and Daughter of Hunger after my mother died. It is my most ambitious work and required a lot of research. My mother was a child in Austria after the second world war and experienced hunger and abuse, and she often told me stories of her past when I was a child. As she lost her memory, I struggled to write down some of them, and then I researched this time period in history and wrote poems about characters, mostly women and children, in Austria and Germany. The second half of the book explores my own life as a child of an immigrant and a mother whose mind erased her own history. Occupied won the Colorado Authors’ League Award in 2020.
While I was writing Occupied, I was also writing short stories about a character, Joan, who is a transgressive anti-hero of sorts, and the stories of dark humor were a release for me and a way to vent some of my overwhelm and bitterness about patriarchy and the confined roles women still become mired in, especially when raising children. These short stories were given a time frame, revised, and turned into the novel As Joan Approaches Infinity, which the wonderful feminist Gesture Press published in 2023. Currently I’m writing its prequel about Joan as a ten-year-old with the working title The Ledge. In it I fictionalize what I am now coming to terms with: what it means to be raised by a psychotic father. The Ledge is what they call the section of the Sears Tower where a glass-enclosed structure juts out of the building’s top floor. My father himself died by flinging himself headfirst off an upper story of a homeless shelter in Vienna. This novel takes part in Chicago, and the father is an architect with schizo-affective disorder. It is a hard novel to write and lacks some of the outrageous humor of my former novel, but it does have moments of levity.
One consistent element in all my work is my feminist sentiment. I specialized in feminist theory in graduate school, and my feminism is a core foundation of all my work. Beside Herself explores motherhood, Occupied the women and children as victims of a patriarchy that results in racism and wars, and As Joan Approaches Infinity the oppression of gender roles played in marriage. As a woman, I will continue to write about being a woman and try to make the world a better place for my daughter, and encourage my son to be a different man than what previous generations have often created.
What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?
When you choose to be a creative writer, you have committed to a practice that can nourish you your whole life. Everything you experience with all of your five senses becomes material. Every conversation you have or eavesdrop becomes material you can use and transform. It is a kind of consciousness and exploration of the world that is unique in that you record reality as well as change it. I don’t remember who said this, but someone said that writing is a way of coming to terms with death. Your life may be hard and you do not know how it ends. In writing, you create an ending, and it may be redemptive, or it may not be in its urgency of message or cry for change, but either way you have created a kind of order out of chaos, even if it may be a postmodern, fractal form. If our reality has no meaning, you make it, even if it is paradoxical and the meaning becomes the fact that we know nothing or can’t perceive meaning in what sometimes feels like a cruel world.
Another reward is physically having a book in my hands. I can leave a kind of legacy for my children. I will burn my journals, but my books I will leave behind if someone wants to hear my story.
Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?
One mission driving my creative journey is to give voice to the feminine. I will always write from my body and my experience as a survivor of sexual assault, a mother, and a woman who has been given less chances than my male colleagues. It’s a known fact that women are still being paid less for the same job. That being said, my work isn’t overtly political or polemical at all. I do believe, also, that the exploration of Gen Z in transcending the binary construction of male and female identities to be liberating and important.
I also have the goal to become as whole and individuated as I can in life. Writing helps you think and grow. It expands your consciousness and teaches you to ask questions, and begs for answers that imitate the complexity of life. It is a spiritual practice.
On a practical level, I hope to publish The Ledge eventually, and I plan to visit Chicago this summer to further the research of the setting. I also look forward to the publication of my next book of poetry, Good Ash, which will be released by Pinyon Publishing in December. In general, I just want to keep writing books. Poetry will always be my first love, but I would like to perfect my prose and hope to improve my narrative writing. Although I am confident of my skills, there is always more to learn.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://kikadorsey.com
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kika.dorsey/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kika-dorsey-ab953548/
Image Credits
Staci Bernstein