Under the Surface with Katarina Thorsen

Launching May 2025, Salt Green Death explores the documented experiences of Joseph O’Dwyer, a young man who was institutionalized at one of Canada’s most notorious historic psychiatric institutions. Researcher and artist Katarina Thorsen delves into 15 years of Joseph O’Dwyer’s life via patient files and other historical documents. This is her attempt at piecing together meaning and context in the experiences of the O’Dwyer family—a small slice of historical graphic medicine brought to life in coloured pencil and graphite.

1. How did you stumble across the story of the O’Dwyer family?
In the late Fall of 2003, I was putting together a comparative analysis about the conditions for women in post-war Vancouver. In the micro-fiches at the Central Branch of the Vancouver Public Library, I found a newspaper article dated November 6, 1947 about a young woman named Molly O’Dwyer, a Vancouver-based Irish immigrant, who died by suicide.

Molly was a good example of the hardships women were facing in Vancouver in the late 40s. I printed out the article and tried to put it aside but found myself obsessed about this young woman whose broken body was featured on the cover of the Vancouver Sun. I felt that Molly had tapped me on the shoulder. “Tell our story.”

21 years later, I have been able to map out Molly’s entire family’s journey from Cashel, Ireland, in the 1920s to Vancouver in the 1960s using extensive archival, historical, genealogical, forensic and psychiatric research. I knew I had to eventually write and draw the O’Dwyer saga. But how? Over the years, I wrote a profile, two massive manuscripts, made countless drawings and even created an experimental online graphic novel. Yet, I couldn’t find the narrative thread. It wasn’t until getting access to Molly’s younger brother Joseph’s entire patient file in 2017 at the BC Archives that the story became clear. THIS IS JOSEPH’S STORY.

The prologue/teaser to the project was self-published in 2022 as a 12 page limited edition broadsheet (400 copies). Salt Green Death is now the culmination of my 21 year journey with the O’Dwyer’s. I am so grateful for that “tap on the shoulder” and I sense that the ghosts are happy.

2. What is your fascination with James Joyce? Is he your favourite writer? Why is his work so embedded in a graphic novel about a psychiatric patient?
I am an avid reader and yet I had not properly read any Joyce until 2021. My Joycean journey began when I read a biography about James Joyce’s daughter, Lucia [Lucia Joyce – To Dance in the Wake by Carol Loeb Schloss, 2003]. Lucia Joyce was diagnosed with schizophrenia and died in an asylum, as did Joseph O’Dwyer. I was not only interested in Lucia’s psychiatric journey but also her Irish roots. The biography helped inform my understanding of Joseph’s experiences.

In one section of her book, Schloss shares a quote from Ulysses. Reading the quote was one of those clouds-part-and-the-sun-shines-through moments for me. The quote is now the epigraph to my graphic novel as it perfectly reflects my intertwined and unrelenting relationship with the O’Dwyer’s. Three words in the quote, salt green death, not only became the title of my book, but provided the structure of the book itself.

Reading Schloss’s book led me to finally start diving deep into Joyce. I started with Ulysses. I now have a large pile of Joyce’s works and related biographies. Ulysses is, without a doubt, my favourite. The experimental and confusing storytelling in Ulysses (with its interior monologues, symbolic parallels, invented words, puns, and allusions) is very similar to my visual storytelling style. You don’t have to get all of it. You have to feel it. And revisit it again and again, finding new details, and perhaps feeling even more confusion. And certainly, the O’Dwyer saga – with its tragic outcomes – is a Ulyssean journey of pathos and defeat.

In Joseph O’Dwyer’s patient file, I read that Joseph loved to read – that he was always reading. In fact, when he was hospitalized, he had a pocket book in his back pocket. I believe that reading gave him structure, an ability to make sense of the world. I took dramatic liberties and imagined that Joseph stole a copy of Ulysses from the psychiatrist’s office. If one looks hard enough on a certain page in my graphic novel, you will see the 1946 edition of Ulysses on the shelf behind the psychiatrist. Throughout Salt Green Death, quotes from Ulysses appear and serve to inform the narrative. Those familiar with Joyce will recognize them. Those not familiar may read the words as Joseph’s own inner dialogue (or even mine as “the observer.”) I imagine Joseph trying to make sense of his asylum experience through Ulysses. For many years, in my personal and professional life, I have worked closely with individuals with a variety of neurodiverse and/ or psychiatric challenges using creative engagement. It is always very moving to find out that what could be interpreted as psychopathology in an individual is actually sensemaking through art, writing, reading and so on.

I am now reading the Swedish translation of Ulysses. It is masterfully translated and lends a whole new understand- ing of Joyce’s work.

3. You live in Vancouver but were born in Sweden. How has being an outsider helped with your artistic vision? Has it helped?
I was born in Sweden in 1962 and came to Vancouver the first time in 1968. We moved back and forth between Sweden and Canada a few times before finally settling here. My immigrant experience helped me better imagine what the O’Dwyer family went through when they moved to Canada in 1929.

At age 6, I learned English the hard way, being “thrown to the wolves” and bullied for my lack of understanding. This also happened in the reverse when I moved back to Sweden in Grade 8. [The bullying in Sweden was more brutal]. On top of it, I suffer from severe anxiety. I never feel that I quite fit in anywhere. Feeling constantly as an “outsider,” I have had to become very observant and I obsessively try to read visual cues. I do keep in mind, however, that “outsider” is a slippery term.

“I am aware there is a certain off-putting, self-regarding twinkle in the eye of someone who declares themselves to be one… There are lots of ways of being an outsider… and many of them don’t require you to come from elsewhere.” — Jesse Armstrong, Writing America, from the outside (2024)

Yet, I have always found a sense of belonging in dance, in art classes, in libraries and in my journals. I thrive when simply observing – from watching the tiniest bug walking through moss in Stanley Park to being lost in the glorious buzz of crowds in New York City. I then transform those observations into creative expression. All my life experiences shape how I make marks on paper.