How do you escape from a convincing story? After enough repetitions, the facts come to serve the story and not the other way around. – Errol Morris
I began working on this PASSION PROJECT in 2003 when I was a volunteer criminal profiler on the Babes in the Wood task force in Vancouver, Canada. And I have been working on it ever since.
But I have come to a crossroads.
Recall:
That tap on the shoulder was a message. I knew I needed to pay attention. And I have been.
But hovering.
Waiting.
Feeling lost— thinking hoping the message was:
“Await the magic moment when a publisher responds, or that phone call comes from that lead down south…”
Sitting on the dock with lines in the water…
But no- I knew in my heart that my HOPE was actually blocking my ability to truly listen.
So I sat down with my main character the other day.
I asked Molly- what do you want from me?
I raged at myself- walked the lagoon, again and again-
… sitting with the questions, still awaiting news from publishers, producers.
Awaiting the signal to restart the manuscript- its parts all laid out and ready. Yet- feeling a nagging churning in my heart and gut that this is not how I naturally work.
Then- AH HA!
Molly pushed me off the dock into the water.
I AWOKE from my stupor!
Molly- who was an ACTUAL LIVING BREATHING HUMAN between 1924-1947, who reached out across time and space and grabbed my heart, asking me to tell her story, whose life I have pieced together from research, who seems to guide the show if I am willing to let go of what I thought it should look like- has made it so clear to me that—
I need to start telling the story in my way.
AND NOW.
It wasn’t the right time before. I have uncovered new things.
But it is also no longer OK to wait.
Narratives are ubiquitous. They are part of the way people see the world, part of the way people think. All of us. Myself included. Without them we would be overwhelmed, with undigested, raw facts. But that doesn’t mean that all narratives are created equal. There is fiction, and there is nonfiction. And one of the differences between fiction and fact is that a fictional character is controlled by its creator. It has no reality off the page… It is easy to confuse a search for revealing plot details with a search for evidence. But there is a difference. In one case, we are wandering through a landscape of words. In the other, we are in the physical world. – Errol Morris
And so, me, the creator am controlled by the non-fiction character, Molly.
Molly- a true crime analysis visual weekly serial
goes online January 15, 2017!
23 sections (two parts per section) released over 45 weeks.
January 15-November 5, 2017
The work is presented in an experimental graphic novel form.
… a crime analysis to determine the general characteristics of the most likely suspect for the crime. – Henry Lee, Crime Scene Investigation (1994)
Vancouver’s ultimate cold case…
– Eve Lazarus, author of Cold Case Vancouver: the city’s most baffling unsolved murders
Katarina Thorsen’s work Molly weaves empirical discovery and her own imagination. While many people know of the tragic deaths of the two children from the Babes in the Wood case, Thorsen introduces another tragic death in Vancouver history near the same time, that of a young woman named Molly, whose demise was a brief and lurid headline back in the day. It is a story about history and mystery, and how these two tragic stories intersect- or don’t- as the case may be.
– Pamela Post, journalist, 2015
THIS IS A WORK IN PROGRESS AND I WILL INCLUDE YOU IN MY JOURNEY.
AS MY MANUSCRIPT UNFOLDS, I WILL SHARE THE PROCESS WEEK TO WEEK STARTING WITH WEBSITE LAUNCH JANUARY 15, 2017
THE 5-ACT SERIAL WILL INCLUDE TEXT, PHYSICAL EVIDENCE, PRIMARY AND SECONDARY SOURCES, ILLUSTRATIONS, PHOTOGRAPHS, VIDEO AND AUDIO. (AND MAGIC)
It will unfold as it should in the only way I know how. It will be workshopped, if you will.
“History is so subjective. The teller of it determines it.“ – Lin Manuel Miranda
“Don’t figure it out. Create it.” – Maryam Hasnaa
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