June 16, 1904. Lá Bloom (Bloom’s Day, in Irish). 120 years!

Reading Ulysses for the past couple of years (in English and in Swedish) while working on my current book is both magical and integral to my creative process. I am in the final month of completing my graphic novel. It’s a glorious, terrifying and exhilarating place to be. When I panic, I remind myself that this strange project chose me. So I go back into trust mode. The ghosts are happy and I am really just taking notes!

My book’s title, Salt Green Death (and its epigraph) actually appears in Joyce’s Ulysses in the Wandering Rocks section. I first came across the quote in a biography about James Joyce’s daughter, Lucia, several years ago (Loeb Shloss, Carol, 2003, Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake, New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux). I found the quote perfectly describes my relationship to this project (encompassing 20 years of research) and the ghosts – in particular, Joseph’s sister, Molly, who I first came across in a newspaper article in 2003 when gathering historical mental health stories in post-war Vancouver.

The book comes out in 2025 with @conundrumpress

“Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes… Shut your eyes and see.” – James Joyce, Ulysses

© KATARINA THORSEN

“Worsening inexorably over his lifespan of sixty years, the eyes of Joyce were the main source of his misery. It was a feat of preternatural breadth, his undertaking of literary labours via a shroud of painful blindness. Joyce’s struggle with his eyes led him to naming his daughter Lucia, after St Lucia, patron saint of the blind. A scrutiny of him as a young man attests to his longsightedness – his glasses magnify the Irish-blue eyes. The wearing of such spectacles is notable because it reveals that Joyce had eyes of a crowded shape : anatomy which increases the risk of high pressure developing in the eyeball. Ordeals of the ophthalmic type began in youth, but inflammation in Joyce’s eyes (rather than pressure) was the initiator of his sufferings in 1907.”