I am deeply honored to be featured in Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine: “Standing up to madness, for decades“:

“Frederick R. Karl, the esteemed biographer of the 20th century German-language writer Franz Kafka, defined ‘Kafkaesque’ as being in a strange world in which one loses all control despite your best efforts. He put it this way: ‘You don’t give up, you don’t lie down and die. What you do is struggle against this with all of your equipment, with whatever you have. But of course you don’t stand a chance. That’s Kafkaesque.’

It’s hard to think of a more apt description for what Kaia Anderson…has endured since shortly after graduation. For more than three decades, a mentally ill man…has single-mindedly harassed, threatened and terrorized Anderson and her family.

And thanks to the failures of a judicial system that continually elevated the stalker’s rights over theirs, the very institutions intended to protect them have too often put them in danger. Anderson is known for helping to strengthen the state’s anti-stalking law, but now, for the first time, Anderson is telling the full story of her ordeal in a new memoir, Trial by Fire… She planned the book for more than a decade, initially spurred by work with a transpersonal therapist who helped her see her experience differently and to work with it.

‘When I discovered the wealth of wisdom we all have buried in our unconscious minds and the transformative power of owning it and making it conscious, I felt this information was so important and so relevant today that it had to be shared,” she says, sitting in the dining room of her Longmont home. “And the best way for me to share it was to tell my personal story. …’

Defying Karl’s pessimistic definition of Kafkaesque, she has made a difference in the face of madness.”

Trial by Fire: A Personal Journey of Consciousness, Power, & Freedom by Kaia Anderson. Pyxis Press, 442 pp. $17.99