“The story will be included in a collection of short fiction … following the publication of her lost novel Toad,” Huffman told the New Yorker. Coupled with that story was an interview with Naomi Huffman, a New York–based editor who’s become the quasi-executor of Dunn’s unpublished works. Another short story culled from Dunn’s papers, “The Resident Poet,” a study of power dynamics that outlines a student’s joyless affair with a professor, was published in the New Yorker in 2020. It shares real estate on the brittle, yellowed newsprint with an ad for John Sayles’s 1979 movie Return of the Secaucus 7.įlash forward to 2022 and that same story, the tale of a rural housewife (in what feels like Oregon, though it isn’t specified) left to dispatch some 50 unruly roosters, is in the pages of the Paris Review. R.” and three tattered copies of it printed in the Clinton St.

Most of the archive is publicly accessible, though some materials are held back for potential future publication.Ī chalky blue linoleum folder with a coffee ring on the inside holds numerous typewritten drafts of a short story titled “The Education of Mrs. Le Guin wrote two years after Geek Love was published and asked, superstitiously, about a next “b**k.” A 1996 letter from Chuck Palahniuk, addressed to the Nob Hill house where Dunn lived for most of her adult life, thanks her for the blurb on his upcoming book Fight Club’s cover. (She wrote for the alt-weekly through the ’80s.) She was in touch with the local literary scene, too. One box holds a postcard from Stephen King dated 1982: “Thanks for the Cujo review,” he wrote, referencing Dunn’s write-up in Willamette Week. But an accelerating trickle of posthumously published fiction is unearthing a rich, never-before-seen body of work.īefore she died, Dunn bequeathed her papers, 47 legal file storage boxes, to the archives of Lewis & Clark College in Southwest Portland. To most people, Geek Love was the extent of Dunn’s fiction. The book would win the hearts of celebrated outsiders spanning Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love to Tim Burton-who to this day owns the novel’s film rights. Inspired by the bioengineered flowers of Washington Park’s International Rose Test Garden, Dunn wrote a surrealist tale of genetically modified circus freaks, an ode to misfits. In 1989, at age 43, she published Geek Love. This has been the case with the archive of Katherine Dunn, the beloved Portland author who died in 2016. The fountain is cut off, so we dive deep, groping for more of whatever it is we loved in their work. When an artist dies, everything they’ve touched becomes precious.

Image: Courtesy the Estate of Katherine Dunn

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