The story in this week’s issue, “The Resident Poet,” is a previously unpublished piece by Katherine Dunn, who died in 2016 and was the author of, among other things, the best-selling 1989 novel “Geek Love,” which follows a family of self-described “freaks” who operate and perform for a travelling circus. Can you explain how you came across the story and what role you’ve played in bringing Dunn’s unpublished work to readers?
I’d read “Geek Love” three times, and thought I’d exhausted Dunn’s body of work, when I realized that she’d written two other novels I knew nothing about—“Attic,” from 1970, published when she was just twenty-five, and “Truck,” from 1971. I’d been unable to find them in used bookstores. “Katherine Dunn wrote other books?” a cashier at the information desk in the basement of the Strand asked when I inquired. “She did, and I can’t find anyone who knows anything about them,” I replied. (This was before “Attic” was reissued, by Vintage/Anchor, in 2017.)
I was particularly curious about “Attic,” the story of a young woman, also named Katherine Dunn, who’s incarcerated after being arrested for attempting to cash a blank check, because I’d read Elizabeth Dalton’s dismissive review of the novel for the New York Times. Dalton described the novel as “contrived,” “silly,” and “embarrassing” and conceded only that it “bears some resemblance, if not scrutinized too closely, to formal innovation.” An agitated critic for Kirkus Reviews attempted to describe the book for a few sentences before giving up, with “It seems unnecessary to pursue it any further,” and then served an unintentionally enigmatic single-sentence sum-up, the literary critic’s equivalent of a sick burn: “Freeform fingerpainting and masturbatory cuddletoys in the attic.” It also seems worth pointing out the considerable number of precious words both reviewers spent questioning the amount of time Katherine—the protagonist, that is—spends on the toilet: “Suggest[s] an arrest at the genito-urinary level,” the Kirkus critic intoned, nostrils pinched. When I finally found a copy on eBay, I bid high.
“Attic” and “Truck” are markedly different from “Geek Love.” Unlike those critics, I was deeply entertained and impressed by Dunn’s early prose. The sentences in “Attic” are like a series of chaotic high kicks, or the deliberately unpracticed routine of a middle-school dance team, and I mean that as a compliment. Reading the book is an aerobic experience but worth it for lines like, “Lots of lovers fucka-trucking down the street just like us.” It’s impossible not to marvel at the verve it must have taken to write that way. “Truck,” too, is a feat of syntax, bravado, and experimental word arrangements. Its first sentences form one of my favorite novel openers: “Going to go up on the mountain and be king. If I’m the only one up there, I’m the king.” You’d never guess that the narrator is a teen-age girl. The prose is frenetic, addled, guileless; Dunn was having so much fun. Together, “Attic” and “Truck” read like the first novels of a young, burgeoning talent—because they are. Knowing that a not insignificant amount of time, nearly two decades, had passed between their publication and that of “Geek Love,” I wondered, What had Dunn written in between?
With little effort, I located Dunn’s archive, which is housed at Lewis & Clark College, in Portland, Oregon, and in April, 2019, was granted remote digital access. I was thrilled to learn that it contained a large amount of unpublished material: drafts of short stories, poems, and essays; Dunn’s daily notebooks; a handful of sketches, rendered in pen and colored pencil; some correspondence. I spent much of last summer reviewing the material. I read drafts, separated the finished pieces, and transcribed more than a hundred pages of typed or handwritten manuscripts. The more time I spent with the material, the more convinced I was that it might one day form a book. Or multiple books.
“The Resident Poet” was one of the first stories I read. I was immediately taken with Sally’s voice—colorful, slightly crass, tinged with self-hatred and unrestrained scorn for Mr. Lucas. I feel such affection for her, a young woman testing her agency with men who desire her, even as she recognizes their desires as contrived. The story will be included in a collection of short fiction that MCD, an imprint of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, will publish in 2022, following the publication of her lost novel, “Toad,” in the fall of 2021.
What was it about “Geek Love” and Katherine Dunn’s work that motivated you to do this?
To read “Geek Love,” as I did again most recently last summer, is to be temporarily immersed in a world of delightful oddities—and fantastic terrors—the likes of which I haven’t encountered anywhere else in literature. There’s the warmth of the Binewski parents, who teach their children to prize their individuality above all else; the summer nights in the throng of the crowded midway, with the lights, the aroma of fried food, the air crackling with possibility; and Oly, the hyper-observant hunchbacked protagonist, whose love for her family practically glows from the page. There are also the “attractions”: jars of formaldehyde, preserving genetically altered infants—the Binewski parents’ expired experiments; Chick, a child who is forced to use his telekinetic talents to further his oldest brother Arty’s tyrannical agenda; a set of conjoined twins, Iphy and Elly, who are raped and impregnated by a man with half a face. The absurdities of the Binewskis’ world—the infernal abuses of power, the horrors that women face for possessing a body, the possibilities and the failures of family—are uncomfortably familiar.
Equally provocative is “Geek Love” ’s celebration of the weird, the “freak,” the irreducible misfit. The book insists that the best parts of a person are those that distinguish him or her from everyone else—and, more importantly, that no one has the right to determine how another person lives. One of the deepest pleasures of reading Dunn’s archive has been discovering that this idea permeates much of her work, even stories she wrote decades before “Geek Love.” I’m excited that more of it will soon be out in the world.
You mentioned to me that “The Resident Poet” was inspired by Dunn’s time as a student at Reed College in the mid-sixties. What do you know about when and where it was written? Was it based directly on her own experiences? Did she leave any notes on the story?
From what I can tell, the story was written in the early seventies, after Dunn had graduated from Reed College. Because I am in touch with her son, Eli Dapolonia, I do know that the story draws from personal experience, although I can only guess to what extent.
There is a character in “Toad” who is very similar to Mr. Lucas: a middle-aged poet, a visiting professor at the local college, crashes a party thrown by his students. Like Mr. Lucas, he’s defined by his desperation to be perceived as a more ideal version of himself—the contemplative intellectual slumming with his subordinates, exploiting the admiration of his female students to stroke his own ego, or worse. That Dunn drew this kind of man more than once, and with such intimate understanding, suggests that he may be someone she has experience with.
The narrator of the story, Sally, is alternately excited by the idea of having an affair with her married professor and repulsed by the actual man who’s supposed to produce that excitement. She feels that she has a certain degree of control in the situation, and that, although she may regret her decision, she was the one to make it. Today, in the #MeToo era, one might argue that a freshman whose professor pursues her sexually doesn’t have power or control in the way that Sally feels she does. Where do you think Dunn would fall in that discussion?
I admire the way that the story introduces a handful of complex considerations about the abuse of power, as well as the performance of gender, age, and sexual appeal, and the fact that Dunn doesn’t attempt to offer pat conclusions. Except this: that even when women are fully convinced of their empowerment, able to make choices, express their sexuality, and be enjoyed on their own terms, the sense of agency is still elusive. The harmful narratives of gender and power that we’ve heard our whole lives are too deeply embedded; they’re in our guts. This was as true when Dunn wrote “The Resident Poet” as it is now.
Though Sally’s voice is frank and brightly funny, at times her careful calculating and self-bargaining are almost painful to read; they show us that, in spite of her insistence otherwise, she is aware of her vulnerability with Mr. Lucas. She assumes that she is in control because she is forthright about her expectations, at least to herself: she’s not seeking emotional companionship or even a satisfactory sexual encounter. She aspires, instead, to be perceived as sexually experienced, a mind-blowing lay, and fodder for a poem that Mr. Lucas might one day write about her—not because she actually wishes to please him but because she wants to prove to herself that she can be immune to the imposition of the feminine ideal. This conviction falters, of course, when she fails to perform the role that he’s assigned her. When Sally realizes that she’s not going to get from Mr. Lucas what she sought, her interest in their affair collapses. She recedes into herself, her humiliation intensifies, and, when he finally drops her off in the parking lot of her dorm, she realizes, “Even when there’s no place left to be hurt, it seems there is something that can be diminished, whittled away.” She’s discovered a dark truth: the well of female suffering beneath the male gaze is bottomless.
Do you know why the novel “Toad” and the stories you unearthed weren’t published in Dunn’s lifetime?
When I first began digging in Dunn’s archive, I asked myself that question frequently. I couldn’t believe that a writer as widely celebrated as Dunn—whose vocal admirers include an impressive array of bright minds, not just authors (Karen Russell, Molly Crabapple, Ursula K. Le Guin) but also directors (Tim Burton, Lana Wachowski) and musicians (Courtney Love, Kurt Cobain, Flea)—could be so brazenly ignored. I spent a lot of time turning over theories. Perhaps some editors weren’t interested in the lives of Dunn’s protagonists: violent housewives, butch women, the disabled, mentally ill, or otherwise marginalized. Maybe it was that she deliberately published her work in small literary journals and not in the magazines that circulated among the literary élite. If she had lived in New York and not in Portland, Oregon, maybe she’d have been welcomed into the scene of feminist writers who were publishing genre-flexing novels in the early nineties.
But I already know, as well as anyone reading this, the reason that Katherine Dunn’s archive is full of work that wasn’t published during her lifetime and why it sat, untouched, for the first few years following her death: the supposedly enlightened institution of American literature has often overlooked the contributions of women. So many have had to wait to be heard. Now it is Katherine Dunn’s turn.
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