Katherine Dunn loved to write. It helped her figure out herself and the world around her. Publishing what she wrote wasn’t foremost in her mind.
That’s why the late author of the 1989 cult classic “Geek Love” left behind a trove of work that none of her fans have ever seen. Until now.
Four years after the Portland literary icon’s death at age 70, her unpublished writings are beginning to make their way into public view. A short story, “The Resident Poet,” is in The New Yorker’s May 11 issue and just landed on the magazine’s website. It’s part of a collection of stories Farrar, Straus & Giroux will publish in 2022.
And next year will bring a Dunn novel from the publisher: “Toad,” which the author wrote more than 40 years ago.
The story in The New Yorker and the novel are linked, in a way, says Naomi Huffman, the editor handling the manuscripts for Farrar, Straus and Giroux. “The Resident Poet,” written sometime in the 1970s, is narrated by a college student named Sally who’s undertaking an affair with a well-known visiting poet even though she finds him rather annoying. She’s doing it for the adventure -- and perhaps also to prick at his bubble of male privilege and self-satisfaction. When Huffman came upon the story in Dunn’s personal papers it solidified her belief that the author’s unpublished work needed an audience.
“I was so taken with it,” she says. “I was so surprised by how fresh it felt.”
Then there’s “Toad,” which, like “The Resident Poet,” is narrated by a “street smart, hyper-observant” college student named Sally. Huffman isn’t willing to go so far as to say they’re the same character, but she says they’re both “born of the same idea.”
“Toad” can be considered the third of a trilogy, along with “Attic” (1970) and “Truck” (1971), Dunn’s little-known, experimental first two published novels.
The three autobiographical works “take bits and pieces from her life and from the people she knew” when she was a struggling 20-something trying to find her way, says Dunn’s son, Eli Dapolonia.
Dunn considered “Toad” a bit of a downer, which is one of the reasons she stuck it in a drawer after completing it. But four decades later Huffman views the novel, about a working-class college student who falls in with a group of wealthy students, as a powerful “coming-of-age tale.”
“This was the 1970s, when people were taking on emerging attitudes about personal freedoms and sexuality,” she says. “Sally is learning what she appreciates in people and what’s important to her.”
Dapolonia gave Huffman unfettered access to Dunn’s papers, which are held at Lewis & Clark College. Most of the short stories in the forthcoming collection are at the college; others were pulled off Dunn’s personal computer. Huffman says she’s including only stories that clearly were completed, adding that she has taken a “very light hand” as an editor.
Dapolonia is certain his mother would approve.
Dunn was “very protective of her work and private about her work,” he acknowledges, but he decided to allow publication of the old, never-before-seen material because it means a lot to him whenever he hears from fans who were moved by “Geek Love,” which is often. He says that “being able to make her unpublished stories available to readers who loved her work is a privilege.”
Dapolonia adds that he hasn’t read a fair amount of the voluminous material in his mother’s archive, but he says Dunn read a lot of her writing aloud to him as she was working on it. That’s how he first took in “Geek Love,” the bizarre story of carnival freaks such as flipper-limbed Arturo -- “Aqua Boy” -- who creates a masochistic cult called Arturism.
Not that Dapolonia found it bizarre.
“ ‘Geek Love’ was completely consistent with her and with my experience with her,” he says of his mother. “It didn’t seem strange to me. It was just like home.”
-- Douglas Perry
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