"In our struggle to restrain the violence and contain the damage, we tend to forget that the human capacity for aggression is more than a monstrous defect, that it is also a crucial survival tool." -- Katherine Dunn
Katherine Dunn is a best-selling novelist, journalist, voice artist, radio personality, book reviewer, and poet from Portland, Oregon.
"American culture is torn between our long romance with violence and our terror of the devastation wrought by war and crime and environmental havoc.""And while national military forces have historically resisted the full participation of women soldiers, female talent has found plenty of scope in revolutionary and terrorist groups around the planet.""Asked why they wanted to fight, the young women said they enjoyed it, just as some men and boys do.""But I think everybody should write. I think those people with stories who don't write should be stomped on.""But I went to high school in a Portland suburb and went to college here.""But the animation has become very good, and I think that a movie is not a book, and a book is not a movie.""But the idea that women can't take care of themselves still permeates our culture.""Every doorway, every intersection has a story.""I come from a family of great readers and storytellers.""I have been a believer in the magic of language since, at a very early age, I discovered that some words got me into trouble and others got me out.""I know if I were in your generation I would be really tired of seeing Sophia Loren as a sex object.""I think genetic research is a fascinating and fertile area.""I think that it's really important to go away and come back.""Let's just say, the American school of suburban angst is not my cup of tea.""Perhaps the strongest evidence that women have as broad and deep a capacity for physical aggression as men is anecdotal. And as with men, this capacity has expressed itself in acts from the brave to the brutal, the selfless to the senseless.""Prior to penicillin and medical research, death was an everyday occurrence. It was intimate.""The intense campaigns against domestic violence, rape, sexual harassment, and inequity in the schools all too often depend on an image of women as weak and victimized.""The more potent, unasked question is how society at large reacts to eager, voluntary violence by females, and to the growing evidence that women can be just as aggressive as men.""The second is the structure and source of cults. They have always haunted me, and I wanted to explore the fundamental notion of giving up responsibility to an outside power.""This idea that males are physically aggressive and females are not has distinct drawbacks for both sexes.""Training of female athletes is so new that the limits of female possibility are still unknown.""We're also far enough from the publishing power that we have no access to the politics of publishing, although there are interpersonal politics, of course.""Well, it arose out of two long-term concerns - the first being the possibility of genetic manipulation, nature versus nurture, what constitutes how people get to be how they are.""What I think happens, and that you have to acknowledge though, is that a director uses a book as a launching pad for his own work and that's always very flattering."
Dunn was born in Kansas City, Kansas in 1945. She went to high school in Tigard, Oregon, and later attended Reed College in Portland. Following her time at Reed, Ms. Dunn spent several years in Europe traveling. While in Ireland, she had a child, and five years later she returned with her son to the United States.
In the 1970s Dunn hosted a radio show on Portland's community radio station KBOO, in which she would read short stories. Her work experience ranges from tending bar, painting houses, and waiting tables, to teaching advanced classes in creative writing at Oregon's Lewis & Clark College and voice-over work.
Dunn's novel Geek Love was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1989. She also wrote the novels Attic (1970) and Truck (1971). In 1989, Dunn announced that she was working on a fourth novel, entitled The Cut Man. She was reportedly still living in Portland and working on the book in 1999. In 2008, it was reported that publisher Alfred A. Knopf had scheduled The Cut Man for release in September, but the novel was not published at that time. An excerpt appeared in the Summer 2010 issue of The Paris Review under the title Rhonda Discovers Art.
Dunn also wrote the text for Death Scenes: A Homicide Detective's Scrapbook (1995), a book of homicide photography; the humorous The Slice: Information with an Attitude (1989) (also published as Why Do Men Have Nipples? And Other Low-Life Answers to Real-Life Questions (1990), which contains her collected newspaper columns from Willamette Week, a Portland weekly newspaper; 3 Day Fox: A Tattoo, a poem; and numerous articles for Playboy, Vogue, and the L.A. Times.
Dunn, who has been described as "one of the better boxing writers in the United States," is an editor and contributor for the online boxing magazine cyberboxingzone.com. Dunn wrote a regular column on boxing for PDXS in the 1990s, in which she at one time provided detailed criticism of Evander Holyfield's sportsmanship in his controversial fight with Mike Tyson. She won the Dorothea Lange...Paul Taylor Award in 2004 for her work on School of Hard Knocks: The Struggle for Survival in America’s Toughest Boxing Gyms. Her essays on boxing were collected in the 2009 anthology One Ring Circus: Dispatches from the World of Boxing.
