By Hannah Crummé, Head of Watzek Library Special Collections and College Archivist.
Award-winning Portland writer and journalist Katherine Dunn (1945-2016) is best known for her highly praised novel Geek Love, first published in 1989. Now, a collection of her short stories is being published by FSG—the first and only collection of short fiction by Dunn. This collection is based on Naomi Huffman’s, its editor’s, tireless work in the archives of Dunn’s papers, held at Lewis & Clark College’s Watzek Library. Archivists from the college met with Huffman when her project began and, with the permission of Dunn’s son Eli Dapolonia, provided her with images of story drafts held in the college’s repositories.
The Katherine Dunn Collection, which contains over 40 linear feet of material created and collected by Dunn during her lifetime, including original manuscripts and draft publications, research notes, fan art, and ephemeral material related to the Geek Love stage adaptations and screenplays, correspondence, interviews, personal ephemera, and more. One of our best memories in archives is opening a box of Dunn’s only to be accosted by dolls in the style of Geek Love’s famously unusual family—our student worker screamed. In celebration of this work, Lewis & Clark Special Collections is creating a digital exhibition exploring Dunn’s milieu in Portland and the avant garde arts network of which she was part. The digital exhibition will be launched in mid-October, to be followed by a physical exhibition on campus in March 2026. These exhibits will be based in an archival collection that witnesses the history of the Impossibilists (Imps, for short). Co-founded in 1977 by Mark Sargent (aka Animal Trust, Max Deadtoe Delaney) and Tom Cassidy (aka Spaceangel and Musicmaster), The Impossibilists were a group of artists and writers active as performers and impresarios in Portland in the late 1970s and early ’80s. Their aesthetics were absurdist, and expressed in graphics, poetry, prose, several “Dada Spectaculars”, comic strips, manifestos, and events, many staged at Cassidy’s junkshop arcade, Keep ‘Em Flying.
In 2022, MCD X FSG posthumously published Dunn’s novel, Toad, to critical acclaim. Lewis & Clark worked with the publishers on a digital exhibition that explored Dunn’s writing process on this novel and the type of archival document with which her editors worked to create the novel. This resource is equally applicable to Near Flesh, as it explores the type of archival papers and drafts Dunn left behind, and how they were used by Huffman to bring her work to life again.
On Tuesday, October 7, at 6:30 p.m., Literary Arts will welcome authors Omar El Akkad and Jeff VanderMeer, with Crystal Willer, Associate Archivist at Lewis & Clark College’s Watzek Library for a conversation on the work of Katherine Dunn, celebrating the posthumous release of her short story collection Near Flesh. This event is free and open to the public.
