Katherine Dunn
In the United States, female fisticuffs were marginalized, first as erotic vaudeville in the 19th century and later as serious competition developed in the first half of the 20th. Legal wars waged by boxers in the 1960s and '70s won women the right to compete professionally nationwide.Collection: Legal
Prior to penicillin and medical research, death was an everyday occurrence. It was intimate.Collection: Death
American culture is torn between our long romance with violence and our terror of the devastation wrought by war and crime and environmental havoc.Collection: Environmental
In boxing, they say it's the punch you don't see coming that knocks you out. In the wider world, the reality we ignore or deny is the one that weakens our most impassioned efforts toward improvement.
There are those whose own vulgar normality is so apparent and stultifying that they strive to escape it. They affect flamboyant behaviour and claim originality according to the fashionable eccentricities of their time. They claim brains or talent or indifference to mores in desperate attempts to deny their own mediocrity.
Every doorway, every intersection has a story.
My own theory about the phlegmatic qualities and properties of the English is the mountain of pure white sugar hydrocarbons they consume every day bloody day of the year - the stiff upper lip is petrified sugar; that's Bermuda's revenge, the with death, the rotting future square in the teeth of it.
I'm like every waitress in every diner; I'm like every mom driving her kids to school. I'm nothing special at all.
I think that it's really important to go away and come back.
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.
My background is standard American blue collar of the itchy-footed variety. We're new-world mongrels. The women in the family read horoscopes, tea leaves, coffee bubbles, Tarot cards and palms.
My handwriting was nothing to write home about, and I had this idea that calligraphy was like taking Latin in high school: that it was one of the bricks, the building bricks, that you had to understand about the forms of writing.
Non-fiction is a big responsibility. Rationality. Facts. The urgent need to reflect some small aspect of reality. But fiction is a private autism, a self-referential world in which the writer is omnipotent. Gravity, taxes, and death are mere options, subject to the writer's fancy.
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 think genetic research is a fascinating and fertile area.
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.
I come from a family of great readers and storytellers.
Let's just say, the American school of suburban angst is not my cup of tea.
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.
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.
But the animation has become very good, and I think that a movie is not a book, and a book is not a movie.
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.
I know if I were in your generation I would be really tired of seeing Sophia Loren as a sex object.
Asked why they wanted to fight, the young women said they enjoyed it, just as some men and boys do.
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.
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.
But the idea that women can't take care of themselves still permeates our culture.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Writing nonfiction of various kinds has been instructive and entertaining as well as paying the rent.
There should be unemployment insurance for fictional people.
Most professional fighters, male and female, hold day jobs, but the women's game attracts a wide social spectrum: hash slingers, teachers, police officers, landscapers, stuntwomen. Many are wives and mothers. Their husbands or boyfriends work their corners, or hide in arena restrooms, scared to watch their bouts.
Anthropologists believe women were among the skilled boxers of the ancient, sport-loving Minoan culture that flourished on Crete until 1100 B.C. The boxing booths at English fairs featured women in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Only one sport can subsume my life at a time.
I was reading a lot of European history, and I thought Attila the Hun had gotten a bad rap.
I'm slow by everybody's standards. But not by mine.
The denial of female aggression is a destructive myth. It robs an entire gender of a significant spectrum of power, leaving women less than equal with men and effectively keeping them 'in their place' and under control.
Boxing gyms are more than training facilities. They are sanctuaries in bad neighborhoods for troubled kids and shrines to the traditions of the sport. The gym is home. For many, it's the safest place they know.
A boxing gym is a place where men are allowed to be kind to one another.
I see my writing as the process of looking at the usual, but from two steps to the side.
The metaphor of the subterranean is at work in a lot of Northwest writers and artists. Zooming in closer and closer and closer, then below, to the worms and the centipede.
Sometimes we followed the crops, doing migrant labor. We did several years of tenant farming in Western Oregon starting in the early '50s. Later, my stepdad managed gas stations in a small town near Portland.
We came to Portland because there was a good alternative public school. Friends who lived there told me about it, and my son loved it. I left his dad and went to work slinging hash in a breakfast diner and working nights tending bar in a biker tavern.
People have been trying for centuries to manipulate genes, enhance certain traits, and achieve racial purity, even in humans. And of course I thought of the Nazis and their efforts toward Aryan magnificence.
I hate to tell you this, but I did not know what the National Book Award was when I got the call.
I don't like to see anyone suffer, and there's a very, very fine line between being healthy and working and totally down and out.