Like many readers around the globe, Naomi Huffman is a huge fan of “Geek Love,” the novel about circus ‘freaks’ by the Portland author Katherine Dunn. Unlike other fans, Huffman is also an editor. Huffman went looking for more unpublished works by Dunn, who died in 2016. This fall Dunn’s novel “Toad,” written before “Geek Love,” will finally be published, after having been rejected by many publishers. We talk to Huffman about the process of editing Dunn’s draft posthumously, and what the new novel says about the famous writer.
This transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. The late Portland writer, Katherine Dunn, the author of “Geek Love”, has a new book out six years after her death and about 50 years after she wrote it. It’s a previously unpublished novel called “Toad”. Dunn tried repeatedly to publish “Toad” in the 1970s, but it never happened. Naomi Huffman edited “Toad” and she joins us now to talk about it. Welcome to Think Out Loud.
Naomi Huffman: Thank you for having me.
Miller: What has Katherine Dunn’s writing meant to you over the course of your life?
Huffman: It’s a big question. Katherine’s writing, to me, has always been an expression of a truly singular voice and a writer who was really writing in her own form, and in her own time. I think she really feels distinguished as someone who was writing to just deal with some of her own pain and some of her own darkness, and I really admire the bravery of that.
Miller: Do you remember when you read “Geek Love” for the first time?
Huffman: I do. I was in my twenties. I believe I was 23 or 24. I was just bowled over. It’s a wonderful, wonderful book.
Miller: How many times have you read it since then?
Huffman: At least five. Yeah.
Miller: Could you describe, just for yourself, how Katherine Dunn’s writing works at the sentence level? I mean, what makes her prose hers?
Huffman: I think there is this distinctive confidence, someone with a poetic sense of language, but also a fierce sense of voice and personality. And I think someone who is just writing to make as incisive an impression as she can. Again, I just really admire that about her.
Miller: When did you start seeking out her unpublished work?
Huffman: That was in 2019. Spring of 2019.
Miller: Why?
Huffman: I had recently read her first two books, “Attic” and ``Truck’', which were published in 1969 and 1970 respectively. And I was just curious about what she’d been working on between those two books and her best known novel, “Geek Love”. And there’s 20 years between those books. I just felt strongly that this writer, who was so talented and had written with such succinctness and such style, there was no way that she wasn’t up to anything interesting in that interceding time.
I literally, one night, just googled ‘Katherine Dunn archive’ and was surprised to find that there were all of these short stories listed in the archive catalog that I had never read and that I couldn’t find anywhere else online. And those are housed at the Lewis & Clark Archive. I reached out to the archive and was granted access to those stories pretty immediately and then began to fill in the blanks of her writing.
Miller: Were you granted that access because you work for a fancy New York publisher? I mean, is that something that anybody could do?
Huffman: That’s a good question. Yeah, at the time I was employed by MCD, which is an imprint of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. And they’re publishing “Toad” next month, tomorrow. And yes, I think that was definitely part of what helped me get my foot in the door there.
Miller: So they said yes, you can look at what we have. What did you do?
Huffman: I think first they just sent me all of the files that I requested, every short story that was in the archive. Some of them were typewritten and hadn’t been transcribed into a digital format. So it was just images of her original manuscripts. Some of them had been published by small journals that didn’t survive into the digital era. So I began transcribing the stories right away, and that was one of the most enriching aspects of the process. I think if anyone has ever had this experience, when you sit down and you’re transcribing the work of someone else, you really begin to think in their voice. And to me that was really powerful. This is a writer whose work I’ve loved and admired for a very long time and just transcribing them was a way of feeling close to her.
Miller: When you say transcribing - so you had PDFs, say of typewritten pages, and you would type them letter for letter?
Huffman: Yes.
Miller: As you said, it seems like a really intimate way to get to know someone’s writing. In this case, this was literally typed. This was not a word processor or printed out. This was a letter. She had typed it. And then you were typing it again.
Huffman: Yes, exactly.
Miller: When did you first read “Toad”?
Huffman: That would have been in the fall of 2019. After beginning the transcribing process of the stories, I decided to travel to Portland. To come here and to visit the stories, to visit the archive in person. And the archive in the meantime had placed me in touch with her surviving son, Eli Dapolonia. Eli and I met at the Stepping Stone Cafe and had breakfast and discussed his mother’s legacy and what he wanted to happen with her work. At the time we were just discussing the short stories and my plans to potentially publish a collection of them. He let me know about the existence of “Toad”, that this was a novel that was not in the archive and was with the family papers. And did I want to read it, to which I absolutely responded that I wanted to. As soon as he had the novel transcribed by a friend here in Portland, I got to read it. That was either fall of 2019 or early 2020.
Miller: What was your first impression of this soon to be published, but never published before novel?
Huffman: Disbelief. I couldn’t believe that it hadn’t been published already. I could understand. My understanding of publishing in the late 1970s, when Dunn was submitting the manuscript, it was easy to think about why the story didn’t appeal to publishers and editors at that time. But now in its current context and specifically as a posthumously published work, it just felt so moving and so powerful to read, and I just felt inspired to try to do whatever I could to get into publication.
Miller: I want to come back to what editors said, when they said no to publishing the novel back in the 1970s. But first, can you give us a sense for what “Toad” is about, who the main character is?
Huffman: Sure. So the main character is a woman named Sally Gunnar. Sally Gunnar, at the beginning of the book, she’s in her middle age, she has created a very reclusive life for herself. From there, she kind of describes her day to day. She spends a lot of time with the goldfish that she keeps in a jar on her table. She considers the toad, the titular toad, in the garden behind her house. And she nurses old wounds, old memories. She thinks back to a particular time in her college years, into a time in her thirties, where she experienced profound suffering and in a profound sense of being unseemly and sort of cast off by society. So, “Toad” is about remorse.
Miller: The Oregonian recently printed the final ‘no’. The final response that Dunn got about this manuscript came from an editor named Michael Denneny at St. Martin’s Press. And I think this was 1979. He wrote this: ‘The problem is not sentence by sentence or scene by scene, but the overall structure of the book. It seems to be basically autobiographical, by which, I mean, that things are there not for any reason, except that they happened. In that sense, the book is not artificial enough. The material has to be more worked into a theme and story.’
That was the final ‘no’ that she got before she decided, apparently according to this or going article, I’m done, I’m not gonna send this off anymore. I’ve taken a couple of years now to do this and I’m not going to show it to anybody anymore to get them to publish it. What do you make of that editor’s assessment?
Huffman: It’s an interesting one to hear. We live in a time, a genre of literature called autofiction, which is, quite literally, authors writing very closely about their own lives. I think that it also betrays a deep disinterest in what “Toad” is about. And maybe a deep lack of the appeal of a story of a woman like Sally and her experiences, and what the appeal might be to female readers in particular.
Miller: It sounds like you’re saying, the short version of that, is that in some ways “Toad” was ahead of its time. Is that a fair way to put it?
Huffman: Absolutely.
Miller: You noted that this novel, this manuscript, it was not in the Lewis & Clark Archives, it was in the family’s archives. And you got it after making a connection with her son. How did you feel confident enough to know that this is a novel that she would have wanted to have published now, or in later years? Clearly she tried very hard to get this published in the 70′s. How do you know that she would have wanted this to be published now?
Huffman: I talked a lot about that with her son, Eli, and this was the work that they talked about specifically. It was something that she really did give him permission to try to get published. And I think I was also emboldened by the fact that another of her often discussed works that isn’t published is the unfinished novel, “The Cut Man”. And “The Cut Man” was a novel that she began writing after “Geek Love”. She doesn’t want “The Cut Man” to be published. And I think that she was able to tell Eli, this is a work that I do feel strongly about, that I really do feel it should be brought to readers someday. That just gave me all the permission that I needed.
Miller: Can you describe your normal book editing process when you’re working with an author who’s alive?
Huffman: I’m a very collaborative and communicative editor. I think that editing is an exchange, an equal exchange, a conversation between the writer and the editor. And I really value that exchange. I think of it as a rope that’s held between two parties. At either end is the writer and the editor. And the challenge of editing “Toad” was that I was the only one holding the rope. So, I really had to figure out a way to feel like I could implement changes in “Toad” and to channel her voice. And honestly, much of the confidence that I was able to gather came from working through those stories and transcribing those stories. I was editing them at the same time that I was editing “Toad”, and being able to just sort of feel very immersed in her voice, very at home in her style, was hugely helpful.
Miller: That’s fascinating. So, is it fair to say that it was almost like you could put yourself in her shoes at the other end of the rope? Because it seems like what you don’t want is to tug so much, to stick with this rope metaphor, that you’re pulling the writing in a direction that’s too far from what the writer would want. And if they’re alive, that’s not going to happen, because they’ll push back or they’ll, I guess, pull back. In this case, you felt like you were able to know enough about her through her writing that you could imagine what she would say?
Huffman: Yes. And I think the context of the publication is important to think about as well. This is a posthumous publication of an unfinished work. My goal was never to publish the most polished version of or to publish the version even that we could have maybe created together if Katherine was alive today, but to preserve this work and to ensure that new and old readers, people who loved her work for a long time, are able to discover this and to enjoy more of her work.
Miller: Did you also have some people you could turn to, so it wasn’t just you and your understanding of what she would have wanted?
Huffman: I spoke to a lot of her folks who worked with her in several capacities while she was living; former editors, friends, family members. I just asked yhem questions about her life and what her writing time was like. The way that she spoke about the rejection of “Toad” and the way that she felt in those years. And I think, that too, is an effort of just immersing myself in her life and trying to figure out what her voice was like and what her wishes were like, what kind of writer she wanted to be, what kind of woman she wanted to be. And all of that was very helpful.
Miller: What does it mean to you to be, delivering to the world, this book by a writer you really admire, who wasn’t able to deliver this book to the world herself?
Huffman: It’s so far been the greatest pleasure and biggest honor of my career as an editor. I think it feels like, in some ways, exactly what I want to be doing as an editor. And in fact, has encouraged me to move my career in this pathway going forward. This is just the kind of work that I want to continue publishing.
Miller: Meaning to seek out more posthumous works.
Huffman: Exactly.
Miller: But there is another one coming out from Katherine Dunn, right?
Huffman: Yes.
Miller: The stories that were the first nuggets you had discovered. What can you tell us about the collection, “Near Flesh”?
Huffman: Yes. “Near Flesh” is over a dozen stories, many of which have never been published before. They were written over a period of 25 to 30 years. And I think that they absolutely exhibit the very best of Katherine Dunn’s writing.
Miller: Meanwhile, are you going on a book tour for Katherine Dunn’s book now?
Huffman: Yes, a small tour. I’m at an event tomorrow night at Powell’s with the local writer Lydia Kiesling. That’s at 7 p.m. And then I have an event the next night in Brooklyn where I live.
Miller: Naomi Huffman, thanks very much.
Huffman: Thank you.
Miller: Naomi Huffman is the editor of the new novel “Toad”, by Katherine Dunn. I say new. It was written about 50 years ago, but it was never published before. It is out tomorrow.
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