, voice artist, radio personality, book reviewer, and poet
from Portland, Oregon
.
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.
I had maggot brains that night and may have imagined half of it, and misunderstood the rest.
She blurbed through her Moms-All-Purpose-Adjustable-List-Of-Horrors that might have happened whenever a child is out of sight.
'Show off' was no insult in our family, but Arty had a way of turning 'sweetheart' into a thumb in the eye.
Papa had looked bad last time. This time he looked like Death's rectum.
She is suspicious and fearless and her progress is alarming.
It may be that the impressions of her infancy are caught somehow in the pulp of her eyes, luring her. Or there may be some hooked structure in her cells that twist her toward all that the world calls freakish.
And they looked at her, watched her, wanted to squirt her full of baby juice.
I wanted to cry, loud and wet with the pain of love.
The molasses voice pours into the sponge ear of the microphone and is transformed into silent, pulsing waves that radiate over a hundred miles.
Can you be happy with the movies, and the ads, and the clothes in the stores, and the doctors, and the eyes as you walk down the street all telling you there is something wrong with you? No. You cannot be happy. Because, you poor darling baby, you believe them.