Education Quote by Katherine Dunn

The power of Katherine Dunn's line is how aggressively unliterary it is: a shrug disguised as autobiography. "But" drops us mid-argument, as if she's correcting someone else's mistaken mythology about her. That's the first move: refusing the romantic origin story. No tortured genius emerging from nowhere, no exotic credentials. Just the unglamorous conveyor belt of American identity-making: high school, suburb, college, here.

Dunn's specific intent feels like a boundary-setting act. She's locating herself against a common literary reflex that treats place as either branding (Portland as vibe) or trauma (the suburb as psychic damage). Instead, she offers a plain chain of facts that says: I'm not a visitor, and I'm not a spokesperson. "Went to college here" doubles down on belonging, but it's a particular kind of belonging - earned through routine time rather than epiphany.

The subtext is also a quiet jab at coastal credentialism and the fetish for reinvention. Writers are expected to have been "formed" by a dramatic elsewhere; Dunn implies that being formed by the ordinary is still formation. The Portland suburb detail matters: suburbia is where culture goes to get laundered into normalcy, where weirdness has to learn camouflage. For a novelist associated with the Pacific Northwest's off-kilter edges, the line hints that the freakshow isn't only in the margins - it's incubated in the most standard settings.

Contextually, it reads like an interview aside, the kind that punctures a profile's attempt to make an author legible through geography. Dunn keeps her mystique by denying you the myth.