Katherine's theory is that everyone looking to make a new life migrates west, across America to the Pacific Ocean. Once there, the cheapest city where they can live is Portland. This gives us the most cracked of the crackpots. The misfits among misfits.

"We just accumulate more and more strange people," she says. "All we are are the fugitives and refugees."

In 1989, when she wrote her bestselling novel Geek Love, Katherine set the story in Portland. The novel— about an outcast circus sideshow family who work to have mutated, birth-defected children to boost their ticket sales—is easily the most famous book that uses the city as a background. Katherine wanted her story set in a place without associations in people's minds.

"When I was a young woman in Paris," she says, "I couldn't walk through the city and see it without seeing it the way the Impressionists did. Because Id seen it through their eyes, it was impossible to see it any other way."

The genesis of Geek Love was here. One day Katherine's seven-year-old son, Ben, refused to walk with her through the International Rose Test Gardens, so she walked   alone  among the  hybrid  roses.  "I  thought  to myself, 'These would not have occurred in nature—I should've designed a better child.'"

She swam in the basement pool at the Metropolitan Learning Center, swimming and writing the book in her mind. For years she wrote "The Slice," a weekly newspaper column that documented oddball Portland happenings.

Now, Portland has its own identity, she says. "It's no longer this blank look when someone says Portland or Seattle or Walla Walla."

Now Katherine Dunn is working on a new book. Geek Love is being reissued, for a new generation of fans. Still, she's not planning to leave.

"First of all," she says, "I can't drive. Besides, when you walk down the street, every corner has a story." She smokes, exhaling out the window above Glisan Street. "Here," she says, "the rolling history of your life is visible to you everywhere you look."

AND KATHERINE'S RIGHT. Every corner does have a story. And every hillside.

In 1980, six days after graduating from high school, I moved to Portland, to the Burlingame View Apartments, on a steep hillside covered with blackberry vines above the Burlingame Fred Meyer supermarket on SW Barbur Boulevard.

My two roommates work in restaurants, and our closet space is filled with boxes of stolen food. Cases of champagne. Three-gallon cans of escargot packed in olive oil. We buy our dope from a potter who lives on NE Killingsworth Street and works in his basement, stoned and throwing the same coffee mug fifty times each day. Around him are racks filled with hundreds of identical coffee mugs, waiting to be fired in his kiln. He must be twenty-five or twenty-six years old. Ancient.