Theresa Kennedy > Theresa's Quotes

“I looked out the hall window across from me as I stood leaning against the wall, and saw the bars on the outside of the windows. The rain trickled down the reinforced misted milk-glass in a constant deluge of melancholy rivulets. It was getting cold - the shadows, the rising turbulent winds, the drifting red and orange leaves were returning once more. I tuned out the sounds of the doctors voices. Soon, I couldn't make out the words they were saying as definite signals meant to convey something. Their words became a dim humming, a song drifting along the periphery of my awareness. And it was then, I knew I would be able to leave. I would go back to my room and take out the violet silk dress, the monstrous talisman I had created, and I would look at it. I might give it away after all. I need to let her go for all the ghosts she carried within her every measured stitch.”
― Theresa Griffin Kennedy, Burnside Field Lizard and Selected Stories

“You are the mermaid; I am the mermaid hunter.
You lead me through your wake and I follow,
Knowing my fate.
You swish your tales and the water boils between them:
I sink,
I drown,
going down
to green depths
wordless.

I shall not taste your full sweetness, only
your salt madness;
I will not tell our wild secrets,
For while it lasts, my hollow skull skulks after you,
Lying at times in your cold hands,
To be tossed aside indifferently,
Roll and rise with the tides, fall again,
Come to rest half buried in the sinking
shifting sands.
Anemones be my eyes
As I watch you swimming from me
Laughing.”
― Dorsey Griffin, Woman Who Runs with Wolves: Poetry of the Macabre and Other Poems

“In 1905, more than 1,700 young women made Portland their home. That trickle soon became a flood, and by 1907 more than 7,000 women a year were coming to Portland look for new lives.”
― Theresa Griffin Kennedy, Murder & Scandal in Prohibition Portland: Sex, Vice Misdeeds in Mayor Baker's Reign

“The butter was real of course. Daddy had a fetish about using only real butter. As he handed it to me, I noticed the hue was brash and yellow, almost like the artificial color used in the making of cheap Margarine. The boysenberry preserves were recently purchased. The glass had a bright red foil label with intricate embossed wording and as I turned the lid, I heard the sucking sound of the seal breaking. Daddy looked over, concerned, until I carefully laid the jar of jam on the counter, pushing it toward him. "I can do everything Tweetie Bird," he said to me. I smiled, embarrassed at my old nickname from when I was a child and nodded my head.”
― Theresa Griffin Kennedy, War Stories 2015: an anthology

“When Daddy turned back to the slim volume of Benton's poetry, and spoke the following words, I knew he was speaking from his own heart, as he said the words with a new feeling of confidence and authority. I knew those words were his words, too and that somehow Benton had spoken those same words for so many other men who could never personally say them. "...and when the enemy is; the lost, the vacant/the aimless something belched out of a vast and blind explosion/I have no heart for that/Mine is not the skill for overseeing/My hand is not the hand to wield God's flaming sword." His voice quavered brokenly with the last line, as Daddy closed the book gingerly and turned to look at me, embarrassed yet unapologetic. His face tried to smile but couldn't. The tears that had formed in his eyes clung to the dark grey lashes and reflected the light from the setting sun outside. I finally reached over and without saying anything, placed my hand over his.”
― Theresa Griffin Kennedy, War Stories 2015: an anthology

“Like stagnant water trapped in a fetid container that decays with the passage of time, fermenting only to nourish the parasites that live within it, Leatrice was still decaying from the inside out. The decay was upon her mouth, curled in contempt, containing the rage that had never left her.”
― Theresa Griffin Kennedy, Burnside Field Lizard and Selected Stories

“I was bent over, my dress hiked up, my pale bottom sticking out, bluish in the dim light and Bryon behind me, lost in another world. His face was pressed into my shoulder and his profile visible. As his features were screwed up in the release of pleasure, his eyes shut tight and his mouth hanging open, I once again struggled not to laugh. There was something so comical and pathetic about his unabashed sincerity and tedious adoration. I hated to admit it, but it made me want to slap him and watch him weep with a smile on my face as I told him it was all over and he would never see me again.”
― Theresa Griffin Kennedy, Burnside Field Lizard and Selected Stories

“Anna Schrader was another of the women who came to Portland during the Girl Rush, arriving in 1910. Census records indicate she was married at the age of eighteen, presumably in Minnesota, where she was born and raised. She became a gadfly for the local Portland police and provided them with a great deal of useful information regarding bootlegging during Prohibition. This was possible because of her affair with police lieutenant William Breuning, who had gotten her the job of "private detective.”
― Theresa Griffin Kennedy, Murder & Scandal in Prohibition Portland: Sex, Vice Misdeeds in Mayor Baker's Reign

“Your knuckles hurt from knocking, so now you're slamming the side of your balled up fist on the wood door which rattles dangerously in its frame. You hope the neighbors can't hear as you beat on the door. It’s late, after midnight again, and recently, (you can't recall when) one of the neighbors complained about the noise. She stood outside the door as you lay on the living room floor and joined at the hip. She began yelling profanities through the thin wood. She was sick of listening to you two going at it all the time. You were a couple of “disgusting animals” in her estimation and she was going to call the police if you didn't keep it down from now on. You smile vaguely at the memory while your fist continues to pound the door. You recall how you both started coming simultaneously within only seconds of her banging on the door, how the startling intrusion made the pleasure even more thrilling, forbidden and intense.”
― Theresa Griffin Kennedy, Talionic Night in Portland: A Love Story

“While you sleep, you are oppressed by dark meandering dreams. They’re characterized by an oppressive feeling of endless overcast shadow. The world is encased in dim blue darkness, and white ash is drifting everywhere. You find yourself in an abandoned tennis court that has gone to seed. The birds have stopped singing, the robins have disappeared and you become one of only thousands of people left. More than half of humanity has died of disease, pestilence, and military genocide. Fat golden rats scurry here and there among severed heads lying all around the tennis court in varying stages of putrid decay. As you walk out of the exit, you see piles of dead soldiers in rotting heaps, victims of mass poisoning by rebel civilians smart enough to fool them with Kool Aid on a hot day. Men, women and children lie everywhere, their empty bodies’ ravaged, their desiccated purple tongues, stick limbs and empty eye sockets all that’s left of them. They were the fortunate ones, shot through the head, the illiterate civilians whose organs were harvested for the criminal elite. The elite live high up in the hills with their armed guards inside abandoned mansions with no electricity or running water. Harvested as replacement organs for the sick or as dinner for those who used to enjoy beef liver, the elite are the only ones with handguns and rifles and everyone else is at their mercy hiding in the abandoned buildings all through downtown and the industrial area of NW Portland.”
― Theresa Griffin Kennedy, Talionic Night in Portland: A Love Story

“At any rate, Clark was not given to notoriety, public acclaim and applause for the event, nor for any other - though he and his family figured large in central Oregon's history - as was Howard Maupin, who never tired of receiving credit that was nor was not his, commencing with his distinguished career in the Army. Who but he would have claimed he stormed Monterey and was awarded a Henry rifle by General George Crook for his service in the Mexican War when he had never left Missouri?”
― Dorsey Griffin, Who really killed Chief Paulina?: An Oregon documentary

“THE MEANEST, MOST MURDEROUS and one of the cleverest Indians in Oregon's settlement days was Chief Paulina of the Walpapi (Woll-Pah-Pe, (for Munipuitoka) tribe of Snakes. Paulina's native name is not known, but there were many different spellings of the name given him by white men: Paulina, Pauline, Pauninna, Pahnina, Pahnaina, Pahninee, Pannina, Paninna, Panain, Ppanane, Palihi, Penina, Pallina, Palina, Paluna, Poliney and Polini - and there may be others.”
― Dorsey Griffin, Who really killed Chief Paulina?: An Oregon documentary

“Sixty years after the battle of Little Bighorn men were still coming forth with the spurious claim that they were survivors, and several old "chiefs" said it was they who killed Custer. Many old gentlemen made late-life confessions that they were Jesse James, and still more claimed they shot Billy the Kid.”
― Dorsey Griffin, Who really killed Chief Paulina?: An Oregon documentary

“When I worked streets, I ran across a lot of people. Some of the most challenging I called "Beer Bottle Tigers," those drunk guys and gals in St. Johns and in the North End. The courage they got from getting drunk. Then the fight was on.”
― Don Dupay, Behind the Badge in River City: A Portland Police Memoir

“By the time the plane touched down in Portland, we had obtained signed, handwritten confessions from both criminals. They planned on hitting it rich in Vegas using the payroll money as a grub-stake. Now, the were broke, busted and bound for an Oregon jail. I often marveled at the criminal mentality. Sometimes because of their sick perversity, sometimes because of their rare ingenuity, and sometimes because they just didn’t get it; that crime doesn’t pay. You can’t do bad and get good in return.”
― Don Dupay, Behind the Badge in River City: A Portland Police Memoir

“Here is an interesting side note about burglary psychology. Many burglary reports, after itemizing a list of stolen possessions, note that the burglar has defecated in the house, sometimes in a corner, on the floor, and sometimes in the bathroom, and sometimes in the shrubbery outside, beneath the broken window. I remember one burglary victim telling me, “He took all the stereo equipment in the den, ransacked the bedroom and then took a shit in the bathroom but didn’t flush. I came home and found a big turd floating in the toilet!” It almost seems to add insult to injury, doesn't It? Actually, there is a physical reason for this. Burglarizing a house causes the burglar to produce stress hormones, like Noradrenaline, corisol and adrenaline. Often an extreme amount of stress hormones can be created while in the act of burglarizing a home. And some people react to stress by taking a shit. Not flushing the toilet, that’s the insult part.”
― Don Dupay, Behind the Badge in River City: A Portland Police Memoir

“Organized crime is nothing more than capitalism with the mask of respectability removed. —Dave Mazza”
― J.D. Chandler, Portland on the Take: Mid-Century Crime Bosses, Civic Corruption and Forgotten Murders

“In the four decades since my father’s murder, I’ve never settled into, or gotten used to his absence. I’ve never had the feeling that the emotional or traumatic experience of his death has been resolved.
Cancel “closure.”
― Robert David Crane, My UnHollywood Family

“I had been trying to understand the many instances of trauma I’d survived, and how they had informed my character and made me the person I was.

I was an angry person. An imperfect person. A person with an urgent need to even the score of the perceived injustices I had experienced in my own petty and immature ways - which I often directed at the wrong people.

I did this by being late to appointments and luncheon dates, saying passive aggressive bitchy things on the telephone, making people wait, and writing Poison Pen Letters to beloved family members where I hurt them with my words.

The letters were generally always a mistake.

Discovering I had a burgeoning skill for writing, as my father had been telling me, (and the way he encouraged me with my writing, telling me I needed to go to college one day) filled me with a giddy sense of self-expression and hope.

Where I had once been powerless, always a victim, suddenly I could tell people what I thought of them. I could tell them off, and hurt them with my words. The act of writing became a conduit of pure rage that escaped the tip of the ink pen in my hand - and a seductive high.

I was burning bridges, settling scores and I was on a roll.”
― Theresa Griffin Kennedy

“My adrenaline started pumping anytime I was within a hundred yards of a bookshop. I loved books nearly as much as I loved clothes. And that's saying something. The feel of them and the smell of them. A bookshop was like like an Aladdin's Cave for me. Entire worlds and lives can be found just behind that glossy cover. All you had to do was look.”
― Hilma Wolitzer, Summer Reading

“Only reading, she knew, could distract her from her obsessive thoughts and restore her sense of peace.”
― Hilma Wolitzer, Summer Reading

“Only reading, she knew, could distract her from her obssessive thoughts and restore her sense of peace.”
― Hilma Wolitzer, Summer Reading

“There are no regular people; there are no special people; yet everyone feels both regular and special, therefore they have value--a particular place or niche--in Theresa Griffin Kennedy's fictionalized Portland. "Burnside Field Lizard and Selected Stories," her new collection from Oregon Greystone Press, is comprised of five very meaty stories; full of the little details that make fiction ring true, as in the title story where, for instance, Kennedy describes with verve the trash that happens to litter a vacant lot. The danger with this kind of attention to detail is that it can sometimes slow stories down. If wielded ineffectively, the reader can begin to feel that the author has filled their narration with laundry lists, merely lists of things. Kennedy avoids this pitfall by describing with style, thereby bringing us deeper into the Portland that she wants to show us. A set of "discarded bra and panties," do not just "lay there," they are "twist[ed] in the dirt...becoming one with the weeds."

Kennedy's artful descriptive flourishes place us squarely in her characters' world. And oh, what a strange, depraved world it is! Time and place play important roles in these stories, and for those of us who remember the Portland of the bad old days, her portrayal is dead-on. There are no ordinary readers, only hard-earned ones. Burnside Field Lizard is worth the time.

J De Salvo, author, poet, and publisher of The Bicycle Review and Oakland Review.”
― Jason De Salvo

“A pat of butter was for sissies; a 'man-sized lump of butter' should be used to fry eggs.”
― Heather Arndt Anderson, Breakfast: A History