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Theresa Griffin Kennedy Books

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“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.”

SexLiesMurderTraumaTortureScandalRapeProhibitionAnna Shrader
Book:Murder & Scandal in Prohibition Portland: Sex, Vice Misdeeds in Mayor Baker's Reign
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“Her golden throated scent like pastry soaked in milk hovered, her wet reptile mouth gave kisses seen only in the mind, raised and heightened to altars of breezy hate. With a glowing white back-light, pastel images in soft focus moved, danced, in a contorted frenzy, part of a bitter hued blue smoking reverie.”

LovePainPoetrySexLongingBetrayalFaithless
Book:Blue Reverie in Smoke: Collected Poems 2001-2016
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“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.”

SexMental IllnessSexual Abuse
Book:Burnside Field Lizard and Selected Stories
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“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.”

LoveSexDarkComedyTraumaChild Sex AbuseDomestic Noir
Book:Talionic Night in Portland: A Love Story
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“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.”

LoveSexAbuseTraumaChild Sexual AbuseHealing The PastDomestic Noir
Book:Talionic Night in Portland: A Love Story
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“Always support younger writers, and do all you can to nourish that spirit of creativity, and original risk. The unique manner of literary innovation that younger writers may engage in, ultimately is priceless. Writers, poets and authors are the spokespersons for ours and the next generations. Support them, mentor them, protect them from the viciousness of popular opinion, which is generally nothing more than censorship wearing the cloak of righteous indignation.”

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Author:Theresa Griffin Kennedy
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