CLA: Dislocate Magazine

November 16, 2009

by Holly Vanderhaar, Assistant Nonfiction Editor

Every parent knows there are questions looming, questions you know your child is going to ask you eventually. Questions that catch you by surprise, questions that come earlier than you expect. Questions that don't lend themselves to the simple answer but rather are harbingers of lengthy conversations rife with gray areas, one in which the need to use age-appropriate vocab wars with the desire to explain a Matter of Great Import.

Never fear, dear reader; you haven't stumbled upon a Mommy Blog. Stay with me.

So imagine my surprise when one of my 6-year-old twins recently asked me, "Mom, what's 'creative nonfiction'?"

My daughters are precocious, I admit, and maybe I should've been prepared for this level of literary awareness from them. After all, thanks to the St. Paul Public Schools, they were introduced to terms like "fiction," "nonfiction," "procedural writing," and "personal narrative" in kindergarten, so they're already comfortable with writerly discourse on some level. But if she's already arguing that "'Nonfiction' means 'true' and 'creative' means you're making it up" in first grade, I may need some help keeping up.

Lucky for me, that help is abundant. As rich as the Cities' public school writing curriculum is, it's only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to literary opportunities for our Minnesota young. The renowned Loft Literary Center has a rich catalog of offerings for children and teens; this past summer, young writers were offered classes in manga, bookmaking (in conjunction with the Minnesota Center for Book Arts), screen- and playwriting, and fantasy writing in addition to more standard offerings in fiction, essay, and poetry. The students' work is anthologized on the Loft's website.

Young writers are also amply supported during the school year, with a number of specialized offerings. High school students can participate in InkTANK, a teen writers' workgroup. Under the mentorship of community artists, writers, and Loft staff, they explore the written word as a tool for self-expression. "Basic Needs" provides workshops for teen parents, and "New Stories, Old Stories" encourages young immigrant or refugee students to write about their culture.

I managed to stammer out an answer to my daughter's question, falling back neither on my intro-creative-writing-undergrad answer ("telling a story that's factually true using the literary devices of fiction and/or poetry") or my extended-family-slash-cocktail-party-conversant answer ("think Truman Capote and In Cold Blood"). But I'm already anticipating the thornier questions to come ("Mom, how much can I make up and still call it nonfiction?" or "Mom, what's the difference between personal essay and memoir?"). Thank goodness I can always ship them off to the Loft.

Posted by Dislocate Literary Journal at 11:09 AM | Permalink

November 9, 2009

When even the Minnesota winter stops in it's tracks, yielding a fine week of warm, sunny weather, you know something big is happening. Michael Dennis Browne, poet and teacher extraordinaire, is retiring after 38 years at the University of Minnesota. In honor of Browne's long service at the University, dislocate is hosting a reading this Wednesday, November 11th, at 7 pm in 150 Lind Hall on the University of Minnesota East Bank. Browne will read from his poetry, alongside MFA candidates Colleen McCarthy (poetry), Josh Morsell (nonfiction), and Swati Avasthi (fiction). Books will be for sale, and refreshments, (good ones, I hear) will be served.

Michael Dennis Browne was born in England, but his fascination with American poetry brought him to the United States as a Fulbright scholar. Browne attended the University of Iowa, earning an M.A. with Distinction in English in 1967. He has taught at the University of Minnesota since 1971 and is a Morse-Alumni Distinguished Teaching Professor of English. In addition to his numerous books of poetry, Browne is author of a children's book, Give Her the River, and several librettos.

The warm weather won't last, and Browne won't be at the University of Minnesota much longer. Celebrate them both this Wednesday--7pm, 150 Lind Hall.

Posted by Dislocate Literary Journal at 11:52 AM | Permalink

If you still haven't submitted to dislocate's Contaminated Essay Contest, here's one more reason to get your submission in: the contest will be judged by award-winning essayist and poet Lia Purpura.

Lia Purpura is the author of three collections of poems, two collections of essays and one collection of translations. On Looking (essays, Sarabande Books, 2006) was a Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the winner of the Towson University Prize in Literature. King Baby (poems, Alice James Books, 2008) won the Beatrice Hawley Award and was a finalist for the Foreword Magazine Book of the Year Award and the Maine Literary Award. Increase (essays, University of Georgia Press, 2000) won the Associated Writing Programs Award in Creative Nonfiction. Stone Sky Lifting (poems, Ohio State University Press, 2000) won the OSU Press/The Journal Award. The Brighter the Veil (poems, Orchises Press, 1996) won the Towson University Prize in Literature. Poems of Grzegorz Musial: Berliner Tagebuch and Taste of Ash (translations, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press) was published in 1998.

Her recent essays "Glaciology" and "The Lustres" were awarded Pushcart prizes in 2007 and 2009, and other essays were named "Notable Essays" in Best American Essays, 2004, 2005, 2007, 2008 and 2009. Lia Purpura is also the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship (translation, Warsaw, Poland), and a grant from the Maryland State Arts Council.

Her poems and essays appear in Agni Magazine, DoubleTake, Field, The Georgia Review, The Iowa Review, Orion, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Parnassus: Poetry in Review, Ploughshares, Southern Review, and many other magazines.

A graduate of Oberlin College and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she was a Teaching/Writing Fellow in Poetry, Lia Purpura is Writer-in-Residence at Loyola University in Baltimore, MD and teaches in the Rainier Writing Workshop Low-Residency MFA Program. Recent visiting appointments include The Bedell Visiting Writer at the University of Iowa's MFA Program in Nonfiction; Coal Royalty Visiting Professor at the University of Alabama's MFA Program; Reader/Lecturer at the Bennington Writing Program, and Visiting Writer at the Warren and Patricia Benson Forum on Creativity at Eastman Conservatory. She lives in Baltimore, MD with her husband, conductor Jed Gaylin, and their son, Joseph.

Posted by Dislocate Literary Journal at 9:14 AM | Permalink

By Gwyn Fallbrooke, Assistant Nonfiction Editor

In her 1934 classic, Becoming a Writer, Dorothea Brande prescribes an exercise in discipline: every day for a week, immediately upon waking up, write nonstop for fifteen minutes. After that first week, schedule two more fifteen-minute slots throughout the day; at those exact times, you must stop whatever you're doing and write. She ends her prescription with this warning: "If you fail repeatedly at this exercise, give up writing." Your resistance, she says, is greater than your desire to write; you may as well find something else to do with yourself.

What a disheartening admonition to an aspiring writer! Of course, willpower is crucial when undertaking any difficult project, but Brande's declaration seems to me extreme and, frankly, unkind. Personally, I advocate the method of persuading the psyche to want something, rather than trying to strong-arm it into performing unpleasant tasks. I liken my style to cajoling a stubborn infant instead of resorting to spankings and time-outs. (No, I'm not a parent; as you might have guessed from my self-management strategy, I have my hands full just keeping myself in line.)

And you know what babies really like? Games! Easy, fun games in which everyone wins. And as luck would have it for us writers with a more hedonistic (read: lazy) disposition, National Novel Writing Month is just around the corner. Starting November 1, literary enthusiasts around the nation will flock to coffeeshops to convene with fellow NaNoWriMo participants, sharing inspiration, commiseration, and electrical outlets while striving to reach the 50,000-word minimum by the end of the month.

The NaNoWriMo website provides a full explanation of the project, which is now in its eleventh year. In short, the idea is to set up a low-stakes, high-intensity month-long writing exercise in order to push past that nasty inner critic that stops us from ever setting word one on the page. The result, in theory, is a "novel." The guidelines are refreshingly sparse: it must be at least 50,000 words, it can't be the same word repeated 50,000 times, it must be all new material, and if you call it a novel we'll believe you. And who doesn't want to be able to say they've written an entire novel--even if they would be mortified to show it to anyone?

In past years, my inertia has gotten the best of me, but this November is a different matter: my self-persuasion skills are stronger, and I'm enjoying a certain elusive optimism about life that I hope will last through the autumn. Still, I find I need to convince myself that taking on the NaNoWriMo challenge will be worthwhile and fun. I thought I'd share my personal persuasive strategy, in case anyone else out there needs some motivation to hop on this bandwagon.

1. In order to meet the 50,000-word minimum, you need to write 1,667 words every day. That means if you type 45wpm, it takes only 37 minutes to meet your daily quota. That's not even two whole sitcoms you're giving up each night. Totally doable!

2. If you can't bear to go without your primetime lineup, schedule your frantic burst of writing during the forgettable 7pm reruns or the ten o'clock news. Better yet, leave the TV playing in the background and call the stream of bad jokes and sensational stories "inspiration."

3. When you're feeling self-conscious about the fact that your prose seems to make no sense because you've been writing stream-of-consciousness with the TV blaring, take a break and treat yourself to some Donald Barthelme or Lydia Davis. You'll feel better immediately: you're being experimental.

4. If you choose to make a habit of writing in coffeeshops, reward your arrival at your 1667th word with a pastry. November's the month everyone starts putting on their "winter weight," anyway, right?

5. If you're still having trouble getting going, you can always resort to the time-honored writing aids of espresso, whiskey, cigarettes, pseudoephedrine, cough syrup, etc. etc. etc.

6. Don't feel obligated to read over what you've written. In fact, you can even promise yourself that, for the entire month, you will not review your work unless you're in such an awesome mood that you're sure to think it's brilliant.

7. If you slip on this last suggestion and discover in mid-November that every word you've put down is a horrible, melodramatic cliché, fear not. Just get out your trusty bottle of bourbon and repeat to yourself: "Things could be worse. At least I'm writing."

Are you sold yet? Sign up at NaNoWriMo.org.

Posted by Dislocate Literary Journal at 6:03 PM | Permalink

By Liana Liu, Assistant Fiction Editor

People love Lorrie Moore. Like, love-love. I love Lorrie Moore. And so I, along with a hundred other fans, came to the Twin Cities Book Festival last Saturday to hear her read and speak. The Book Festival, an annual event, had lots of book stuff going on, but was sadly lacking food options. Many tables (hello dislocate!) did have bowls of assorted candy, in an attempt to entice potential readers/customers, but one can't survive on sugar alone. Well, I suppose one can, if it's only for a few hours, as it was at the Twin Cities Book Festival. I guess what I'm trying to say is that by the time of Lorrie Moore's reading, I was on a total sugar high. Which might explain the nature of the following observations.

1. People love Lorrie Moore. The atmosphere in the room before, during, and after the reading was one of bubbling excitement, of chirpy anticipation. Conversations sang with unbridled enthusiasm! How at odds with the sarcastic, cynical, irony-loving, outsider-status-treasuring characters that populate Lorrie Moore's books. The fans/readers arrived with no chips-on-shoulder; they were ready and willing to be pleased. And pleased they were! Lorrie Moore made jokes and they laughed, oh how they laughed! I am not saying that her jokes weren't funny, because they were perfectly funny. But still, how they laughed! I swear, I'm not complaining. It was just unexpected to be in a room full of people that were all so ready to laugh! It made me feel awkward. It made me laugh!

2. Lorrie Moore has pretty hair.

3. I missed Nicholson Baker's reading because I was roasting a potato and I miscalculated the amount of time it took to roast. And once started, you can't stop. Heck no! But late in the afternoon, he visited the dislocate table and he was such a sweet fellow with such a fluffy beard that I wished I hadn't missed his reading. Serves me right for choosing food over art, as usual. We gave him an issue of dislocate! Doesn't that make you want an issue of dislocate, literary journal read by Nicholson Baker?

4. Lorrie Moore did not visit the dislocate table, but she is excused because she had a bad cold.

I apologize for the number of exclamation points used in this post. A teacher once said that my excessive use of exclamation points in a story was too Lorrie Moore-ish. I can't help it. I love her!

Posted by Dislocate Literary Journal at 8:34 PM | Permalink

By Molly Sutton Kiefer, Poetry Editor

"I hear Rain Taxi is changing its name to Snow Taxi," Adam Zagajewski deadpanned before taking a sip of water at Saturday's reading. Zagajewski, the University of Minnesota's most recent Edelstein-Keller visiting writer, is an award-winning poet and essayist hailing from Poland. He also spends ten weeks of the year in Chicago, where he teaches at the University of Chicago in a program called the Committee on Social Thought. This is after spending eighteen autumns in Texas, where he taught in the University of Houston's MFA program.

It's been a glorious three days for this budding poet, who managed to pack in many Zagajewski-themed events for the week: Thursday was an interview, which will appear in dislocate issue 6 (and, perhaps, a teaser on contamination is forthcoming), a classroom visit to a poetry workshop, and dinner with the poet, professors in the program, and two other MFA students; Friday was lunch with the MFAs and a manuscript conference; and Saturday, the conclusion: driving the poet in my ramshackle car to the Twin Cities Book Festival, put together by Minnesota's very own Rain Taxi.

Reading Zagajewski in preparation for his visit and interview, I began to wonder at the fact that all his work is translated and yet he is so eloquent in speaking. I learned Zagajewski trusts his translators implicitly, and while he reads mainly in English to English audiences, he has little hand in the actual word choice but lets his main translator, Claire Cavanaugh, take the reigns. Zagajewski said a translator is "someone who must master the delicate layers of the language" and at the readings, the poems feel no less his own. Similarly, he does not write poetry in English but has been known to write essays in English, including his introduction to Edward Snow's translations of Rilke.

Zagajewski's views of poetry are hopeful, and he encouraged all the MFAs he encountered to find their own voices. He told us to "protect that candle" and remember two things: be patient and believe in yourself. He recounted a call from fellow poet Czeslaw Milosz, who after winning the Nobel Prize asked Zagajewski, "Tell me, have I ever written a good poem?" Oh, self-doubt. Zagajewski's message was one of trust--yourself, your voice, your craft.

Posted by Dislocate Literary Journal at 12:30 PM | Permalink

dislocate is pleased to welcome all our Twin City fans to our first reading of the year, taking place this Tuesday evening in Lind Hall on the University of Minnesota campus.

Headlining is David Treuer, author of the novels Little, The Hiawatha, and The Translation of Dr. Appelles. Treuer will be joined by three University Minnesota MFA candidates: Meryl DePasquale (poetry), Patrick Hueller (fiction), and Wilson Peden (nonfiction).

Refreshments will be served before and after the reading. You can also pick up a copy of our latest issue, dislocate #5.

WHEN: Tuesday, October 13, 7:00 pm
WHERE: 150 Lind Hall, University of Minnesota--East Bank

Posted by Dislocate Literary Journal at 9:30 AM | Permalink

By Sheena Fallon, Development Coordinator

Last Wednesday Maxine Hong Kingston came to the University of Minnesota as part of the English Department's Esther Freier Endowed Lecture in Literature Series, with a lecture titled "The Art of Making Peace." This semester I'm teaching an introductory literature class about writing and activism, and I had been looking forward to this lecture so much that I had assigned my class The Fifth Book of Peace. It's early in the semester, and my students were having trouble making the jump from the literary journalism I had assigned at the beginning of the semester and this book. Although it says memoir on the back of the book, Kingston makes "claims" that aren't objectively and verifiably true: the Oakland-Berkley fire that took her home was in part caused by her father, recently deceased; it occurred because "God was showing us Iraq" - the first Iraq war; that the manuscript she lost in the fire, The Fourth Book of Peace, had to burn as the first three mythical books had burned.

When I was first introduced to her work in China Men, I read these moments as artistic license, an incorporation of talk-story and myth into nonfiction, which I deftly pointed out to the students in my Multicultural Literature section. But in the lecture it was clear to me that I had been reading her work all wrong - those things that seemed "made up" to me weren't fiction to her. In the course of the lecture, she told the story of The Fifth Book of Peace, and at each moment that seemed more magical realism than objective truth, stopped to share with us how she had doubted herself and what she was experiencing, and asked others if they felt or experienced the same things.

To finish her lecture, Kingston spoke about the time she and other peaceful demonstrators for CODE PINK were arrested in front of the White House on International Women's Day in 2002. Her story seemed true enough (in the nonfiction sense) until the moments before the arrests, when the "atmosphere turned a rosy color" and the protesters "gathered it into balls and threw it towards Iraq and towards the White House." The skeptic in me wanted not to believe, but the artist in me was right there with Maxine Hong Kingston, taking in the rosy atmosphere. We must imagine peace in order for it to exist.

"The way of seeing the world - even one person's seeing of it - could cause it, could change it," she writes in The Fifth Book of Peace. "Only change oneself, and the world will change." Perhaps what is so remarkable about Kingston work is that she not only allows herself to see the rosy atmosphere: she has the courage to ask others if they see it too.

Posted by Dislocate Literary Journal at 8:34 PM | Permalink

By Brian Gebhart, Fiction Editor

This summer has been filled with conspiratorial murmurs, from a newly-resurgent political paranoia to the release of Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol, which now rests, unsurprisingly, at the top of the New York Times Bestseller List. I'll let you decide whether this fact is a function of the page-turning plots or further evidence of a cultural low-point. Wherever you come down on this question, it seems clear that Americans have an insatiable appetite for secret societies, hidden symbols, and the reimagining of history as conspiracy. This should be no great surprise when one considers that just over one year ago, we were watching the global economy collapse for reasons that still seem hopelessly opaque. In such an atmosphere, the temptation to read ulterior motives into seemingly innocuous events can be irresistible. If you're drawn to this idea, you can now try your hand at generating the next gripping Robert Langdon plot yourself. Perhaps, in times of crisis and jarring change, people want to ascribe the disruptions in their lives to the mysterious and the occult. Perhaps there's just something in the air. But then, I wouldn't want to sow the seeds of suspicion any further--they're already germinating quite well without my assistance.

In the midst of such overheated speculations and alternate realities, Jim Shepard's arrival on the University of Minnesota campus last week was a welcome respite. Shepard--whose most recent short story collection, Like You'd Understand Anyway, was a finalist for a National Book Award--has gained some well-deserved critical attention for his deft explorations of historical figures. His stories, while often comic in tone and always exhilarating to read, treat their subjects with a seriousness and an empathetic understanding rare in contemporary fiction. The historically-based stories, which often center on unsavory characters--John Ashcroft and Charles-Henri Sanson (executioner during France's Reign of Terror) just to name two examples--adopt these individuals' perspectives with unflinching sincerity and a genuine desire to understand their motives. Shepard demonstrates that one need not venture beyond the tangible world of people, with their insecurities, jealousies, and grievances, to gain a greater understanding of history and its tragedies. But don't just take my word for it. For more insight into Shepard's approach to fiction, make sure to check out the interview with him in the upcoming issue of dislocate.

As one recent report shows, even the financial masters-of-the-universe who presided over last year's collapse were acting based on motives that now seem recognizably, if depressingly, human. Sure, it's fun to speculate about clandestine cabals and to imagine a world in which hidden symbols reveal history's greatest secrets. But as Jim Shepard shows, people are the stuff of which history is made. If we're lucky, his fiction will continue to dazzle readers with the stories of those people, at least until the man behind the curtain is finally revealed.

Posted by Dislocate Literary Journal at 7:34 PM | Permalink

By Josh Morsell, Managing Editor

This year, dislocate is sponsoring a contest for "contaminated" essays. In her September 14 blog, Editor-in-Chief Colleen Coyne wrote about her Google search for "dislocate," and I found her results amusing, so I thought I'd try the same with "contamination." But whereas Colleen learned of a guy who fantasized about having a superpower where he could "dislocate and relocate joints at will... kind of like a flesh transformer," the results for contamination just weren't funny. Parsley was contaminated with salmonella; salted plums with lead. There are dangerous levels of antifreeze in the soil of Bad Axe, Michigan, and a "mercury mystery" in a Twin Falls, Idaho parking lot (nobody knows where the poison came from). Television tubes buried in Ottawa, Ohio have leaked into people's backyards. Dangerous staph germs found at West Coast beaches! Farm runoff fouls wells! One in ten Americans drinks dangerously contaminated water! Over 16 million acres of Vietnam still rife with unexploded bombs! My Google search found 862 articles about contamination published in just the past week.

Just so my blog entry wouldn't be completely depressing, I thought, How can I make this funny? (To be clear, there is no requirement for humor in the Contaminated Essay Contest - although humor is quite welcome.) I wondered if contamination could be a superpower, and I looked up the Wikipedia "List of superhuman features and abilities in fiction." The closest things were X-Ray and Captain Atom, both of whom can emit radiation at will, but they're not really contaminators. They just blast you with energy, bam. I wanted to find a superpower about creeping, chronic infection.

I did find a lot of references to another kind of superpower/potential superpower afflicted by contamination - the U.S., China, Europe, Russia, India, and Brazil suffer contaminations of water, soil, milk, even of "cancerous politics." That's not funny, either.

Why does dislocation get to be funny? When you dislocate something, it tends to happen quickly. Maybe quick makes slapstick? Contamination connotes slowness, a creeping weakening, and chronic stress - if you even know it's happening before your teeth fall out.

To even look for humor seems in poor taste.

But then, I heard on Fresh Air about "cancertainment," a subculture of young cancer patients who share information and inside jokes through blogs with titles like "Cancer is Hilarious." Check out Iva Skoch's Newsweek article "A Malignant Melanoma Walks Into a Bar." Skoch, who was diagnosed with colon cancer at age 29, writes that, "Often, the reality is so overwhelming that all I can do is laugh."

The inspiration for the Contaminated Essay Contest came from a lyric essay by poet Colleen McCarthy, a student here at the University of Minnesota Creative Writing Program. Colleen's father covered the 1979 Three Mile Island nuclear accident when he was a young journalist, and he later took a job as a spokesperson for an electric utility that operates several nuclear power plants. Deploying her prose much in the manner of poetry, Colleen explores the dendritic networks of the nuclear industry - the destructive and productive ways it has become implicated in our economy, our government, our culture, our natural environment and our bodies. For both sickness and health, it has become part of what we are.

Ecologically, the world has always been interconnected, with a range of impositions and complicities between organisms and elements: parasitism, amensalism, commensalism, mutualism; contamination, infection, competition, exploitation, cooperation, fertilization.

As human societies become more complexly interconnected, we face ever new contaminations, minglings, and opportunities; the terrain shifts; "perhaps, even, the limit toward which we speed is for every sphere of life to be contaminated by every other sphere" (to quote our contest write-up).

We want the Contaminated Essay Contest to address a condition of life today, a set of unanswered questions; and we seek new language, new formal expressions, with which to meet these questions.

Not everybody finds contamination, with its connotations of sickness and trouble, to be aesthetically attractive. Some have suggested that we change the name to, I don't know what, The Healing Essay Contest or something. But I suggest that contamination is very present and very future; and, whether we fight it, take advantage of it, laugh at it, or just curl up fetal, we've got to deal with it. So let's have some fun.

P.S. If you're looking for prompts to get you going on this essay, here's an interesting breakdown of six types of contamination: physical, social, psychic, moral, cultural, and artistic/rhetorical.

Posted by Dislocate Literary Journal at 7:20 PM | Permalink

By Colleen Coyne, Editor-in-Chief

In the middle of a sticky, bumpy bus ride this afternoon, I overheard a girl on her cell phone complaining that it was going to snow soon. Today it hit 82 degrees, but this is Minnesota, and it's almost fall - so anything is possible. Far more exciting than the imminent threat of nasty winter weather, fall also brings a new school year and (drum roll, please) a new year of dislocate. We held our first full staff meeting of the year last week, and we can now add ten new lit-loving grad students to our masthead.

Our reading period has been open since July 15, and submissions are plentiful (but we always want more, of course!). This year's guidelines reflect one major goal: now that we've been on the scene for five issues, we want to grow even more and lock in our reputation for high-quality work that pushes the limits of genre, redefines and re-appropriates conventions of content and form, and makes us feel physically as if the tops of our heads were taken off. Ms. Dickinson may have been talking specifically about poetry in that last one, but we know that feeling can happen when we encounter any piece of writing that surprises and excites us.

This need to carve out our niche seems natural. We live in a world that is constantly asking us to define ourselves, to outline our parameters and stick to them, personally and professionally--and sometimes even creatively. This can be a huge burden for writers, writing programs, and journals, but it's also an opportunity to both inhabit and challenge our own identity, to (re)evaluate its accuracy and resonance. On the dislocate staff, we're often faced with the question: why "dislocate"? We even ask it of ourselves sometimes. It's an odd term, a fact proven to me during a recent Google search. That is, if you Google "dislocate" (go ahead, try it out), this journal appears on the first page of results--whew--but a scan of the other returns reveals a bevy of assorted oddities:

* a clip, from Britain's Got Talent, of a man who can dislocate his neck.

* lyrics to the song "Dislocate" by Alaskan metal band 36 Crazyfists, which chants "spilling the guts, spilling the guts, spilling."

* a handy list of limb-specific suggestions for "what to do if you dislocate your thumb."

* the earnest message board posts of someone wishing they possessed the superpower of being able to "dislocate and relocate joints at will...kind of like a flesh transformer."

* a quote by Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset: "By speaking, by thinking, we undertake to clarify things, and that forces us to exacerbate them, dislocate them, schematize them. Every concept is in itself an exaggeration."

I'm feeling flarfy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flarf_poetry)! But in addition to giving me the urge to collage hilarious search returns into an even more hilarious poem, these results represent some of what's shaped our mission statement. Well, maybe not the dislocated-neck guy. But certainly that last one--the idea that we're striving to make sense of the world around us, and the only way to do that is to take ourselves out of our comfort zones, to view things through a slightly distorted lens, to embrace the attempt as well as the result of grand gestures of experimentation--fits us well.

And so we go into another year, and we hope that you're coming along for the ride, that you're ready, as we are, to open yourself up to new ways of writing and new ways of looking at the world.

Posted by Dislocate Literary Journal at 2:28 PM | Permalink

By Jonah Charney-Sirott

Everyone here at dislocate is a big fan of Kevin Wilson, whose short story, "The Vanishing Husband," was featured in dislocate #5. Recently, one of our editors, Jonah Charney-Sirott, had the chance to ask Wilson a few questions. We present that interview to you here.

dislocate: In "The Vanishing Husband," the protagonist works at a company manufacturing personalized school textbooks. How much research do you put into learning about a job like this? None? Thousands of hours? Was this an actual job you held?

Kevin Wilson: I put no research at all into it. I try my best to do as little research as possible when writing stories. One reason is that I can get lost for days researching the smallest point and it ends up not helping me all that much. I once spent three weeks reading about pinball machines from the early 1900's for a story that I was writing. I ended up using some of that information, but not nearly enough to warrant the time I spent reading about it.

dislocate: How dedicated are you to working within the short story form? Will your next project be a novel or will you continue with short stories? If your project is a novel, any basic differences in the writing process that you have been surprised by? Enjoyed? Disliked? If the next project will be shorts, what draws you and keeps you engaged in the short story format?

Kevin Wilson: I love short stories and the form appeals to me so much, both as a writer and a reader. As a young writer, trying to figure out how writing works, the short form is best because you can play around, make a mess, learn how to make less of a mess, and you haven't wasted two years of your life on a 300-page failure. And as a reader, especially now that my time is limited with a new kid in the house, I can read a twenty-page short story and it can have the same emotional resonance as a novel. Everything about the form just appeals to me.

But I'm working on a novel right now, partly because that's the second book in the book deal with Ecco and partly because I want to see if I can write in a longer form.

dislocate: Jeffrey Eugenides recently wrote that whenever he is blocked or uninspired, he turns to Bellow's Herzog to get the juices flowing and become re-inspired. Are there any works that you continuously return to?

Kevin Wilson: I almost never read a book twice. There's just so much to read and I spent so much of my life reading comic books and pulp novels (and I still read that stuff obsessively), that I haven't read many classics at all and I'm always trying to catch up so I don't look like a damn moron around other writers. And there are so many books coming out each month that I want to read. So I tend to read a book, enjoy it, and then move on to the next one. But there are writers I like to read sections of just to make me happy, people like Flannery O'Connor, Padgett Powell, Charles Willeford, Ann Patchett, Carson McCullers, Barry Hannah. For instance, I just went back to Patchett's novel, Taft, to find a line I had been thinking about, just for the pleasure of rereading it:

"I think she's scared of me," Ruth said. "Wonder why that is."

"You're fucking scary is why that is."

Also, I fear that if you collected the limited interviews I've done, you would find a borderline crazy infatuation with the work of Chris Adrian, especially his first novel Gob's Grief. I've read that book as many times as any book and it always surprises me with the depth of emotion going on. It makes me excited to write, to try and get something good on paper.

dislocate: Any fantastic nonfiction that you've read recently? Ideas or obsessions that have gripped you? When reading nonfiction (if you do) do you try and relate the book to your current fiction work or do you keep the two separate?

Kevin Wilson: I don't read nonfiction, mostly because there is so much fiction that I want to read that it rarely creeps into my reading list. I did actually listen to the new Malcolm Gladwell book on CD, which was fun and helped pass the time from Louisville to Nashville in the car, but because I read so much fiction (catching up on classics I never bothered to read; reading all the great contemporary fiction that comes out every month; reading the pulp novels that I love so much; reading my 100 bucks worth of comics every month; reading my students' stories), I just don't bother with non-fiction. This is a huge failing, I know.

I do, however, spend a lot of time on Wikipedia, which I find to be a lot of fun. I just go to a random Wikipedia page and I can spend hours reading about stuff I never knew existed. I spent all of last month reading about feral children, something I never knew about until Wikipedia told me about it. Now, I'm sure, I'll end up writing a story about feral children.

Click here to read an excerpt from "The Vanishing Husband" in a previous dislocate blog entry, or read the full story in dislocate #5. You can also find information more information about Kevin Wilson at his website.

Posted by Dislocate Literary Journal at 11:52 AM | Permalink

DISLOCATE #6 & THE CONTAMINATED ESSAY CONTEST


Reading Period

July 15 - December 1, 2009

What do we want?

Send us your best work, of course. But send us your best work befitting the spirit of dislocate. Tear us out of our cushiony comfort zones. Ignore "no trespassing" signs; push the limits of form, genre, and subject matter. Dissolve extant boundaries and suggest new ones. Make us question our beliefs about what writing can and cannot do. Give us a little pain with our pleasure. Don't confuse us. Enthrall us, engage us, surprise us. Be innovative and experimental with your ideas, form, and process. In short, blow our minds.

Click here for full submission guidelines.

In addition to sending regular submissions (in poetry, prose, creative nonfiction, and our new "everything else" category), we hope you'll enter this year's contest, "The Contaminated Essay," 1st prize $400.

CONTEST: THE CONTAMINATED ESSAY

Your essay may be about contamination...

To render impure by contact or mixture; to corrupt, defile, pollute, sully, taint, infect.

Contamination may be on a dramatic, mortal scale: smallpox-infected blankets; a nuclear meltdown; an outbreak of hallucinogenic rye fungus. It may be dramatically personal: the way love or a bad relationship infects a person. It may be banal and devastating: the drip drip water torture of a life based on lies, the unwitting and deadly inhalation of asbestos over the course of years.

Contaminate's root is the Latin word tangere, "to touch," and contamination usually refers to "touch that makes bad." But there are ways that elements become stronger as a result of corruption: steel gets stronger when tempered in extreme heat, and chemotherapy purifies the body by nearly destroying it. In literature, stories are retold and recontextualized in an endless and productive series of contaminations. Perhaps, even, the limit toward which we speed is for every sphere of life to be contaminated by every other sphere. The question looms: How do people survive, and even thrive, within this contamination? You need not answer this question directly. But let the question contaminate your work.

Your essay may be contaminated in form...

What happens to the essay when we contaminate it with heterogeneous elements? You might add photographs or screenshots from a PowerPoint presentation. You might mix up formal conventions, and make the piece extremely short, or especially lyric. You might transcend generic boundaries and integrate elements of fiction or poetry.

You may contaminate your process...

Write under the influence of giardia, or in traffic jams, or in the presence of small, demanding children, and find ways to incorporate those impositions into your text.

Length: Up to 3,000 words; fewer is fine

Deadline: December 1, 2009

Contest Fee: $15 (includes at 1-year subscription to dislocate)

1st Prize: $400, publication in dislocate #6, and 4 contributor copies

All entries will be considered for publication in dislocate.

Click here for full submission guidelines.

Posted by Dislocate Literary Journal at 5:38 PM | Permalink

Katie Leo on Dislocate's Transitions issue for the Utne Blog:

Increasingly, we are a global community of migrants. In this era of unprecedented mobility, boundaries seem more permeable, and indeed arbitrary, than ever.

Enter the hybrid. Not the car, the literary genre. Are genre categories like poetry and prose just so 20th Century? The spring issue of Dislocate magazine seems to say, yes.

Read more about Dislocate in the Utne Blog!

Posted by Dislocate Literary Journal at 1:15 AM | Permalink

Dislocate's Featured Author of the Summer: Kevin Wilson

You've seen him in the New York Times; now you can see him in Dislocate!

Kevin Wilson is the author of the collection, Tunneling to the Center of the Earth (Ecco/Harper Perennial, 2009). His fiction has appeared in Ploughshares, Tin House, One Story, Cincinnati Review, and elsewhere, and has twice been included in the New Stories from the South: The Year's Best anthology. He has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and the KHN Center for the Arts. He lives in Sewanee, Tennessee, with his wife, the poet Leigh Anne Couch, and his son, Griff, where he teaches fiction at the University of the South and helps run the Sewanee Writers' Conference.

Pick up a copy of Dislocate to read Kevin's story "The Vanishing Husband." Want a taste? Check it out:

The Vanishing Husband

My bed split in two while I was away at work. Where there had this morning been a single king-sized bed, now sit two brand-new double beds spaced a few feet apart from each other. In the span of a few hours, it has split apart like a cell dividing. Two from one. Blessa was sitting on our front porch, rocking slowly on the swing, when I pulled into the driveway. I remember driving up and watching her legs move slowly with the swing, the way her feet stretched out in front of her, and I was happy. I was happy to be at our large, comfortable house, and I was looking forward to a quiet dinner of pasta and some kind of vegetable dish and a bottle of wine. The usual. The good things we had afforded ourselves. And then she tells me, "Yelt, I want you to come see the beds." I thought the way she phrased it was odd at first, cause up to that point I had remembered only one bed in our house. But she was right. Two beds.

Our previous bed, the single bed, was a nice one. It was a king-sized sleeper with lots of springs and cushion, the kind you can drop watermelons on from high distances and not topple a tower of champagne glasses. And it was true, the watermelons onto the bed, because we tried it the first night Blessa and I had brought it home from the store. One of us stood on a ladder with a watermelon while the other stacked champagne glasses, and no, the glasses would not move. The bed was comfortable and warm and held both of us with room to spare. And now it is gone. I cannot make heads or tails of it, try to imagine someone slipping in during the afternoon and taking a chainsaw to the bed, moving the two halves apart from each other. I look at Blessa, expecting to see the same puzzlement on her face. She is smiling, holding the hem of her sundress in her hands and squeezing tight. "Do you like it, Yelt?" It starts to come to me, slowly.

I do not understand things very well, am not what you would call a fast learner. I had thought she was just as baffled as I was, had spent the whole afternoon pacing the long hallways of our house, trying to understand why the bed had split. But here she is, crawling onto one of the beds, the one nearest the door, and beckoning me to lie down. So I do. I drape my sport coat over the easy chair that, thankfully, remains the same dimensions as when I had left, and sit down on the far corner of the bed and look over my shoulder at the other bed, which I assume will be mine. The bed is hard, the mattress not yet accustomed to the contours of my body. I ask her why there are now two beds and she tells me, "it just seemed like the thing to do, get some space."

Want more Kevin Wilson? Go here to buy our latest issue and read the full story! Need another reason? See what Kevin Wilson has to say about Dislocate and another one of our authors, Adam Peterson. You can also check out Wilson's new book, Tunneling to the Center of the Earth.

Posted by Dislocate Literary Journal at 6:32 PM | Permalink