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!
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.
The literary journal Dislocate launches its fifth issue on Saturday, May 9, 2009, from 8pm to midnight, at the Bedlam Theatre in Minneapolis. The event celebrates creative work from international writers and artists on the subject of political, social, geographic and cultural transitions with food, drink, a reading by local poet Todd Boss, Twin Cities band Run at the Dog, and New York City DJ Jason Baker on the dance floor! The journal includes:
• Acclaimed authors Kevin Wilson, Peter Johnson, Nin Andrews, and Todd Boss, among others!
• Poetry by Haitian poet Jacqueline Beaugé-Rosier, published for the first time in English and French!
• Responses to Jacob Lawrence paintings from "The Great Migration" series by women of the Grace House re-entry program in Chicago!
• Photography by featured artist Kyle Rand (kylerand.com)!
What: Dislocate Transitions Launch: Books, art, food, drinks, live band,
dance floor DJ!
When: Saturday, May 9, 2009, 8pm-12am!
Where: Bedlam Theatre
1501 S 6th St
Minneapolis, MN 55454
bedlamtheatre.org
This event is free and open to the public. First 50 guests receive free drink ticket!
Dislocate is published annually by the University of Minnesota Creative Writing Program. For more information, please contact Shantha Susman at susman [at] umn [dot] com.
Transitions Issue Emphasizes Migration Narratives, Transitional Forms
The literary journal Dislocate launches its fifth issue on Saturday, May 9, 2009, from 8pm to 11pm, at the Bedlam Theatre in Minneapolis. The event celebrates creative work from international writers and artists on the subject of political, social, geographic and cultural transitions with food, drink, and New York City DJ Jason Baker! The journal includes:
• Acclaimed authors Kevin Wilson, Peter Johnson, Nin Andrews, and local poet Todd Boss, among others!
• Poetry by Haitian poet Jacqueline Beaugé-Rosier, published for the first time in English and French!
• Responses to Jacob Lawrence paintings from "The Great Migration" series by women of the Grace House re-entry program in Chicago!
• Photography by featured artist Kyle Rand (kylerand.com)!
What: Dislocate Transitions Launch: Books, art, food, drinks, DJ!
When: Saturday, May 9, 2009, 8-11pm
Where: Bedlam Theatre
1501 S 6th St
Minneapolis, MN 55454
bedlamtheatre.org
This event is free and open to the public.
Questions? Email Shantha Susman at susman [at] umn [dot] edu.
Dislocate is getting ready for another fabulous and our final reading for the year, featuring award-winning poet and non-fiction writer WANG PING! Ping will be joined by our very own MFA students Brian Laidlaw, Michelle Livingston and Laura Owen.
"Oh wonderful!" You say, "When?
Tuesday, April 14, 2009 at 7:00 pm
"Can't wait! Where is it?"
At the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities Campus
2o7 Church Street S.E. (Washington Ave., and Church Street)
in 150 Lind Hall (Taylor Center Library)
"Anything else?"
Well, yes, now that you ask. We wouldn't let you go hungry. Complimentary refreshments will be served and admission is free!
Wilson Peden, Managing Editor
In case you missed the news, a study conducted at Connecticut State University named Minneapolis the most literate city in the United States (okay, technically we tied for 1st with Seattle, but if you look at the findings online, you’ll see that Minneapolis is listed first). St. Paul, our neighbor across the river, comes in at #4, making the Twin Cities one of the most literate—and, arguably, literary—metropolitan areas in the country.
These findings are certainly a point of pride for those of us who call Minneapolis home, but they’re hardly a surprise. The calendar of literary events in the Twin Cities is always full, and March has some particularly choice offerings. For starters, there’s Pulitzer Prize-winner and former U.S. Poet Laureate Louise Gluck, who visits the University of Minnesota on Wednesday, March 4. Gluck is the latest Freier Endowed Lecturer in Literature. Gluck will be speaking and reading about her work at the Coffman Theater, Minneapolis Campus. Event starts at 7:30 pm and is free and open to the public.
If you’re looking for something closer to Uptown, you might check out C.A. Conrad, Aaron Kunin, and Magdalena Zurawski at Magers and Quinn Booksellers. This should be a fun group: Conrad is a sound poet, Zurawski is a Ph.D. candidate at Duke, and Kunin author of “a collection of small poems about shame.” The reading takes place Sunday, March 8 at Magers and Quinn, 8pm. For more information about all these writers, check out Zurawski’s blog. Event is free and open to the public.
And if you lean more towards interactive events, check out this bookmaking workshop at Open Book on March 14. Visiting artists Peter and Donna Thomas will teach you how to make books out of found objects, including ukuleles, apparently. Anyway, ukuleles are involved in some manner, as well as cameras and accordions. The workshop requires prior registration. There’s a hefty materials fee for this workshop, but honestly, who wouldn’t fork out some cash to learn how to turn a ukulele into a book?
By Libby Edelson, Fiction Editor
Last weekend a large contingent of Dislocaters traveled from Minneapolis to Chicago to set up shop at this year’s Associated Writer’s Program (A.W.P.) conference. Over 8,000 people flooded the downtown Hilton, and from our shared hotel rooms to the book-fair, from the panels to the parties, there was hardly a moment of alone-time to be had. Funny, because the very thing we were all there to celebrate—writing—is a solitary act. While we laud writing’s power to engage us with the larger world, to connect us across time and space and cultures, both as producers and also as audience, while we stress the necessity for our own writing of cultivating curiosity about the world beyond ourselves, we write—physically, literally—alone.
Sometimes this aloneness, especially for those writers who don’t have the luxury of teaching in or attending M.F.A. programs, or working in publishing, or whose work is as of yet unpublished, can transform into a poisonous loneliness. We rely on our imaginations to ply our trade, but those imaginations—exhausted by craft—can fall short of providing us with a sense of community and kinship. In the echo chamber of our head, our work—not just the writing itself, but the work of writing—starts to ping back and forth, sending out a resonance that sounds eerily like why bother or who is this for, anyway? We lose faith.
So going to A.W.P. felt a little bit like going to worship. There was something of the prayer service in the vast gilded halls full of people nodding in unison as Stuart Dybek articulated his theory of urban animism, or as Antonya Nelson talked about the power of omniscience. The Hilton, a stately old-time affair on Michigan Avenue is the Hilton—the first hotel in the family’s empire. I found myself feeling that its crystal chandeliers, plush muffling carpets, elaborate murals, sweeping staircases and grand foyers served as a sort of tangible imprimatur of the worthiness of our enterprise—as if the lovely, and yes, old-fashioned, setting not so much elevated the conference or what it stood for, but provided a reflection of it that we so often are unable to see.
Manning the Dislocate booth on the conference’s last day and speaking to a steady stream of awesome, delightfully weird, surprisingly disparate, but all identifiable Writers (or at least People Who Care About Writing) in my capacity as Fiction Editor, I was reminded of the Rosh Hashannas and Yom Kippurs of my youth—the High Holidays were the only time my family attended synagogue. On those afternoons, sitting in a far row in the back of the chapel, I was amazed to be part of something so much bigger than myself. Instead of paying attention to the rabbi or the service, I would try to count how many people were in the room. Afterward, we mingled in the halls of the synagogue, families exchanging news and Mazel Tovs and the pleasure of being together. That was my sense of religion as a child, my sense of faith—the pleasure and possibility of community.
So yes, the A.W.P. conference is a good place to professionalize, to schmooze, to pad out the old curriculum vitae. More than that, though, it’s a chance to be reminded that we don’t work alone, that in the end, we do a share a set of values and beliefs in that thing that can feel so fleeting, so ephemeral, so isolating—the making of art. Whether it happened when I was stuffing my face with tacos (the likes of which I haven’t had since leaving California) in a hotel room itself stuffed to capacity with raucous writers exchanging dirty jokes, or while watching Paul Muldoon and his ASL translator entwined in mutual fascination and a sort of doubled poetry, or during my mission proselytizing on behalf of our bad ass mag, Dislocate, A.W.P. made a believer out of me.
by Brian Gebhart
So everyone knows how bad things are right now, in just about every area of the economy. Writers and artists are no exception, though they aren’t one of the politically kosher sectors that various leaders and commentators like to single out for their sympathies (i.e. money). One of the most universally ridiculed pieces of the current stimulus package was funding for the NEA, though there is actually a great case to be made for arts funding as effective stimulus. It’s instructive to note that during the Great Depression, the Federal Writers Project employed such petty scribblers as Saul Bellow, Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, John Cheever, John Steinbeck, Margaret Walker, and Richard Wright, among many others. In addition, the FWP produced books focusing on many unique and unsung local stories, like this one about the Bohemian Flats underneath the U of M’s very own Washington Street Bridge. I’m guessing that whatever miniscule fraction of New Deal spending the FWP represented was probably money well spent.
The publishing industry is also feeling the crunch. This does not bode well for young writers eyeing their prospects for either signing a first book contract or landing a job in publishing. The future health of newspapers and magazines looks even gloomier. The historian Douglas Brinkley recently proposed the brilliant idea of providing federal subsidies for book reviews, the paper equivalent of NPR or PBS. My hopes for such a program actually appearing, of course, are basically nil.
Still, there is some reason for optimism. I have heard from an exclusive inside source (also known as my wife) that the used book business in the Twin Cities is booming, on both the buying and selling ends. In a country with a struggling economy and an insatiable appetite for entertainment, books provide more bang-for-the-buck than just about any other medium. In addition, there are numerous literary events in the Twin Cities that are free and open to the public (see here, here, and here for starters). Perhaps, if we’re lucky, the current economic hardship could bolster the current revival of American readers.
Good news, writers! We're extending our flash fiction contest till February 6, 2009! Send us your very best flash fiction, along with a check for $10, and you could win our first prize of publication and $400!
But what is flash fiction, anyway? I hear all my friends talking about it.
Good question! The first association that comes to our minds is a camera flash―the object that in a burst of luminosity illuminates a subject in order to fix it, that freezes one moment in a flood of light. The flash, brief as it is, leaves one slightly dazzled, its intensity momentarily disorienting. Even as the flash reveals, it disorients, dislocates.
Flash fiction functions in a similar manner. Call it what you will―the short-short, micro-fiction, postcard fiction―flash's potent brevity allows the writer to unpack one moment, one idea, one singular tiny story, and to fix that moment of narrative in close, sharp focus. Flash suggests not only brevity, but clarity. Flash dislocates us as readers, surprises us, undoes us, delights us, by locating something we might otherwise miss in a longer narrative―the small, the fleeting, and the ephemeral.
Oh, so it's one of those genre-bending forms?
Flash is the wonderful threshold between poetry and the short-story, where, as in poetry, every word counts, and where, as in the short story, there's a narrative unfolding, a beginning, middle, and end, no matter how implicit or oblique. But flash works its magic not through expansion but through winnowing, compression, precision, and concision. Because flash dislocates both of its formal cousins, the poem and the short story, and occupies a strange, wild space all its own, we have a special affection for it.
So flash us! Whether it's the brief history of a love affair told through a series of movie ticket stubs, the acknowledgments to a book that exists only out there in the fictive world, or the voicemail of a particularly crazy boss, freeze a moment, fix a narrative, show us what we've been missing. Surprise us. Dazzle us. Dislocate us.
Will do! What are those details again about how to submit?
$10 per entry. One entry per person. Entry should be under 1,000 words.
And what do I get?
First Prize: $400, publication, 5 contributor copies.
Second Prize: $150, publication, 4 contributor copies.
Third Prize: $50, publication, 4 contributor copies.
When do you need it?
Extended deadline: February 6, 2009.
Where do I send my flash fiction entry?
Send your manuscript, cover letter (name, mailing address, email address, phone number, title of piece, and brief bio), and check for $10 payable to Dislocate Magazine to:
Dislocate―Attn: Dislocate Flash Fiction Contest
Department of English
222 Lind Hall
207 Church Street SE
Minneapolis, MN 55455-0134
For more information, check out www.dislocate.org, or email us at susman@umn.edu.
by Sheena K. Fallon
Development Coordinator
As a writer and grad student I seek out the free or nearly-free gems in the Twin Cities, and luckily, not all of these deals involve happy hour pints of Schell’s and baskets of fries. My favorite free venue in Minneapolis is the Central Library downtown, on Nicollet Mall. The new library opened in 2006, and with fireplaces and comfy chairs, it’s a great place to spend a winter afternoon. But there’s more to the library than the books.
The Talk of the Stacks is a free reading series at the library. Coming this spring are David Plotz, the Slate’s new editor, and Tom Robbins, author of Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, among others. There are recorded archives of past lectures, including M.T. Anderson, Chip Kidd, the U of M’s own Charlie Baxter, and, of course, Garrison Keillor. Want more? The library also has listings of readings at local bookstores.
In special collections, you can click through pictures and be transported to another era. Two of my favorites are the digitized propaganda posters in the World War II collection, and the Minneapolis Photo Collection.
If you’re one of the many writers whose “steady? teaching gig pays those steadily incoming bills, take advantage of the library’s list of databases available to cardholders in Minneapolis or a Hennepin County suburb. In the Gale Virtual Reference Library, access a virtual copy of Reference Guide to Short Fiction, which provides essays on authors like Updike or others you might teach in an undergrad or advanced high school fiction writing course. Or, if you’re looking to expose your students to Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, look for Nonfiction Classics for Students: Presenting Analysis, Context, and Criticism on Nonfiction Works which has a full-text essay about Ms. Dillard and many other authors. Whomever you want to study, Lit Finder supplies the full-text of many poems, essays, and short stories.
And, if you find yourself at the Central Library on a snowy afternoon and you see a curly-haired girl looking out the digi-camo glass instead of typing on her neglected laptop, make sure to say hello.
By Kevin O’Rourke, Poetry Editor
I am not what you would necessarily call an ‘old hand’ at attending readings. I came to writing seriously & the literary world’s attendant snack tables relatively late: I was not an English major as an undergraduate; I spent a great deal of time during my formative years in white-walled art galleries; I have been known to skip readings by major literary figures in order to watch baseball. My relative inexperience with regards to readings combined with my self-identification as a possible writer-to-be presents me with a curious set of problems/questions. First there is the problem of attendance: do I want to go? Will anyone else go? Are the Phillies playing during the reading? But more pressing (and literarily salient as far as this blog is concerned) is the question of content. What does one read? How does one keep the audience interested? Do I tell jokes, or do I wear all black and growl my work as if a member of some Norwegian black-metal band?
I’d say that I come at writing from a wryly-dramatic point of view; my own work, and the work in which I am interested, could in a way be likened to that scene from Airplane when Ted sees Elaine in the bar, and Elaine is dancing to “Stayin’ Alive? with one of said bar’s patrons, and said bar patron is stabbed in the back and begins to motion, in time with the music, towards his back, which causes to Elaine to mimic his seemingly inventive dance move (for clarity, here’s the link). And while I do work with humor, I also write a good deal of sad, sad, sadness poetry (“I / had an oven of gladness / in which I baked / days of boo-hoo and sadness?(2)), which tends to not so much ‘entertain’ those who hear/read it as it does, well, bring them down.
As the preceding paragraphs no doubt indicate, I’ve no issue with ‘light verse’ (if you can’t appreciate a good dirty limerick, then I probably won’t like you) or funny work in general. I mention this because humor seems to be amongst the chiefest weaponry employed by writers seeking to keep their audience engaged in their reading. Not out of some sense of self-censorship or being ashamed of their more ‘serious’ work – simply because use of humor is an easy way to connect with one’s audience. But that being said, how does one find a balance between the overtly entertaining and the overtly serious? And is the division between the two that stark? And so on.
All of the above navel-gazing is really just a long-winded way of getting to my point: that Nov. 18th’s Dislocate/MFA reading (with guest reader Todd Boss) addressed many of these questions quite nicely. I think the night’s success has much to do with the variety of readers and the ways in which their work played off of one another’s. Luke Pingel’s untitled lyric poems (prose or otherwise) led nicely into Libby Edelson’s domestic narrative which led into Cory Newbiggin’s nonfiction about Star Wars and family which led into work from Todd’s new book Yellowrocket, from which he read a nice mixture of heavier & lighter work. Like a good mixtape, there’s nothing quite like a multi-reader reading: one gets just enough of a taste of each reader’s work to leave the reading wanting more, more, more.
(1) The Who, Tommy, MCA, 1969
(2) from Gabriel Gudding’s “The Lyric?
To submit to Dislocate you must, of course, write. But what if
you find yourself creatively blocked? This is an age-old writer's
affliction and a blog post on its existence would be of little use to
anyone. But what are some tactics that writers use to escape the
dreaded block? Oh there are many exercises, prompts, visualization
techniques, sure, but one of history's least heralded is also its
most simple: coffee.
Take a man like Balzac. Fueled by innumerable cups of coffee, he
wrote novel after novel, often working fifteen hour days. In his
essay, "the pleasures and pains of coffee" Balzac noted that the warm
drink "gives us the capacity to engage a little longer in the exercise
of our intellects" and further, that under coffee's influence "ideas
quick march into motion like battallions of a grand army." The
father of realism was not the only one to depend on caffeine as a part
of his writing routine.
Jean Paul Sartre was said to ingest all sorts of amphetamines
during his writing days, but always needed a cup of coffee first. But
who else? There is a novel, "Coffee With Poe", based on the
historical fact of the great poet's love of the drink. And who can
forget the Beatniks, Kerouc, Ginsberg and company, perhaps the
literary movement most associated with coffee and responsible for the
rise and atmosphere of a good many coffeehouses. Remember, the next
time you take that sip of coffee before you sit down to write, you are
slurping on the shoulders of giants.
Mid November—it’s getting colder, the sun's down before you leave work, and if you’re like me, you’re starting to feel some seasonal affective disorder about now. You know what’s good for seasonal affective disorder? Poetry. Really, really good poetry.
As luck would have it, there's an opportunity for you to come hear some great poetry, and some great prose too. Todd Boss, awarding winning poet and Minnesota native, will be reading work to hold your early winter blues at bay. Todd is the author of On Marriage (Red Dragonfly Press) and yellowrocket (W.W. Norton and Co.) He’ll be reading his poetry alongside MFA candidates Luke Pingel (poetry), Libby Edelson (fiction), Cory Newbiggen (nonfiction).
It’s all happening this Tuesday, November 18th, in 150 Lind Hall on the University of Minnesota campus (east bank). The reading starts at 7pm, but come early to snack, chat, and buy copies of Dislocate #4, our latest issue featuring the art of Brian Ness. Hope we’ll see you there.
-Wilson Peden, Managing Editor
By Jim Novak
I share a small desk in the dank T.A. office with one of my very good friends. Both of us are in our third and final year of this lovely M.F.A. program so we are trying to assemble manuscripts, meet with students from the classes we teach, and read for classes we’re taking, all in the same space that’s about as big as a bucket seat in a nice conversion van. Our similarities go beyond books and writing and teaching; we are both a little messy. Some of the stuff on our desk include four dirty coffee mugs, seven AWP magazines, and a box of Kosher instant Mashed Potatoes. I’m not trying to make any enemies here, but once I found a greasy receipt for Chinese food stuck between two books. Despite all of the clutter, I like living with some else’s mess and giving someone my mess back. This by no means is a weird Minnesotan passive aggressive attempt to zing my deskmate. I truly like being in her mess because each day I find something different.
Today, I came across a book by Wilco lead singer Jeff Tweedy. Adult Head is a collection of poems that adds to the canon of poetry books written by aging rock stars. When I lived in Cleveland, Billy Corrigan, singer from the Smashing Pumpkins, came to town to read from his new book. The poems, let me put this nicely, were terrible. So thumbing through Tweedy’s book I didn’t expect much, and I wasn’t given a lot from it. Lines like “an old man who just won’t/ stand out of the way? (from “When I say My Heart? p. 6) do nothing for me. Please, Mr. Tweedy give me something to chew on.
This got me thinking. Why, if I enjoy the lyrics so much, does the poetry fall so short below my expectations? Am I turning into a snob? Maybe. But, the words in Tweedy’s book have no music to support them. Relying on two sensory experiences to help your art for twenty years can get you into some trouble. Without the drums, guitars, and bass, where do these words go? For me they don’t belong in a book.
I’m probably a bit bitter because I have nothing in print, and if I was known for something, let’s say baseball, yeah, if I was a baseball player I would surely try to use my clout to publish my thoughts. So to this I say, keep going rock singers. Keep publishing your books of poetry without a sound track. Keep giving us your lyric notebook in book form so we can buy it and inhale it because we love your, oh that’s right, music.
By Swati Avasthi, Blog Editor
Junot Diaz’s recent novel, The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, has won so many awards that when University of Minnesota’s Professor Evelyn Ch’ien listed them while introducing the author at his reading at the U of M last week, she had to stop and take a breath. After reading from his book, Junot Diaz answered questions from Professor Chi’en and from an audience so large that people were sitting on the floor. The blunt question I wondered, that I always wonder when a writer acquires such deserved approbation, is how did he do it? How did he create a book that is so rich with character and that is so flexible and inventive with language?
During the presentation, he read and spoke slowly, deliberately, as though he wanted the air to transmit the weight and texture of each word. Or perhaps, I was just interpreting his manner of speaking through my lens of nerdy-wordy admiration. But then he spoke about language, talking about how he layered linguistic choices and worked for ten years to acquire the linguistic muscles to incorporate such a variety of languages in his book.
After the presentation, during the book-signing, I asked him if he was working from the unconscious, letting the characters speak through their own voice, or the conscious, deliberately constructing sentences one at a time. He answered that you write every sentence over and over again. So, he told me, language on the page comes from both.
So, how did he do it? While Junot Diaz didn’t give us the key (as if there is one) he did give me a clue. The absorption of language slowly filters to the unconscious. It filters though hard work and time and observation, even for a master, much less the rest of us.
I left with evidence that of the unwritten rule: as a writers, we must always listen, must always hear the millions of languages around me, before we can speak, before we can write.