CLA: Dislocate Magazine

Do you sometimes fantasize about how cool it would be to write a stupefyingly popular blog, column or article for a website like the Rumpus or Salon or NewYorker.com? It is time, my friends, to turn those dreams into reality. dislocate.org is planning a February 1 launch of its brand new website, which will feature weekly columns as well as a steady stream of articles about books, writing, the "industry," and all things remotely related to a writer's life (fashion, pop culture, sex(!), etc.).

Perks of writing for dislocate.org:

• Expand your portfolio!
• Beef up your résumé!
• Build a loyal following among the denizens of the internets--and thereby a readership and consumer base for your forthcoming magnum opus!
• A little internet cred never hurt with the agents, either, or so I'm told.

In preparation for our grand entrance onto the scene on February 1, the dislocate web team is looking to publish a range of articles in time for the launch, and we'd love to see what you've got to offer.

dislocate.org is currently looking for:
excellent writing, of course. But more specifically:

Guest Contributors
Article categories are still somewhat fluid, so write about anything that excites you. Here's what we're thinking so far:

For the "Writing" section: book reviews, author interviews, profiles, craft-related essays, stuff about publishing, an "MFA Beat"-type section, general coverage of the literary scene, "opinion" pieces on any of the above.

For the "Culture" section: everything else (subject to the web editorial team's definition of good taste).

Go ahead and submit an article! Send the full text (in the body of the email) to dislocate.online@gmail.com by January 25 and we'll let you know what we think.

Columnists
Let's be honest: we all kind of envy PerezHilton's insane popularity and gut-roiling readership level. Here's your chance to show off (or develop) your blogging chops and create an internet personality worthy of its own cult following.

Columns can be primarily either topic-driven or personality-driven, though ideally there will be some of both. Columnists will post on a weekly basis (more often if you like)--with entries of between 400 and 800 words, give or take. Two examples of columns we're fond of: Steve Almond's Bad Poetry Corner and Ted Wilson Reviews the World.

Have an idea for a column you'd love to inflict upon the world? Pitch it to us at dislocate.online@gmail.com with a sample post or two (600-800 words).

Staff Writers
Interested in having articles published regularly on our snazzy new website, and adding a sweet line to your CV? Staff writers will be chosen by the web editorial team on the basis of previously submitted work. In other words, give us something awesome to publish, then give us something else that's equally awesome, and after that we'll discuss making you a core member of our writing team.

Questions? Comments? Great ideas? Send them to dislocate.online@gmail.com.

Posted by Dislocate Literary Journal at 5:24 PM | Permalink

by Shantha Susman, Publicity and Outreach Coordinator

Emergency As Usual

It's Snow Emergency time in Minneapolis, which means citizens not lucky enough to have driveways or back alley parking remain ever vigilant. A declaration of a Snow Emergency means the plows are coming to sweep your street, and woe be unto the car owner who doesn't move her car in time. The impound lot is not a friendly place. I've always found it bizarre that this is called an emergency, since it's no different from street sweeping and plowing that happens routinely (several times a week, say) in busier cities throughout the country. Not to mention the fact that Minneapolis is snowed on four good months out of the year. Emergency? Or Business As Usual?

Which begs the question: what exactly is an emergency?

In Denis Johnson's collection Jesus' Son, his story "Emergency" concerns a hospital. Like a snow-filled Minneapolis winter, the hospital ER is in a continual state of emergency, to the extent that emergency becomes, shall we say, business as usual. The dreaded H1N1 has also catapulted us into a constant state of emergency--here at the University of Minnesota we are bombarded with missives instructing mindfulness, cleanliness, and lenience toward students who may be too sick to attend class. The Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport has been at a constant threat level of Orange (one notch below a true emergency) for the past two years.

Neil Strauss has a new book out called Emergency: This Book Will Save Your Life. You can read that if you want; I probably won't. If you read it, you will likely be ten times better at being prepared for disaster than I will, or at least you'll better understand the mindset of the worriers.

Here at dislocate, we understand well the constant state of emergency. Literary journals are always scrounging for funding, scrambling to read through submissions in a timely fashion, anxious and eager to produce a beautiful book. These emergencies are real, but perhaps a bit like snow in Minneapolis: they're cyclic, planned for, and no less trying for being expected. It's business. As usual.

Posted by Dislocate Literary Journal at 5:16 PM | Permalink

By Andrea Uptmor, Assistant Fiction Editor

The Holiday Season is upon us, and if you are like me (and of course you are, that's why we're such good friends), not only do you hate saying "The Holiday Season is upon us," but you are feeling great trepidation at the thought of buying presents worthy of your loved ones. Also, you have limited yourself to Amazon.com because mall crowds make you have major episodes of chest pain and depersonalization. So what are you going to do? You are going to buy them BOOKS, is what you're going to do. Here's your Holiday Book-Shopping Guide for all of the special people in your life:

Your Mom - Too Much Happiness by Alice Munro

Moms like the word "happiness." And you know how last month, when you gave your mom your new story to read, and she sighed and said, "Well I would have liked it if there was a sense of redemption in the end, like maybe the main character gives CPR on a dying boy to make up for her own lost children?" Munro does that all over the place in this book, and she does it thirty-five times more skillfully than you ever could.

*Also a good bet: The Art of Happiness by the Dalai Lama

Your Whiskey-Loving Father -Where I'm Calling From by Raymond Carver

If he loves fishing and smoking cigarettes as well, then you are going to hit the jackpot this year. This is arguably Carver's best collection of short stories. He covers all the stuff your dad likes--whiskey, cigarettes, fishing, cellulite, yard sales, vitamins, vacuums, smoking weed--and he does it with that special Carver balance of sensitivity and abruptness that make the rest of us writers pull out our hair and wonder how in the world a man could pack so much life into a single word.

*Also a good bet: The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien

Your College-Bound Brother - The World Without Us by Alan Weisman

This book is a long thought experiment that asks the question "WTF would happen to the planet if the humans disappeared, rapture-style?" It's full of fun questions like "Hey, man, guess how long it would take for Manhattan to sink?" Good conversation-starters for your brother and his new roommate when they are sharing the awkward post-unpacking silence. Plus it'll make him sound smart, which, as you have tried to tell him before, will impress the ladies.

*Also a good bet: Deer Hunting with Jesus by Joe Bageant

Your Weird Cousin Who Likes David Lynch Movies -Driver's Seat by Muriel Spark

This is a slim novel, one you could ostensibly fold and tuck in your back pocket, but it's such a creeptastic story you might not want to keep it nearby. The story is about Lise, a wacked-out traveler who sort of endearingly reminds you of your weird friend, except Lise is on a mission to find the perfect man to murder her. (As a bonus gift, you could pair this with a DVD of the 1974 movie version starring Elizabeth Taylor and Andy Warhol. But that might ruin it.)

*Also a good bet: Genius and Heroin by Michael Largo

Your Poet Best Friend -The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker

Or really any friend you might have who keeps his beard long and twists it thoughtfully when he speaks. The professorial type. Baker's new novel is about a poet who is supposed to write the introduction to a forthcoming poetry anthology, but he only succeeds in procrastinating in very Nicholson Baker-type ways: by ruminating on his failed relationship, playing badminton, and developing a friendship with the kitchen mouse. If you have ever wanted to see your poet friend smile, watch him quietly as he reads this book.

*Also a good bet: Gilead by Marilynne Robinson

Posted by Dislocate Literary Journal at 7:58 PM | Permalink

December 1, 2009

With our Contaminated Essay Contest, we want writers to explore these questions, to confuse the matter further with experiments in form and genre. We want to find new ways to define the essay.

Continue reading "In Defense of Contamination" »

Posted by lega0044 at 8:57 AM | Permalink

by Karen Randolf

Earlier this fall, in a silly attempt to distinguish themselves in the sea of corndog-touting tables, the dislocate pistons encouraged passers-by to revel in the nostalgic pastime of Mad Libs. You see, with this issue's Contaminated Essay contest (for which we are accepting oxen until December 1st), Mad Libs provided a specular illustration of how form and content might bend--and thrive--through contamination. In this spirit, Thoreau and Gehrig were seeded with the nervous sting-rays-of-speech of passersby. Shortly into the sunflower though, it became sparkly that there was a generational window that recalled Mad Libs with both clarity and turbans. Trying to verify this striptease, I here hazard a Siamese history of Mad Libs.

Mad Libs, playfully named after ad libitum, or 'as you waffle,' was invented in 1953, by Leonard Stern and Roger Price--but it wasn't until 1958 that the mercury was ready for the eager public. For those less slippery with these inventors' artichokes, some biographical highlights are in order: Stern wrote for television shows like The Honeymooners and The Honeymooners, and several of Cheech and Chong's films; Price, also no stranger to naps, wrote for Bob Hope and Sassy magazine. Price subsequently had an even wider range of corsets, including the donkey of a Frank Zappa album.

But it is Mad Libs, this duo's most lauded furnace, that has granted me--and I presume, those syncopatedly close to me--any number of crucial lice. These lessons are culled from the vivid pitchforks of long childhood pencil-case rides, and I admit to more recently Mad Libs desserts during summer school teaching: under the spiral of teaching grammar, it's a remarkably easy lesson-massage. So, its ailments:

1. Mad Libs ostensibly oozes us parts-of-speech (though at the book fair, adults did not seem to retain those quibbling pockets).
2. We curdle the delights of pale substitution, a practice much revisited with the introduction of the word processor rainbow, much to the spatula of paper-graders everywhere.
3. It munches that writing indeed isn't as sardonic and myopic as it itches: it's always at least dialogic, underhandedly public, and dreamt.
4. Mad Libs sometimes just don't itch, just like martinis.
5. And last, Mad Libs explains those mysterious mechanics of pumpkin pie, how the unexpected always yields that little turkey--and that the funniest things are always those that border on taboo: douche bag, boink, balls, apeshit, fuckwad, poop. But when they're expected, it's not elephantine at all, see? It's just, well, meat-headed.

dislocate accepts submissions until December 1, people. Or rather dislocate spigot-boink-apeshit-balls until December 1. Shucks.

(Thanks to those who helped fill in the peanuts)

Posted by Dislocate Literary Journal at 2:08 PM | Permalink

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

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.

Continue reading "Seven Tips for National Novel Writing Month" »

Posted by Gwyn Fallbrooke at 6:03 PM | Permalink

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.

Continue reading "People Love Lorrie Moore" »

Posted by liuxx675 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

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.

Continue reading "Contest 2009: Why the Contaminated Essay?" »

Posted by at 7:20 PM | Permalink