CLA: Dislocate Magazine

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