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.

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!

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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�?

By Jonah Charney-Sirott

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.

By Swati Avasthi, Blog Editor

When Peter Johnson introduced his work at a reading he and Nin Andrews gave earlier this week at the University of Minnesota, he told his audience that he hoped we would leave and either stare longingly at each other over our cups of coffee at Starbucks or make good use of our beds. (One of which I did and I won’t tell you which one.) Moving from his poem “Almost Happy�? to “Happy�? Peter Johnson is a master of using the little moments and little pieces of life to describe one of the hardest things to write about: happiness. The humor he employs in his poems lead us to both laugh and ruminate on the metaphors. Nin Andrews addressed happiness in a way we all can relate to: the power of the orgasms. After reading from her orgasm poems, she told us she would get “less nervy.�? But she didn’t. She kept us on the edge by using unconventional, interesting and effective strategies in her poetry that draws the reader so close into the world of the poem that we don’t want to leave.

I have come to believe that the language of happiness is disappearing from our literature and from our speech. I find myself fighting against its gradual and subtle decline in my conversations when I’m trying to describe the simple pleasure of a day gone by when I’ve finished all my work, gotten my kids fed, and am ready to read in bed or in my own writing.

But I was treated to a listening to two distinguished writers challenge my assumption that happiness is disappearing from our language. Look to their work for a simple metaphor, a repeating structure, or the celebration of an orgasm. Read how they guide us to a path that is as rife with conflict as with pleasure. I know that I will be reading and re-reading, studying their prose poems to know more about how to seize and represent moments of pleasure on the page. And I hope you will look for them in our upcoming issue of Dislocate or, of course, between the covers of their books.

by Holly Vanderhaar, Nonfiction Editor

If I go a week without questioning my decision to become a writer, I know something must be wrong. I always operated under the assumption that if you were meant to do something, that something would flow easily and be a joy—at least most of the time—to undertake. Not that there aren’t moments when the writing is going well, when I feel I’m (dare I use a cliché?) “in the zone�? and I experience something that must be akin to a runner’s high. (Or at least what I imagine a runner’s high must feel like, since I generally try to avoid that particular activity.) But that “writer’s high�? comes infrequently, and most of the time I have to bribe or trick myself into confronting that blank white page.

Many years ago I considered getting a PhD in psychology, and for a while I was a research assistant in a behavior lab, working with rats and pigeons. You know, the stereotypical “peck this key and get some food�? gig. Anyone familiar with operant conditioning can tell you that if you are trying to strengthen a particular behavior like pecking a key—or, in our case, twenty-six of them, give or take—the most effective technique is that of intermittent reinforcement. What this means, essentially, is that the animal gets a reward, but only some of the time. Slot machines are a prime example; keep pulling that lever and eventually, your reward will come. Don’t give up! It could be the very next time. Or the next. Or the next. Vegas is just one big rat and pigeon colony, in more ways than one.

I give my students tips to overcome writer’s block. By now, we’re all familiar with them. Take a walk, listen to music, meditate. Free-write. Use a prompt. But I end my spiel with the home truth that sometimes you just have to push through it. Sometimes the techniques won’t work. In the real world, we face deadlines and we don’t always have the luxury of waiting for the gentle throat-clearing and whispered suggestion from the Muse. I would estimate that my own work is about ten percent inspiration and ninety percent perspiration (seasoned liberally with profanity). I used to think that meant I wasn’t meant to be a writer, that I didn’t enjoy it enough. But I suppose that’s how vocations work. For whatever reason, and by whatever force, you are called to do something. The rewards may be few and far between, but they will come. Just keep pecking those keys.

by Wilson Peden, Managing Editor

As we’ve mentioned in the last few posts, this is busy, exciting time for everyone at Dislocate. Issue #4 rolls off the presses this week, our reading period for Issue #5 is underway, and to celebrate both issues, we’re throwing a launch party—Thursday, September 25th, 7pm at the Loft. Local writers Dylan Hicks and Katrina Vandenberg will be reading, and of course the Dislocate staff will be there. Come pick up a copy of Issue #4. Come and listen to the readings. Come talk to the staff—you might even convince some of us to go out for a drink afterwards. There will be snacks. If you live in the Twin Cities area and you love good writing and/or snacks, then come on out, because this party is our little gift to you.

It wasn’t easy to get to this point; the process of assembling Issue #4 was long and difficult. So as we release that issue out into the world, maybe it’s worth stopping to ask: why are we doing this? After all, putting together a literary magazine is a lot of work; it’s work that we love, but it’s still work. Sometimes the work stressful; we get tired and cranky and we snap at each other. And personally, I sometimes stop to think about the bazillion other literary magazines already out there, many of them are publishing very nice work, and I ask, what do we do that is different from what they do? What do we have to offer?

Well, I might mention our staff, a smart, thoughtful group of individuals whose solid judgment and idiosyncratic tastes are unique to Dislocate, and I could certainly point to Issue #4 as evidence of the fine work that comes from those tastes and judgments. I might mention the issue we are working on now, the Transitions Issue, an issue we hope to fill with writing that plays with the boundaries of form and addresses the themes of change and motion that seem so present in the world and so incredibly important right now. And I’d mention that some of the writing we publish—some very, very good writing—might not ever be read if we didn’t publish it.

Anyone who’s worked for a literary journal or small press knows there’s not much money in literature. Certainly that’s the case for Dislocate. And yet, despite the hard work and the lack of monetary compensation, there are many, many literary journals already on the market. These journals are in many ways are our competitors, but in some ways, we’re not competitors at all. As the poet, essayist, and all around smart guy Lewis Hyde has pointed out, art and literature don’t always have to move within the confines of the marketplace. Sometimes art moves better in a gift economy.

Writers don’t send us their work with any expectation of monetary reward—they send their work as an offering, a gift they hope we will pass on to our readers. Some pieces we publish; some we cannot, but we’re no less grateful for the gift. Of course, we do charge a (very small) fee for copies of our magazine—as much as we’d like to give it away for free, we do have expenses to cover—but in the end, this process is still about the exchange between writer and reader. We’re happy to facilitate the exchange.

In that spirit, this launch party, and this whole endeavor, is a gift—to the readers and writers and sponsors and all the many people who support Dislocate. So come out, join us at the Loft this Thursday—this one’s for you.

You're invited to attend. Local poet Katrina Vandenberg and local writer/musician Dylan Hicks will read at the launch party of Dislocate #4! Celebration begins at 7:30 p.m. on September 25 at Open Book. The fourth print issue features hot new poems, essays, fiction, interviews, and the extraordinary graphic art of Brian Ness. Open Book is located at 1011 Washington Avenue South, Minneapolis. This event is free and open to the public - please join us!

By Shantha Laura Susman, Editor-in-Chief

To say that it's springtime would be obviously incorrect, but no one can refute that I have two new plants on my windowsills. There's a palpable feeling of change in the air. For those of us in academia, it's the spring of a new school year. For those of us on Dislocate staff, we're anticipating the imminent birth of the 2008 issue. For those of us anywhere in the United States, these next few months will bring political change in our school boards, city councils, in congress, and in the white house. Of one thing I'm sure: things are going to be different around here.

As the new Editor-in-Chief of Dislocate, I want to welcome our new staff members and say, on behalf of all of us, we're excited to read your work! Our 2008 issue is set to launch on September 25th at the Loft Literary Center, and the reading period is open on our 2009 issue. Send us your amazing short story, creative nonfiction essay, or a few poems that rearrange the world, and we'll consider your work for publication. This will get you a peachy publishing credit, the admiration of our readers and staff, and a couple of contributor copies as a thank you.

To reflect the changes in our world – new staff, new issues, new politicians, new plants! – this issue's theme is Transitions. Evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, who was born on a back-to-school September day in 1941 and died on the first day of spring, 1960, wrote that transition doesn't happen gradually, but in spurts of action after long periods of stasis; punctuated equilibrium. How fitting that we have a number of excellent short form authors visiting the University of Minnesota campus this semester, prose poets like Nin Andrews and Peter Johnson whose stories flash on the page, sudden and whole.

To honor our visiting authors, we're holding a flash fiction contest. We're scouring the writing world for the best flash fiction we can find. And we plan to publish the top three entries in the 2009 Transitions issue of Dislocate!

Whoa! Tell me more about the Dislocate Flash Fiction Contest!

$10 per entry. One entry per person. Entry should be under 1,000 words.



Sounds great! 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?

Deadline for contest (and for regular submissions): December 1, 2008.



Can I send you a flash fiction contest entry AND a regular submission?
Why, sure!



What are you looking for, Dislocate?

We want excellent writing that rearranges the world. To dislocate is to put out of order. Change the way we think about creative writing, and change the way we see the world. 



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



What about my regular submission?

Same as above, but without the check.

Simultaneous submissions are accepted; previously published work or e-submissions are not. Please include a SASE for reply; if you would like your manuscript returned, make sure you include adequate postage. We will get back to you within 2-4 months; if you haven't heard from us in 4 months, feel free to query about the status of your manuscript, but please don't before then.

For more information email us at dislocate.magazine@gmail.com.

My goodness at the lag. I am the worst blog editor ever.

The truth is, a few of us here at Dislocate were overwhelmed by minor trifles like finishing our Masters' theses and crapping our literary bloomers at the prospect of being unemployed again at the end of our graduate careers. Some of us were just too busy updating our resumes and and laundering our bloomers to update the blog.

That is going to change, I hope, with the newfound resolve and discipline of the interim blog editor (who bears a curious resemblance to the full-time blog editor) and the fresh talent we've got coming in to staff Dislocate in the fall and put together Dislocate #5.

Meanwhile, Dislocate #4, the ass-kickingest Dislocate yet, is on its way back to the printers and should be hitting shelves soon. And this space will be updated more regularly. Like, anywhere from a week to six months from now.

Minneapolis, Minn. — Your neighbor bursts through your front door, stumbles about the house to wherever you are, and falls to the floor, just a few feet away from your feet. She—yes, she is a she—is short of breath. She is injured. She has been shot in the abdomen. The blow is fatal, and you both know she will die in minutes.

A dog runs in after her and jumps up at your waist, pawing at your mid-section. During your neighbor's last minutes, the two of you take turns petting the dog.

"What's its name?" you ask.
"Just picked it up from the pound," she says. "Doesn't have one."

Your neighbor dies.

The whole scenario is bizarre. No one's overlooking that. The very minute your neighbor returns from the pound with a brand new dog, without even having enough time to lock her car with her remote, someone shoots her in the abdomen, and she dies. But not before stumbling through your door, and collapsing just a few feet away from your feet. Bizarre. But, you know what you must do.

You call the police, the paramedics, her family (in that order), and that night you are interviewed by several local news outlets. You are not a suspect. No one is. Whichever hands were responsible for your neighbor’s death will not be cuffed today (or ever, c’est la vie). Throughout the investigation and the interviews, you are cooperative and appear calm and articulate. Given the circumstances, you are. But for some reason, some inexplicable reason, you never tell anyone about the dog, and no one asks. They assume the dog is your dog and always has been, and you let them. The dog doesn't seem mussed by the discrepancy either. So the dog becomes your dog, as if it always were your dog.

Weeks go by, then months. A year passes.

Finally, one night, with no one around, you confront the one detail left unsettled about your neighbor's death: What do you name the dog?

- Michael Garberich

[Disclosure: a dog named craig is the name of Dislocate intern Michael Garberich's blog, which is his mildly obsessive, occasionally compulsive approach to experiencing the newspaper and other publications.]

It's been a while since our last entry, but everyone here at Dislocate has been busy. We're culling material for Issue #4 and getting ready to send it to the printers ... always an exciting time. And, we just returned from the Association of Writers & Writing Programs annual conference, held in New York City.

This year's conference was supposedly the biggest one yet, and I had no trouble believing it. The sheer number of panels, panelists, and especially journals, writing programs, and publishers present at the bookfair (filling three floors of the midtown Hilton) was staggering. As such, it was hard to digest everything, or make it to every panel that looked interesting, but I tried. I saw a great panel about hybrid forms in nonfiction—a hard concept to explain, so I won't even try—that featured the inimitable Ander Monson delivering a fascinating talk about video games. I browsed the bookfair enough to accumulate a fair amount of publishing envy. And I talked with a host of people from other writing programs and publishing houses.

Overwhelming, yes. But well worth it.

- Jake

As you've no doubt noticed, the Dislocate website is boasting a brand new look. We'd like to thank Carol Lemke and Karen Bencke, the lovely web development people at the U of M's College of Liberal Arts, for all their help getting the new site up.

Take a look around the links on the left. And welcome!

Cara Blue Adams has reviewed Dislocate's second issue for Newpages, an online repository of news and information about literary magazines. Check it out!

We'll be sure to send her Issue #3.

by Holly Vanderhaar

In 1997, Vanity Fair's James Wolcott pejoratively referred to Lee Gutkind as "the Godfather behind creative nonfiction." Though it wasn't Wolcott's intention, his dismissive remark brought Gutkind and the genre to the awareness of countless Vanity Fair readers, and as we all know, there's no such thing as bad publicity.

Gutkind started America's first MFA program in creative nonfiction at the University of Pittsburgh, and is the founder and editor of the literary journal Creative Nonfiction. He has written or edited twelve books, most recently Almost Human: Making Robots Think (2007).

I had the opportunity to work with him last spring at Arizona State University, where he was the Distinguished Writer in Residence at the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing. Thanks to Lee, I came away with a new awareness of the importance of structure, and a new mantra: "The building blocks of creative nonfiction are scenes.�? I recently chatted with him about immersion journalism, MFA programs, and the role of the internet in the genre of creative nonfiction.

(or, "How Long Until Pitchers and Catchers Report?")

by Kevin O'Rourke

Timing is everything. Just when I couldn’t have been more distraught over the end of the 2007 baseball season, and moreover the manner in which it concluded (another sweep?!), my mother gave me a book. Namely Michael Chabon’s highly entertaining and evocative Summerland (Miramax, 2002). His tale of children & baseball & a fantasy world which exists in tandem with our own certainly did its very best to raise my spirits. So what if the book is supposed to be for kids? So was a certain other series about a boy wizard and his adventures. I enjoyed that one too, even if it meant removing the books’ dust jackets whenever reading them on the subway.

But I digress. Full disclosure: I am a huge baseball fan, I participate in a fantasy baseball league, and my idea of a good time tends to involve watching a game and jawing about, say, Rickey Henderson’s lifetime stats. I mean, the man stole 1,406 bases! Number two on the all-time list, Lou Brock, stole 938. Look at it this way: Henderson had 10,961 at-bats during his career, and his OBP (on-base percentage) was .401. That means he got on base about 4,395 times. Which means he stole a base approximately 32% of the time he was on base. This is completely ridiculous.

Dislocate, a literary journal at the University of Minnesota, announces its first Dislocated Poetry Contest: Poems on the theme of Dislocation.

The Winner will receive $500 and publication in the 4th print issue of Dislocate.

All entrants will receive a copy of Dislocate and be considered for publication.

Entry fee: $10
Page Limit: 5 pages
Deadline: January 31, 2008

We welcome both experimental and traditional forms which stretch the boundaries of poetry.

Each contest submission must include an entry fee. Submissions must also include a self-addressed stamped envelope and cover letter with your name, address, phone number, e-mail, and entry title. University of Minnesota, Twin Cities English department students and faculty are ineligible for this contest.

Simultaneous submissions are accepted; previously published work or e-submissions are not.

Manuscripts will not be returned without a SASE and correct postage. Make entry checks payable to Dislocate Magazine.

Send all entries to:

Dislocate—Attn: Dislocated Poetry Contest
Department of English
222 Lind Hall
207 Church Street SE
Minneapolis, MN 55455-0134

*Please note that non-contest submissions for poetry, fiction, and non-fiction do not require an entry fee and are welcome from September 15 - December 15 every year.

Contact us at dislocate.magazine@gmail.com with questions. To view previous issues, visit our website at www.dislocate.org.