Blog
Hiatus and Inertia
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.
June 4th, 2008A Dog Named Craig
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.] February 28th, 2008Recap: AWP 2008
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
February 2nd, 2008New site design
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!
December 18th, 2007Dislocate reviewed on Newpages.com!
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.
December 13th, 2007An Audience with the Don
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.
November 27th, 2007Tug McGraw’s Leap: Baseball and the Literary Arts
(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.
November 20th, 2007
Interview: Kristy Bowen
by Ryo YamaguchiAll the poets and I here at Dislocate are huge huge fans of Kristy Bowen's latest chapbook, feign, out from New Michigan Press last year, 2006. Okay, I have been trying to find a deft, definitive reason for why I am so enamored of this book, and short of solving any of my own life problems (inability to sleep, lack of rhythm, that reoccurring smell of copper), I have come upon a conclusion: I love these poems for the way they bring an otherwise associative sensibility into a strong sense of scene: how Bowen discovers within and at the corners of her stagings these shadow worlds: or a jar lifted to open the air over the curio: so everything has a pitch toward a silent figure: even has her mind leaps, it finds an accumulating logic: or maybe, just have a look at a few of these lines, from one of my favorites, "Girls Reading Novels:"
Violet is named for lavender equations, the glitter at the end of your spine. Avenues grow contradictory, the length of the chain-link divided by the water's murky circle. Kitchen floors tilt at a seventy degree angle while intricate societies are discovered among the broken dishes. My limbs are symmetrical, polite.
Oh, oh that exquisite tone, the abeyance, until we get the ending:
Some terrible violence in the way I say open.
These are careful poems, even as wild as they are. A measured mental conflagration, hoorah! So, so, the real bit here: this has prompted us to invite Kristy Bowen to kick off our series of:
Awesome Interviews with Awesome Writers
November 8th, 2007Dislocate Poetry Contest
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, 2008We 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.
November 6th, 2007
