Profile of a Literary Journal: dislocate
Dislocate No. 6 the contaminated issue
Spring of 2010
University of Minnesota
This week I’m going to talk about dislocate, a literary journal produced by the MFA students at the University of Minnesota. According to their mission statement, they look for work that breaks conventional form and genre and goes beyond the normal categories that sorts works into separate areas. You could even say that they want work that is dislocated from its source categorization. (I apologize, that was a terrible pun.) Jokes aside, I think it’s important to support work that tests the limits of form and conventional assumptions of genre. This kind of work can have a hard time getting published in mainstream publishing because it refuses to be labelled as one thing or another, which can be hard to pitch to a publishing house, and can be intimidating for publishers as far as marketing goes. And now, I’m going to talk about one of dislocate’s issues to further examine how they choose work and whether or not the pieces do push form and genre.
The particular issue I’m talking about is an older one, but it was the one I had most readily available to me, so we’re going to talk about this one. It’s the Spring 2010 contaminated issue, which has a really interesting premise behind it: the idea behind this issue is including pieces the feature some sort of contamination, or the blending together of unlike ideas or emotions. In the editors’ note at the beginning of the issue, they state that “no individual, and no creative work stands in isolation from the rest of the world, from the elements that hover at the margins.” So the idea is that these pieces deal with people, objects, or ideas that become contaminated with something else. I think this fits well with dislocate’s overall mission to include work that could potentially cross genre, so I really like that they chose to create an issue with this theme because it really lends well to their goal as a literary journal. They also chose to feature pieces from a nonfiction essay contest specifically on this theme. I think this was also a good choice because there are a lot of assumptions about nonfiction as a genre. For example, before being exposed to other writers, I had always assumed that the essay was supposed to be dry and academic, when it is anything but that.
I’d love to go into more detail of the particular works of the journal, but I’d like to let my readers enjoy it for themselves. However, I’ll go over briefly some of the ones I enjoyed the most. There was this lovely short fiction piece by Greg Bachar titled “The Broth Never Varies” that deals with people and apparitions wandering in a cemetery, or a world contaminated by spirits, or perhaps it is a spirit contaminated by flesh? I found a poem by Elizabeth Aoki titled “Perusing an Online Catalog of Hipster Laptop Bags” (which is a great title,) where people are contaminated and become containers. I also enjoyed one of the nonfiction essays by Brian Oliu titled “c:/run iliad.exe” that was featured in the issue. As the title suggests, the piece appears to be contaminated by a computer program that runs information about the Iliad.
All of these pieces, including the ones that I didn’t have time to mention do a beautiful job including the theme of contamination into their pieces. This speaks well not only of the authors of these pieces, but also of the staff responsible for dislocate in picking all of these submissions and putting them all together. And at $10 for a print version, this is an issue definitely worth owning. I think that dislocate is committed to their vision of featuring work that pushes all the boundaries of form, which leads to an exhilarating read that continually surprises and delights at the turn of every page.
Anna Wallace
