Submissions
CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS!
DISLOCATE #6 & THE CONTAMINATED ESSAY CONTEST
*CONTEST DEADLINE EXTENDED TO DECEMBER 15*
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.
In addition to sending regular submissions, we hope you'll enter this year’s contest, “The Contaminated Essay.” We're looking for essays of 3,000 words or less that are contaminated in form, content, and/or process. The contest fee is $15 per entry and this also buys you a 1-year subscription to dislocate. 1st prize is $400 and publication in dislocate #6.
GUIDELINES FOR REGULAR SUBMISSIONS:
There is no reading fee for regular submissions.
Poetry
Send 3-5 poems (no more than 1 per page).
Fiction
Send up to 6,000 words, double-spaced. Number your pages.
Nonfiction
Send up to 6,000 words, double-spaced. Number your pages.
Everything Else
Have something that doesn’t quite fit into these other categories, but you think it belongs in dislocate? We want to see it! Please, no scholarly articles, research papers, or interviews.
For electronic submissions, (preferred), send your work to the appropriate genre editor:
dislocate.poetry.editor@gmail.com
dislocate.fiction.editor@gmail.com
dislocate.nonfiction.editor@gmail.com
dislocate.everythingelse@gmail.com
Please email one attached document that includes all your work, in .DOC or .RTF format. Include a cover letter (either in your attachment or in the body of your email) with a short bio and the title(s) of your work(s).
If you’re submitting via snail mail, address your work to:
[Genre] Editor, dislocate magazine
Department of English, University of Minnesota
1 Lind Hall
207 Church Street SE
Minneapolis, MN 55455
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 15, 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.
The Judge...
If you needed one more reason to submit to the Contaminated Essay contest, then how about our judge, Lia Purpura?
Lia Purpura is the author of three collections of poems, two collections of essays and one collection of translations. On Looking (essays, Sarabande Books, 2006) was a Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the winner of the Towson University Prize in Literature. King Baby (poems, Alice James Books, 2008) won the Beatrice Hawley Award and was a finalist for the Foreword Magazine Book of the Year Award and the Maine Literary Award. Increase (essays, University of Georgia Press, 2000) won the Associated Writing Programs Award in Creative Nonfiction. Stone Sky Lifting (poems, Ohio State University Press, 2000) won the OSU Press/The Journal Award. The Brighter the Veil (poems, Orchises Press, 1996) won the Towson University Prize in Literature. Poems of Grzegorz Musial: Berliner Tagebuch and Taste of Ash (translations, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press) was published in 1998.
Her recent essays "Glaciology" and "The Lustres" were awarded Pushcart prizes in 2007 and 2009, and other essays were named "Notable Essays" in Best American Essays, 2004, 2005, 2007, 2008 and 2009. Lia Purpura is also the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship (translation, Warsaw, Poland), and a grant from the Maryland State Arts Council.
Her poems and essays appear in Agni Magazine, DoubleTake, Field, The Georgia Review, The Iowa Review, Orion, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Parnassus: Poetry in Review, Ploughshares, Southern Review, and many other magazines.
A graduate of Oberlin College and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she was a Teaching/Writing Fellow in Poetry, Lia Purpura is Writer-in-Residence at Loyola University in Baltimore, MD and teaches in the Rainier Writing Workshop Low-Residency MFA Program. Recent visiting appointments include The Bedell Visiting Writer at the University of Iowa's MFA Program in Nonfiction; Coal Royalty Visiting Professor at the University of Alabama's MFA Program; Reader/Lecturer at the Bennington Writing Program, and Visiting Writer at the Warren and Patricia Benson Forum on Creativity at Eastman Conservatory. She lives in Baltimore, MD with her husband, conductor Jed Gaylin, and their son, Joseph.
Electronic Submissions (preferred): Your subject line should be “The Contaminated Essay.” In the body of the email, include your name, address, phone, email, title of your submission, and word count; a brief bio is optional. Attach your submission in .doc or .rtf format (title it something like “yourname_contaminated.doc”). Your name should NOT appear on the entry itself. Email your entry to dislocate.nonfiction.editor@gmail.com by December 1, 2009. Make your payments online, here, through Paypal; alternately, you may send a check or money order for $15 via snail mail, made out to dislocate with "The Contaminated Essay" in the memo line.
Snail Mail Submissions: Include a cover sheet with your name, address, phone, email, title of your submission, and word count; a brief bio is optional. Your name should NOT appear on the entry itself. Entries must be postmarked by December 1, 2009. Include a check or money order for $15 made out to dislocate with "The Contaminated Essay" in the memo line.
Address your work to:
Contaminated Essay Contest, dislocate magazine
Department of English, University of Minnesota
1 Lind Hall
207 Church Street SE
Minneapolis, MN 55455
For more information, email us at dislocate.magazine@gmail.com.
