Atlas of the Midwest: A Lit Mag Explores Geographical and Psychological Space

dislocate spring 2013 issue 9: Atlas of the Midwest
Rating: Four Stars

“Because it was Saturday night, because there was nothing better to do, we decided to drive around to see if we could find that old Indian son of a bitch who killed that white woman up in Elgin last winter.” The first paragraph of Valerie Cummning’s “Mayflies” is a treat for fiction fanatics such as myself. The voice—first person blunt, straight to the meat and bones of the conflict, Realist narrative quenches my thirst for distinct voice and style—the narrator’s voice reads like a Midwestern version of Junot Díaz’s alter ego, Yunior. “Mayflies” is one of six fiction pieces published in dislocate spring 2013 issue 9: Atlas of the Midwest. The rest of the fifty-one-page magazine is filled with prose poems and visual art with a variety of thin and exaggerated brush strokes, palette scratches, high-saturated colors, vibrant movements—these paintings are maps, symbols of bodies moving through time and geographical space.
The issue’s theme is portrayed in Bridget Mendel’s cover art—images of the different representations of the twelve states that make up the Midwest, a continuous map that links prehistory with tradition. Submissions to dislocate are not just limited to homegrown Midwesterners; the editors at dislocate welcome fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and visual art from writers whose narratives have some geographical connection to The Heartland. Dislocate was born in 2001 to several graduate students in the MFA Program in English at the University of Minnesota and continues to be an all-student run literary magazine. The cover size is convenient for those of us who like to role up our lit mags, stuffing them in our back pockets, and walking to the local café at noon to become immersed in word play.

Bridget Apfeld’s fiction piece “Venison” is a great example of what the editors at dislocate looked for in this edition. Apfeld frames the story with dead deer reports given to the DNR, but the crux of the story rests within the idea of an unhealthy family unable to break away from addictive behavior—a family whose female members will continue to make the same mistakes until the narrator can walk away from the past. The narrator has just been released from his job at the Peshtigo mill, leaving him no choice but to move back in with his mother. It’s not until the first couple paragraphs that we learn the protagonist’s reason for not wanting to return. The narrator does not murder our eyes with excessive exposition. Instead, he gives us subtle details regarding his sister Laurie’s appearance and gestures: the “fine lines around her eyes and the raw-meat redness of her hands,” or the way the narrator asks, “How is Joe,” without telling us who Joe is. Domestic abuse is apparent, but it isn’t named, only hinted by strong characterization, a brilliant technique that steers the reader’s senses to its max capacity.

It is not surprising that these grad students are able to put together such an aesthetically pleasing journal with professors like Ray Gonzalez—the award winning Mexican-American poet—teaching them about the importance of words and formatting. An astonishing fifteen poems are published inside dislocate, along with sixteen pages of visual content, making the two forms of art the highest demand for the editors of the UMN based magazine.

The Atlas of the Midwest issue offers a great homage to photographer Wing Young Huie, whose artist statement and black and white prints are placed in the center of the magazine in gloss paper. Huie is a self-taught landscape photographer, primarily interested in all cultural aspects of Minnesota life. His self-professed best piece, “Chicago Avenue & Lake Street” taken in 1981, is depicted vertically on page 32 at full-scale. Two diverse cultures and ethnicities come together, and are yet divided by the angled brick building that cuts the image in half. Two elderly Caucasian women in pearl earrings, white gloves, heels, and long rain coats talk to one another on one side, while on the other, a black man with a cigarette in his mouth, hands in his pockets, work boots, jeans, and a hat that has seen better days, stares at the two women. The image was not rehearsed; Huie was merely walking down the street, suddenly intrigued at the sight before him. The black and white image frozen in time, it’s immortal characters staring back at us.

Visiting authors at the University of Minnesota are welcomed to partake in interviews about their work with dislocate editors. The interview section offers great advice to emerging writers. Prose poet Christopher Kennedy, author of four poetry collections and the director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Syracuse University talks about craft in this issue: first person vs. third person point of view, when to really know when your work is finished, what to do with good ideas and how to eventually kill them, syntax, symbols, the list goes on. This is a useful section for unpublished writers on the rise. There’s nothing better than to hear or read about a successful author that encounters craft issues on a daily basis and then to have the author share his or her methods for maneuvering around these obstacles.

The contributors’ bio section is fairly clever and nonthreatening. Instead of incorporating the writer’s full length career bio, making you feel worthless as an amateur writer, brief facts are given about their projects followed by answers to random questions that make the contributors sounds like real, likable people: “Where are you,” or “Where were you at the precise moment that you became a writer?”

Print copies of dislocate are only available to locals. Out of state readers don’t need to pay for subscription; dislocate is available through their website for free—easily accessible for online reads or through PDF downloads. The journal’s Facebook page is not getting enough spotlight as it deserves, with only a little over 250 likes, compared to other literary journals that charge writers ridiculous reading and subscription fees, are jammed packed with typos, misplacement of page numbers, and formatting issues. Dislocate is not too concerned with publishing literal interpretations of their magazine’s theme—the editors crave experimental works where chunks of white space devour stanzas and manikin paintings become the fictional stories that accompany them. 

(This review was originally published in The Review Review:  http://www.thereviewreview.net/reviews/atlas-midwest-lit-mag-explores-geographical-and-psyc)

The Hospital for Bad Poets Review

J.C Hallman levitates and modernizes literary Post-Modernism in his short story collection The Hospital for Bad Poets by dealing with some of the concerns writers in the twentieth century drew attention to. The clearest example of this is seen in “Carlson’s Team” a story whose main protagonist uses cinematic effects as social commentary on the effects television has on relationships. All fourteen short stories deal with the complexities in intrapersonal relationships. The Hospital for Bad Poets contains characters that are ordinary, much like Raymond Carver’s quotidian settings and characters, but Hallman’s characters are not static, each has a yarning for something—they all have secrets and double lives.

In “Carlson’s Team,” the narrator, Carson, who is also the protagonist of the piece, directly addresses the reader by formatting his tale like a TV script. His interaction with his wife, Wendy, is edited to fit the demand of an audience. The couple is either literally or metaphorically in a sitcom—the reality of that idea is blurred by the narrator’s stab at modern day reality TV and fictitious overtone. It is also important to note that the television set is always on when Carson narrates scenes with his wife. Social media takes over the private lives of the common man, a commentary much noted in Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 and Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, two Post-Modernist books that use the television set as a prop to emphasize the new mankind. Scenes that are unscripted in Carlson and Wendy’s day-to-day routine are “cut-off” by transitioning from one scene to the next—a quality seen in reality shows today. In this way, reality becomes fiction based on perceptions society has created in deciphering what makes a relationship work, and in this case, what gets more ratings. Nothing of substance can be spoken between the protagonist and his wife because that would mean they would have to face their marital issues along with their audience, and they can’t take that risk without going against the Post-Modern ideology that language doesn’t mean anything—it doesn’t get anyone anywhere.

Another story in Hallman’s collection that uses a prop to avoid communication is “Autopoiesis for the Common Man.” In the first paragraph, the protagonist/narrator tells us his dilemma; he is dating two nurses at the same time, Joan and Marci. The frame of the story is built around the idea of a non-genuine connection he has with the two nurses—the only thing that links him to them is the talk of microbiology. Characters in this short story are hidden behind science. Instead of having typical dialogue between two characters, the protagonist and Joan or Marci replace normal talk with ideas learned from a fictional book titled The Conjugal Cyst. The piece or rather, the main character, loses the frame of the story when he has to deal with something serious, in this case, keeping a sincere tone when he pleads Marci to come back to him. The frame comes back when Marci can’t tell him that he reminds her of her son. By the end of the story, the protagonist realizes that every time he can’t make a connection with a female character, he must go back to science.

Hallman’s plot twists are mundane but his characters reactions and behaviors to each other are surreal and unexpected. Most of the stories in The Hospital for Bad Poets consists of one-liners in dialogue; one dimensional, but the narrative move the story forward. Mundane characters in “Fire” are made interesting by the circumstances that surround them—a fire that is about to engulf his house in flames. Ned’s marriage to Elise is dry and filled with empty, un-kept promises, but their inability to communicate keeps the reader hopeful and reassured that Ned will one day speak to his wife, even if it’s just about the fire that is approaching their neighborhood. Ned wants to speak to a person of the opposite gender so bad that he calls an incident status hotline not to get an update, but to try to communicate to an entity not his own. Ned asks the woman on the other line where the fire is located at the moment. Then he asks her if there had been any fatalities. The woman becomes hostile. “I live close to it. I was just wondering. I’ve got kids” (159). Ned needs her to stay on the phone in the same way that Mr. Gibbs needs to believe that Tom Royce is making their neighborhood decay with his power to stay sane. The poet in “The Hospital for Bad Poets” needs to be drifted in the poet’s hospital to be able to better communicate his work with the outside world.

Hallman’s stories don’t follow a typical arc with closure at the end, but this doesn’t take away from the brilliance of his pieces. At least his characters try to gain closure in their lives—they don’t simply stay static. These characters progress in his or her own way—the reader can only have hope. 

Review of This Is How You Lose Her by Junot Díaz

This Is How You Lose Her by Junot Díaz, is the ultimate recipe for getting your ass kicked and dumped by your girlfriend. The main character of the short story collection, presumably Díaz’s alter ego, Yunior, who also appeared in Drown, a short story collection written in 1997 and in the author’s only novel, The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, walks the reader through a battlefield of lyrical storytelling about what it’s truly like to be a Dominican man in the United States. The narrative voice so vividly honest, it reads more like a confession than fiction.

The first story in the collection, “The Sun, The Moon, and the Stars,” first published in the New Yorker in 1998, is written from the perspective of Yunior, a young man who cheats on his girlfriend Magda. Of course, Yunior doesn’t tell her about his infidelity, his lover is the one who confesses it to Madga. The relationship continues only because of the main character’s pleading, but the relationship would never be the same. Yunior’s best thinking takes the two on a vacation to Santo Domingo. Instead of basking in the delight of barrio lifestyle with his “abuelo and his campo hands,” Magda, is portrayed as an Americanized Cuban who would rather stay at a resort in the DR than see life as it really is. No matter how much Yunior tries to make this relationship last, the two are too fundamentally different to be together—Yunior is too rooted in his life as a stereotypical machista, a melancholic being who constantly dreams of his real home to be involved with a woman that takes her heritage for granted.

“Otravida, Otravez” is another well-crafted piece in the collection. The author or the protagonist of this piece has flung us into this story en medias res, without any backstory or context—the reader is put an active position of trying to unravel what’s going on. The story has no connection with Yunior and his brother Rafa (aside from the fact that the woman’s lover is Yunior and Rafa’s father, Ramón before the boys moved to the States), yet it is plopped in the middle as if somehow, the woman telling this story is connected to the brothers by simply sharing a country and its many unknown (to the people that have never been to the DR) characteristics. The story also serves to provide the reader with the glimpse of Ramón’s life in a foreign country before he sends for his family.

Like Yunior and Rafa, the protagonist in “Otravida, Otravez” is distant with her lover Ramón, which is remarkable in and of itself because she breaks free from the role Latin America give women—that they crave love and attention from their men. But this woman is not like that—her only desire in life is to survive, to never go back to the Dominican Republic. The protagonist works at St. Peter’s Hospital, doing laundry for patients who stain the sheets with gallons of blood: “I never see the sick; they visit me through the stains and marks they leave on the sheets, the alphabet of the sick and dying” (55). There is great detail surrounding the daily task—sheet stains as the epidemic of the sick and dying—of AIDS, of people dying as this woman only observes, doing nothing, commenting nothing about these daily scenes, she just wants to survive:  “You’d think, given the blood we see, that there’s a great war going on out in the world. Just the one inside of bodies, the new girl says” (55). The dialogue between the two is short and straight to the point—Ramón and the protagonist don’t talk in circles like dialogue is suggested it be written in writing workshops. The narrator treats Ramón as she treats the blood-stained dying patients at the hospital—at arm’s length. Díaz uses minimalistic descriptions to describe an extremely mundane job and converts it into an employment worth seeking and finally obtaining.  

“ ‘Each building has its own laundry room,’ Papi explained” (121) and Mami goes along with it, trying to make the comment, the situation run smoothly across her family’s expression. Like Call Centers in Nicaragua or for Nicaraguans, buildings containing their own laundry room represent success to this Dominican family; to some it might even represent the American Dream.  There is no other, subtler way to say it better than Yunior: “This was our first day in the States” (121) in “Invierno.” These eight words convey so many questions and stories behind each letter that as a reader, it’s better to accept its no-context directness, move on, and swallow hard ‘till the end. The stories jump around out of sequence, because in this piece, Yunior is only about seven years old, compared to the first story of the collection, where we read a narrative by a Yunior who has already completed an undergraduate degree. This is the pivotal moment, where the reader gets to see the influence of a deep-rooted machismo first hand. To Yunior, “a father is a hard thing to compass,” therefore, this story is not about his thoughts about his father’s behavior, but simply an observation. It is important to note that “Invierno” is written in the present about the past in the perspective of a child. No matter how street-smart Yunior and Rafa are intellectually, seven year-old children can’t understand what gender oppression is and can’t possibly understand that their Mami is suffering in her own solitary enclosure. This woman must walk through the snow in a straight line in order to escape into the future, where she will be stuck with two adult men that will be exact replicas of their father; one constructing a formula to lose all the women of his life while the other slowly but surely dies alone.