Seven of our graduate students in Creative Writing will be reading 7 pm March 1 at Magers & Quinn Bookstore. Poet Jennifer Fossenbell is one. In her middle year of the three-year Creative Writing Program, Fossenbell serves as the co-editor-in-chief (with Nasir Sakandar) of dislocate, the print literary magazine that has been edited, produced, and published by graduate students in the Department of English since 2005. Before she came to Minnesota, Fossenbell taught English as a foreign language in Ukraine and Vietnam and co-edited a literary anthology of international writing, Strange Roots: Views of Hanoi. She's also a member of the poetry promotion collective Our Flow Is Hard, involving four other graduate students, which is working to free readers from the well-manicured garden of poetry. How? Read on . . .Fossenbell received the Gesell Award for Poetry in 2011 and the Michael Dennis Brown Fellowship in 2012. One of our many graduate students already publishing widely, she's placed poems recently with Whole Beast Rag and Short, Fast & Deadly. Her go-to book right now is Julio Cortázar's Cronopios and Famas, translated by Paul Blackburn: "The way he wields nonsense strikes me as dangerous in the best, most essential way."
1. There is suddenly a raft of literary magazines out of the Twin Cities. What is dislocate's niche?
As I see it, the bigger the raft, the more people literature can keep afloat in our community. I think dislocate's strength lies in its being a student-run journal with an ever-changing staff. What could be considered a lack of continuity to me is a rare opportunity for the journal to reshape its borders continuously. There are plenty of readers, myself included, who get bored with journals with too narrow an aesthetic stance, and dislocate by its nature presents a wide range of what's good and interesting that's being written today, with one eye always on the outer edges of form and style. Our readers value that, love not knowing exactly what the next issue might look and feel and sound like.
dislocate has shifted more explicitly toward a regional focus than ever before with our ninth issue, "Atlas of the Midwest," which is interested in the inner and outer spaces unique to this particular point on the globe. We attempt to represent particularly the voices and faces of the cities and the surrounding region, and, unless I'm mistaken, we're still the only local annual literary publication in the Twin Cities available for free in print. For issue 9, we've got an array of works that collectively poke at the uncanny juxtaposition of geography and anatomy, at how and where the map overlaps with the inhabitant, where atlas is both human and landscape. A few of the many great pieces include poems from Ed Bok Lee and Sarah Fox, an incredible short story with the tantalizing title "Venison," and an excerpt from Body Geographic by Barrie Jean Borich, plus an art feature of selected pieces from local photographer Wing Young Huie's "Intersections" exhibit. The issue will be out in mid-April, when we'll be inviting the whole world to celebrate with us and soak up some great readings at our launch party. Watch our facebook page and website for the exact time and date.2. What defines the Our Flow Is Hard poetry collective?
I recently joined up with its founders, Carrie Lorig, Amelia Foster, Feng Sun Chen, Christine Friedlander, and Kristin Fitzsimmons, so I'm new to the Flow fold, but I came to it for the same reasons they started it: to blow up the neatly edged garden of poetry, where we've often gone strolling and admired the hydrangea hedge and dahlia beds with proper reverence. Exquisite flowers can be lost in the hush of such propriety. There are so many of us who want to roll around in the weeds, get stung by nettles, eat the dirt, and put wildflowers up our noses. Poetry and the people who brush up against it deserve to feel real in body, mind, and spirit while they're doing so. To be allowed to laugh, shout, rock, sweat, speak in tongues, have visions, heave, dance, or hurl poetry back, if they want to. I recently read this, from Clarice Lispector, and it sang to me: "A new era, this my own, and it announces me right away. Am I brave enough? For now I am... Freedom? it's my final refuge, I forced myself to freedom and I bear it not like a talent but with heroism: I'm heroically free. And I want the flow." (from Agua Viva, 1973). If I could add some kazoo accompaniment to this quote, it might almost capture what I feel Flow is doing.
The next thing to watch for is a reading in March with the formidable wife-husband poetry duo from Iowa City, Mary Austin Speaker and Chris Martin, featuring Austin Speaker's first collection of poetry, Ceremony, due out this spring from Slope Press. The event will be an incredible experience--part poetry reading, part ceremony in its own right (or rite). This summer we'll be hosting an event with some glamorous folk from beyond the Mississip: Joe Hall, Colin Winette, and Kelin Loe.
3. You co-edited the anthology Strange Roots: Views of Hanoi (Thế Giới Publishers, 2011). How did you come to that role?
I was in Hanoi for a total of about three years, mostly teaching English at first, but taking on freelance writing and editing gigs and becoming more involved in the international literary scene as time went on. I formed the Hanoi Writers' Collective in my first year there, and watched it swell into a vigorous and incredibly diverse community by the time I left. In my last months there before making the move to Minneapolis, two of the members (Andy Engelson and Helen Kang) and I put together a short anthology of selected works by most of the group. One of the members (Suzi Garner) contributed the bulk of the artwork; a friend from outside the collective donated her time to design the book, and the husband of another (Brendan Baylor, who is now doing his printmaking MFA at Iowa) provided more original artwork, including the cover. So the whole thing was very DIY and communal and none of us fully knew what we were doing, but together we figured it out (insert Sesame Street song here). The end result was this gorgeous collection of original prose, poetry and artwork that circles around the joys and complexities of life in Hanoi as a cultural and linguistic outsider. We self-published it through an independent Hanoi press and started selling it in a couple of the local shops with foreign language sections. It's in its second printing now, so it has far exceeded our expectations. We were prepared to consider it nothing more than a personal keepsake for our own communities, but I guess it's something that visitors and expats in Hanoi can relate to. Or people just buy it because it looks so sexy.
4. You write award-winning poetry, but you also just published the wonderful essay-like collage "Doom Regeneration of the Mid-90s Self." What inspired you to write in that way about Gregg Araki's movie and your changing relationship with it?
I first watched the unrated version of Doom Generation (almost universally scorned as the worst kind of B movie) when I was 14 or 15 years old. When I heard Jennifer Knox was curating a series of essays on "chick flix" (to be loosely interpreted) for the blog Delirious Hem, I knew immediately I wanted to write about that movie and how it had sprouted some of my early (and wrong) notions about social norms in terms of sex and gender, about what it means to be a strong, transgressive woman. So I watched it again for the first time in over a decade, and my impressions and responses were so fragmented that I knew I had to write something that reflected that fragmentation. I started stacking up sentences and images: snippets of reviews, both positive and negative; lines of dialogue from the movie; descriptions and images of scenes and deleted scenes; imagined quotes from my younger selves as they encountered the movie; and my own current-day commentary. I guess I'd call it a fragmented lyric collage, or possibly a really long prose poem.
5. What have you valued most thus far about your experience in the MFA program?
Next year will be my last, and I still feel like I have an impossibly long drive to destination Thesis. What I struggle with most are the same things I most value: stimulus and time. I have the gift of time, sometimes it even feels like an abundance of it, but it's never enough. I'm surrounded by books and writers who blow my mind on a daily basis, who inspire me to be smarter, more thoughtful, more reckless. To write more, to read more, to write and read differently than I would have on my own. So much so that it becomes a challenge for me to focus, to reign myself in, and to have discipline in terms of completing the projects I start. Still, the community here is the prize, it's what continues to squeeze me and explode my ideas and my language. I'm looking forward to seeing what comes out of the rubble.
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