The Imagination Fully Dilated Blog

Below you’ll find the weekly Dilation Exercise. Please look at the picture and read the caption and allow your imagination to go to work on it. If you need a further explanation go to Imagination Workout—What is This?

If it kept coming down, we were sure to drown in it.

Each of us could see what we needed to do individually and as a group to stop it, but few were willing to sacrifice in their personal lives, occupations and politics to make the change.

—Alan M. Clark

Eugene, Oregon

My new fiction collection, Boneyard Babies, will be released as a paperback by Lazy Facist Press, an imprint of Eraserhead Press in November of this year. It will debut at BizarroCon, November 11-14, Edgfield Manor, 2126 S.W. Halsey St., Troutdale, OR 97060.

The image above is an excerpt from the cover artwork I’ve put together for it.

The collection consists of ten collaborations and six solo efforts. It includes stories that are constructed in a more traditional manner as well as ones created through the use of a surreal writing game I call Bone-Grubber’s Gamble. They are surreal and dreadful tales of the oddest sort with characters living and dead, biological and mechanical, superhuman and god-like. It is, I believe, a charming companion for lovers of the bizarre and another small statement for the preservation of the grotesque.

My collaborators include writers Jeremy Robert Johnson, Bruce Holland Rogers and Eric Witchey and visual artists-turned-writers Mark Roland and Jill Bauman.

Here are links to information about BizarroCon and Eraserhead Press.

Alan M. Clark
Eugene, Oregon

Below you’ll find the weekly Dilation Exercise. Please look at the picture and read the caption and allow your imagination to go to work on it. If you need a further explanation go to Imagination Workout—What is This?

She was proud to be part of the perfume ad while it was glamorous and beautiful, but with the decline of the neighborhood the advertising space lost its value and the beautiful people who admired her moved away.

Now that her location provided just enough cover to be a convenient spot for the homeless to urinate, she wanted out.

—Alan M. Clark

Eugene, Oregon

Below you’ll find the weekly Dilation Exercise. Please look at the picture and read the caption and allow your imagination to go to work on it. If you need a further explanation go to Imagination Workout—What is This?

With the fall of the great god Calculus, math, the bedrock of science, crumbled and there was no longer any means of testing our understanding.

Both a blessing and curse, anything was now possible.

Artwork—”The Fall of Calculus” a collaboration between Jill Bauman and Alan M. Clark

Text—Alan M. Clark

Eugene, Oregon

Below you’ll find the weekly Dilation Exercise. Please look at the picture and read the caption and allow your imagination to go to work on it. If you need a further explanation go to Imagination Workout—What is This?

Did he have the courage to save his family?

Knowing he had little time left, he flipped through to the last few pages to get a look at the end.

—Alan M. Clark

Eugene, Oregon

Below you’ll find the weekly Dilation Exercise. Please look at the picture and read the caption and allow your imagination to go to work on it. If you need a further explanation go to Imagination Workout—What is This?

There had been so much shame and failure in his life that he came to disrespect and distrust his own mind.

Did he represent himself honestly to others or were his motivations hidden even from himself?

—Alan M. Clark

Eugene, Oregon

Below you’ll find the weekly Dilation Exercise. Please look at the picture and read the caption and allow your imagination to go to work on it. If you need a further explanation go to Imagination Workout—What is This?

Somehow Hypnozoid had emerged into the real world from 1950’s black and white Science Fiction.

His plot for world domination through mind-control was ultimately thwarted when those assailed by his superior intelligence merely laughed at his dated appearance.

—Alan M. Clark

Eugene, Oregon

Below you’ll find the weekly Dilation Exercise. Please look at the picture and read the caption and allow your imagination to go to work on it. If you need a further explanation go to Imagination Workout—What is This?

It had taken Alister years to train them and now they consistently turned out paintings worth millions.

Too bad no one was buying any of them.

—Alan M. Clark

Eugene, Oregon

Below you’ll find the weekly Dilation Exercise. Please look at the picture and read the caption and allow your imagination to go to work on it. If you need a further explanation go to Imagination Workout—What is This?

I was young and she knew I could not defend myself against her seduction.

Therefore waiting until she entered my chamber to clothe her ghastly remains in tempting flesh was meant to make it all the more horrible.

—Alan M. Clark

Eugene, Oregon

I was trying to create a new Dilation Exercise when an older one involving the painting  “Dexter’s Freezer,” the first in the four panel art and caption set below, combined in my mind with several other images and story lines I was considering to create a short story.

Freezer Burn

Delirious from lack of sleep during the heat-wave, I was cleaning out the freezer, removing the mysterious ice-encrusted packages and ice trays.

Suddenly it was a whole lot bigger in there, so I climbed inside to get a look around and the door shut behind me.

In my state of torpor, I wandered the frozen wastes, fascinated by the strange formations.

Only when I began to shiver from the cold did I begin to believe this was more than a dream.

I tried to return the way I had come, to find the door and get out.

The ice, shifting beneath my frostbitten feet, tangled my path and left me more disoriented, and I knew that if I didn’t find someone to help me I would die here.

She looked a lot older than she was, and when she told me her name I remembered.

“My name is Chicken Pot Pie,” she said, and I awoke with a start, bumping my head on the edge of the freezer and falling to the floor.

—Alan M. Clark

Eugene, Oregon

In order of appearance, the paintings are “Dexter’s Freezer” copyright © 1986 Alan M. Clark, “Shipwreck Formations #3″ copyright © 2009 Alan M. Clark, “Shifting Ice” copyright © 2009 Alan M. Clark, “Locked in the Angel Closet” copyright © 2005 Jill Bauman and Alan M. Clark.