The rebooted Dodge is coming! Our new website is live and we intend to open to submissions on October 18. We’re so excited to read your eco-writing and translations!
You can also visit our editor, Katharine Beutner, in person at the Lit Youngstown bookfair on Saturday, 10/8/2021. Buy old print issues! Get an exciting bookmark promoting the reboot!
In Fall 2021, the Artful Dodge will reboot as The Dodge. We are tremendously grateful to our founding editor, Daniel Bourne, for his years of tireless work building this journal, with its thoughtful focus on sense of place and promotion of writing in translation. Since the Artful Dodge’s first publication in Bloomington, Indiana, in 1979, its pages have included work by writers such as Rita Dove, Jeanne Larsen, Tess Gallagher, Czesław Miłosz, William S. Burroughs, Charles Simic, Naomi Shihab Nye, Tim Seibles, Stuart Friebert, Elizabeth Bartlett, and Ronald Wallace. Via searching interviews and thoughtful editing, the magazine has also focused on “translation as a particularly engaged way of reading, a disciplined way of writing,” in Dan’s words. More than anything else, we find inspiration in Dan’s editorial commitment to nurturing writers’ development.
As we look forward, we’re considering what we want to nurture: how to honor the previous incarnation of the Artful Dodge while embracing our current moment. “The dodge” we want to consider now is how to think and live differently, to abandon what harms us all and move toward justice (environmental, racial, social, economic, and beyond). We will have to be quick and clever as we move into the future. Artfully, we will feint, essay, dash, and stumble–try out new ways of seeing ourselves and the nonhuman beings who share our world.
The new Dodge will therefore publish eco-writing, works in translation, and writing about animals. To transform across boundaries is to translate–as Peter Quince tells Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: “Thou art translated!” We are interested in dodging borders, in transnational literatures that recognize the rootedness of story–the “eco”/oikos in “ecofiction,” our dwelling places and our relationships to them.
The Dodge will become a largely online publication, though we look forward to experimenting with special print issues. (We are also so grateful to former managing editor David Wiesenberg for his years of beautiful work designing and printing the Artful Dodge.) The magazine began as a xeroxed and stapled labor of love; now, it will take a new form, accessible to more readers, produced with direct design and publication assistance by Wooster students.
We will open submissions in Fall 2021 with a streamlined online submission process, an expanded masthead, and a new website ready to showcase your work.
Friends and readers of the Artful Dodge:
We’ve been quiet at the Dodge lately for a variety of reasons: our founding editor’s retirement, a resulting change in editorship, the coronavirus pandemic. We have some administrative updates about the Dodge to share with you, which will come at the end of this post, but first we need to speak to this moment by saying: Black Lives Matter.
On May 25, 2020, four Minneapolis police officers murdered a Black man named George Floyd in an act of horrific violence. In the aftermath of his death, his name has become a rallying cry for antiracist movements around the world.
We must remember George Floyd’s name, and the names of others: Ahmaud Arbery, James Scurlock, Tony McDade, David McAtee, Breonna Taylor. We must also recognize that their deaths are part of a heartbreakingly vast history of devastation visited upon Black people in the name of white supremacy.
Millions around the world have taken to the streets to protest and mourn. Some have just woken up to the brutality of racism; many have been working tirelessly for racial justice for years. Together they demand change on all levels of society, in all areas, from emergency response to healthcare to education–not only justice for George Floyd, but true justice and equity for all.
We at the Artful Dodge stand unequivocally opposed to all overt and covert forms of racism. In this time of sorrow and courage, fury and hope, we want to support the voices of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) activists speaking out about the changes our world needs, including the abolition and defunding of institutions that act to preserve racist power. Below, we’ve gathered some resources for readers to learn and take action in support of racial justice.
We are learning and thinking, too, and are dedicated to figuring out how we as editors of a literary magazine based at a small liberal arts college can contribute to antiracist work not just in the publishing industry and academia, but beyond–in our lives that we spend off the page. We will report back in the future with specific actions we plan to undertake.
Once more: Black Lives Matter. So do Black words, Black art, Black passion, Black scholarship, Black innovation and joy.
*
The administrative updates we promised: first, our founding editor, Daniel Bourne, is retiring from his teaching at the College of Wooster, our home institution, and is handing over the reins of editorship he took up in 1979 to his colleague in the English Department, writer Katharine Beutner. Watch our soon-to-be-updated website and social media this summer for a farewell message from Dan.
Due in part to the coronavirus pandemic, we will not be publishing a new issue this summer–but we aim to publish our next issue by the end of 2020, and we anticipate opening a new reading period for submissions in the fall. Updates on this to come as well. Currently, we are working our way through a backlog of submissions. We appreciate your patience and look forward to reading your work again soon.
With hope and determination,
Katharine Beutner & Daniel Bourne
Learn more about the Movement for Black Lives and amplify their demands:
Donate:
https://nymag.com/strategist/article/where-to-donate-for-black-lives-matter.html
Support Black artists, businesses, and bookstores:
https://shoppeblack.us/2020/03/black-owned-online-bookstores1/
https://lithub.com/you-can-order-today-from-these-black-owned-independent-bookstores/
Suggested anti-racist reading:
https://bookshop.org/lists/antiracist-reading-list
Publishing equity:
#PublishingPaidMe, a hashtag and Google doc collecting information on advances and book deals to expose racial disparities in compensation: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Xsx6rKJtafa8f_prlYYD3zRxaXYVDaPXbasvt_iA2vA/edit?usp=sharing
Artful Dodge is a bustling literary crossroads, with contributors of poetry, prose, and artwork reaching from the lakes of South Korea to the Florida panhandle, from western Australia to the farmland of central Ohio. Use this map to travel those roads yourself, covering 10,000 miles in a single click and connecting the disparate strands of imagination. Of course, to attain the work itself, you must travel to our Submittable link to order a copy of AD 54/55 for yourself and your own corner of the globe.
Wooster alum and poet Danny Caine recently appeared on the radio program hosted by David Folkenflik, On Point, discussing his favorite books of the year. He was joined by Amanda Nelson and Clay Smith. You can listen to the program, and learn more about the guests here.
I met Danny when I was still in high school, attending a summer writing workshop at John Carroll University. I was inspired by Danny’s love of writing, and his dedication to helping young writer’s succeed. When I told him I was considering the College of Wooster for college, he was thrilled, and told me that he had conducted a creative senior independent study during his time at Wooster.
With the guidance of Daniel Bourne, Artful Dodge’s founder and editor, Danny completed his senior independent study at the College of Wooster. Today, he is the proud owner of Raven Books, an independent bookstore in Kansas. You can learn more about the great work of his bookstore here.
Danny also has a new book of poems, Continental Breakfast, being released by Mason Jar Press in the coming months. Keep an eye out for his work!
On behalf of everyone at Artful Dodge, congratulations Danny on all of your accomplishments!
-Megan Murphy, Assistant Editor
The Dodge would like to congratulate Katherine Zlabek, who contributed the story “Hunting the Rut” to Dodge 52/53 a few years ago, for winning the 2018 Non/Fiction Collection Prize in January of this year. This annual award presented by an Ohio State University Press publication, the Journal, is not only a cash prize, but the publication of the writer’s collection of short stories and/or essays. Katherine’s story collection, When, is due for publication in fall 2019.
If you are interested in learning more about Katherine and her work, check out her website. There, you’ll be able to see news and a list of some of her other publications.
—Holly Engel, Assistant Editor
