The Story

The Dodge is a literary magazine based in Wooster, Ohio, at the College of Wooster. We are under the editorship of Katharine Beutner and are generously supported by the College’s Donaldson Fund for Creative Writing.

The Vision

In Fall 2021, the Artful Dodge rebooted as The Dodge. We began publishing new work in January 2022.

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 is now 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 takes a new form, accessible to more readers, produced with direct design and publication assistance by Wooster students. 

We opened submissions in October 2021 with a streamlined online submission process, an expanded masthead, and a new website ready to showcase your work. 

Does this all sound familiar? Visit our old site to see where we came from and rediscover some of our greatest hits—interviews, selected poems and translations, and more