Eco—ecological, environment (from the Greek oikos, home)

The Dodge is a literary magazine of writing, translation, and art on place and environment. We invite broad interpretations of our eco-themes and especially seek creative works that imagine a just future for the planet. We welcome writing that contends with the historical roots of the climate crisis—the colonization of people, land, water, and air—and explores inherent relationships between human and nonhuman life. With works in translation, we’re interested in how other cultures, traditions, and languages might influence us to expand and redefine our own perceptions about the environment and the human presence within it. 

Given our focus on environmental justice, we’re eager to champion emerging and marginalized voices underrepresented in magazine publishing and eco-writing, including writers and artists who are Black, Indigenous, people of color, people who are trans, gender-nonconforming, and LGBTQIA+, people with disabilities, women, and others.

Based at the College of Wooster in Ohio, we are under the editorship of Marlo Starr and are generously supported by the College’s Donaldson Fund for Creative Writing. Originally founded in 1979 by Daniel Bourne as The Artful Dodge, the magazine was re-imagined as The Dodge, a journal of eco-writing, by Katharine Beutner. See Our History below for more. 

2021 Reboot Vision Statement: In Fall 2021, the Artful Dodge rebooted 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 ecofiction, 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. 

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Visit the Artful Dodge to see where we came from and rediscover some of our greatest hits—interviews, selected poems, translations, and more.

The following acknowledgment was adapted with kind permission from one authored for use in the wider Ohio region by Shane Creepingbear (Kiowa) in collaboration with Chief Ben Barnes of the Shawnee Tribe based in Miami, Oklahoma, whose people were forcibly removed from Ohio in 1831. Other contributors include Dawn Knickerbocker (Anishinaabe) and support from the Urban Native Collective (UNC) of Cincinnati. 

The Dodge is a literary magazine based in Wooster, Ohio, at the College of Wooster. Please join us as we recognize and acknowledge that the College of Wooster was built on the Indigenous homelands of the good and many people of the Shawnee, Miami, and other Iroquian, Souian, and Algonquian bands. Today we are gathered on the unceded lands of these historic bands and Nations. We ask you to acknowledge these communities, their elders both past and present, as well as future generations. We are obligated to educate each other with accurate information about the history of this land.

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A land acknowledgment is an important path and a first step to dismantling racial and colonized oppression within our spaces. Indigenous Nations have always formally welcomed and acknowledged land territories when hosting visitors and when traveling to neighboring communities. The land is not merely space that bodies occupy; it is a depository of culture, story, history, and tradition, and it is with these traditions in mind that we reflect and center ourselves and our thoughts toward respect.

 Please join us as we acknowledge and honor that the word Ohio comes from the Iroquoian word ohi-yo,’ for “good rivers” and was a place of gathering and ceremony, trade and exchange, food growing, sharing and story, and respect for culture. The Iroquoian-, Siouian-, and the Algonquian-speaking peoples are still here. We can never separate the people from the land–for this land longs for its people. We acknowledge the ancestral homeland of the Shawnee, Miami, Delaware, Potawatomi, Wyandot, Seneca, Chippewa, Ottawa, and Wapakoneta. Over 39 historic Nations and bands call this land home. Today we are gathered on the land that was unceded and stolen. We ask you to acknowledge these communities, their elders both past and present, as well as future generations.

• We are committed to the process of working to dismantle the ongoing legacies of settler colonialism.
• We acknowledge that this place was founded upon exclusions and erasures of Indigenous knowledge about how to care for these lands.
• We are obligated to support and educate each other with accurate information about the true history of this land.

Decolonization means that we will strive to be in service of the water and the rivers and the animals in relational solidarity with them. And as people now on this land we must do what we can to provide nature and wildness with protection and defense.