ARTFUL DODGE: A Pride of Literary Lions

Today marks the debut in the MagSampler.com newsstand of the jauntily named Artful Dodge, a hefty literary journal published from the College of Wooster in Wooster, OH. Founding and current editor Daniel Bourne started Artful Dodge in 1979 in Bloomington, IN. The journal's Web site furnishes this little history: "During the 20-plus years of the journal's existence, we have pretty much lived up to our name, dodging our way along with the help of grants from the Ohio Arts Council and support from the College of Wooster; keeping our head above water and somehow managing to publish work from such writers as Nobel Laureate for Literature Czeslaw Milosz, William S. Burroughs, Charles Simic, Naomi Shihab Nye, Tim Seibles, Stuart Friebert, Elizabeth Bartlett, Ronald Wallace and others. There have also been the Artful Dodge interviews, which Library Review reviewed as 'much more perceptive than most,' with such writers as Jorge Luis Borges, Czeslaw Milosz, W.S. Merwin, Nathalie Sarraute, Gwendolyn Brooks, William Least Heat-Moon, Michael Dorris, Tim O'Brien, Stuart Dybek, William Matthews and Stanislaw Baranczak. We've left the years of xeroxing and stapling journals and have arrived at our present production of one perfect bound, four-color double issue a year, annually receiving more than 3,000 works, and keeping up with a subscription list of 1,100 and growing." I've been looking through combined issue 46-47 here in the newsstand, which features quite a bit of translated poetry as well as new prose and poetry (200 pages in all). I liked one poem by Tess Gallagher titled "Lady Betty" which carries this intro: "Given the death sentence for murder, she saved her life by becoming executioner at Roscommon Jail, Ireland, 1740." I've already started my screenplay; I envision Bill-killer Uma Thurman as Lady Betty, a weary smile on her face and a murderous glint in her eye. A two-year subscription to Artful Dodge (one double issue each year) is $14.00 from the publisher; you can get a sample copy from us for $2.59.