Editor Interview: The Dodge

Eco-writing, translations

Ecotone, Orion, Kenyon Review, Milkweed, Restless Books, Norton, Graywolf, Catapult, Conjunctions, Split Rock, Terrain.org, The Fourth River

Some writers we love: Rajiv Mohabir, Belle Boggs, Ruth Ozeki, K-Min Chang, Donika Kelly, Sequioa Nagamatsu, Richard Powers, Barbara Kingsolver, Ross Gay, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Matt Bell, Imbolo Mbue, Diane Cooke, Kim Stanley Robinson, Alison Cobb, Ben Ehrenreich, Atsuro Riley, Kenan Ince, Patricia Lockwood, Rebecca Solnit, Claudia Rankine, Elissa Washuta, Emily St. John Mandel

We're interested in exploring a wide range of eco-writing, writing about animals, and work in translation--we don't have predetermined ideas about what nature/environmental writing should look like. We're always striving for diversity in our editorial team and the works we publish.

Read the work already published on the site and feel free to query us if you're uncertain whether a piece suits our guidelines. (For example, we don't publish straightforward scholarly essays on eco topics, but are open to hybrid work with a scholarly underpinning!)

The ideal submission follows our guidelines and suits our theme, and then offers us a beautifully written new view of something (an animal, an interaction with nature, a human impulse).

We do appreciate content notes (which are encouraged, not required), given that a lot of eco-writing is heavy, and many of our readers are Wooster students.

We don't require cover letters and encourage readers to assess the writing first, even if a submitter includes one, for equity reasons. If there's something important about your background--you're writing about tar sands workers and you once worked in the tar sands, for example--we're glad to know that!

We try to give every submission a solid chance, but as we're all volunteers, we aren't always able to read an entire submission if the beginning is extremely unpromising.

Each piece is read by several readers. If their overall reaction is "yes" or "maybe," the piece is then read by the genre editor and associate editor, who are also free to select pieces with "no" votes from readers if something gets their attention. The genre & associate editor then run pieces they want to accept by the editor-in-chief before contacting writers to accept a piece and offer any edits. While we occasionally accept pieces in need of more thorough revision, we aim to accept writing we would be happy to publish as-is, then work with writers to make it even better.

See previous answer. All our staff and readers are volunteers, so we're working on submissions whenever we can around our jobs as teachers, librarians, communications professionals, etc. Our editor-in-chief also teaches an experiential editing class for students at the College of Wooster every semester. We have a Zoom editorial meeting once a month and are in regular email/Slack contact about submissions and other planning.

As mentioned previously, we aim to accept pieces we feel are generally publication-ready, as we don't see it as our broad editorial role to heavily reshape the author's work. That said, we occasionally accept work we feel excited about but want to offer more substantive edits on, or suggest a resubmission. We always line edit, copyedit, and proofread, and the author approves final edits and is notified when the piece is posted on our site before it's promoted publicly.

We sure do! This is our first year of publication as the rebooted Dodge, so we're still working out our award submission schedule.