Dunes Review fills a literary vacuum
Dunes Review current editor Jennifer Yeatts
By Sarah Bearup-Neal
Sun contributor
The seventh in a year-long series of articles about local art, culture and creativity.
Nature abhors a vacuum. The same can be said for creative writers without an outlet for publishing their work. And that, dear reader, is one way of explaining how The Dunes Review, a local literary journal, came to be.
The first issue of the Dunes Review was published in 1997. Up until that point, there had been no regional publication devoted to publishing creative literature, and to supporting the work of developing and established local writers, said founder Anne-Marie Oomen, a playwright and memoirist.
“You could occasionally get something published in Traverse Magazine,” said Oomen, an Empire resident.
Or, for a short time, local creative writers had an outlet for their work in Small Towner, a periodical founded in the early 1980s by Peter Phinny of Glen Arbor. Phinny also acted as the quarterly’s editor, and published it throughout the 1980s. Small Towner emphasized the arts in many forms: literary fiction and poetry, the visual arts, and interviews with local artists of merit.
“But when the Small Towner ended, that was pretty much it. I’d just come back to the region (in 1996), and was acutely aware that there was this gap,” Oomen said. “We had so many talented people and no place to showcase their work.” So, she created a place.
“It was a time in my life when I could taken on a big project, and there was state funding available,” Oomen said.
The inaugural Dunes Review appeared in Spring 1997. It was 72 recycled-paper pages of poems, essays and creative nonfiction by 38 writers living in or tied to Leelanau, Manistee, and Benzie counties. In all there were 300 submissions to that first journal, juried by seven of Oomen’s writing peers. Although Oomen was the ringleader, she was aided and abetted in this project by a band of many, many volunteers, and through the sponsorship of three institutions: the Glen Arbor Art Association in partnership with the Traverse Area Arts Council, and the Michigan Council for the Arts (MCA) from which came a $2,000 grant. That last financial bit is a notable. In the first issue’s “Editor’s Notes” Oomen wrote, “Dreams aside, none of that [publication of the Dunes Review] can happen without the continued interest of readers and writers. In the face of a changing political climate, the government support which partially funded this project is tenuous at best.”
Oomen’s prognostication came to pass. “The MCA has reorganized and now it’s much harder to get money for projects like Dunes Review,” she said recently. “It’s discouraging.”
The first issues of Dunes Review were $5 a copy. “We placed it in all local bookstores but mostly hand sold it, mostly from readings” and out of the trunk of Oomen’s car, she said. Today, it is available for $25 through annual subscription, and as a benefit of becoming a member of Michigan Writers, a literary organization. Founded in 2001, Michigan Writers exists to “encourage and support writers of all ages, skills levels, and genres in the Great Lakes state by providing opportunities for networking, publication and education.” According to editor Jennifer Yeatts, there are about 450 members. Michigan Writers now publishes Dunes Review in April and October.
The “dunes” of the Review’s title references one of this region’s most iconic and place-defining geologic formations, the Sleeping Bear. “I wanted [the publication] to reflect a connection to the region, so we also considered Moraines Review as a possible title; but we went with Dunes Review because everybody would identify with it,” Oomen said.
Place, place consciousness, and the awareness of placemaking: These were dominant themes in the writing — both creative and reportorial — of the 1990s. “Place” was a topic that allowed writers to celebrate, analyze, revisit, re-imagine the culture of small towns and villages, and the ways in which they were shaped and influenced by natural and human communities. True to the times, the first Dunes Review offers poems noting a “frost-flowered window,” purple thistles and, from Glen Arbor poet Lara Alderman, a “Grasshopper in the Corner of the Room.” In her essay “Writing Me,” Traverse City journalist Loraine Anderson wrote, “Place, a physical place, shapes us and inscribes our scribbling. It inspires us or saddens us or angers us, and it draws the story out.”
Oomen edited Dunes Review for five years, then retired from it. Publication of the journal continued through the work of more volunteers including former Maple City resident Holly Wren Spaulding who passed the editor’s baton on to Yeatts in 2013. Reflecting on the Dunes Review in its 20th year, Yeatts, a Traverse City resident, said, “We fill a niche as a journal with a strong regional, Midwest/Great Lakes identity, with powerful Michigan roots at heart.” Today, there are other Michigan-based small press literary journals including Third Coast, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Passages North, all of which, she said, “are going strong.” The void that spurred Oomen has been filled.
The Dunes Review in 2016 still offers knowing paeans to things and experiences that result from living alertly and consciously in-place: Kirk Westphal’s love letter to a wooden canoe in local waters; and in Christopher Crew’s “Today,” a poetic inventory of fall apples “spooned full of sun” and maple trees turned vermillion “faster than deer can strip the bark.” Not all the subjects written about in the newest issue of Dunes Review are bucolic, however. Just as Yeatts acknowledges the ways technological advances have improved the publication — spiffed up the way the journal is bound, smartened up the cover art, made it easier to publish in general — technology itself becomes the subject of what’s being published. Thus: Alexander Payne Morgan’s poem “Programmers for the End of the World” with its references to Facebook and “smart-phone chats.” Thus: “Everybody Hates Facebook” in which Deborah Bacharach free versifies about the social-est of media: “for silly videos of cute cats, reposted articles I could have read in the New York Times myself if I had a subscription, which I don’t so appreciate being pointed to race riots in Midwestern states …”
A panel of six or so “regular, trusted readers” assist Yeatts in evaluating submissions for each new issue. She is interested in publishing anything that makes her want to re-read it, anything that pulls her back into the story, regardless of genre, Yeatts said.
“We are particularly drawn to pieces that have some echo of our Northern Michigan region,” Yeatts said. “It may be a thin line or thread — maybe there some reference to cherries or a fresh water lake we’re all familiar with — but that’s what we’re drawn to.”
In her “Editor’s Notes,” Anne-Marie Oomen expressed the hope that the first issue of the Dunes Review would lead to another, would provide space for a wide range of regional voices, would “become a document which we can turn to and say, this is who we are, and perhaps a hundred years from now, a young historian will dust off the first issue and say, ‘This is how we sounded then’ … in this place.”
“Place,” at least as a literary subject, has been transmogrified by this odd, arguably surreal Facebookian universe thrust upon us. Yet 20 years down the road, the Dunes Review has not only absorbed the blow, but rolled with it. And yes, Oomen’s original hope for the Dunes Review remains. It is still “[a] witness. Testimony. Voice.” It’s all there, dear reader, still in the Dunes Review’s DNA.
