Juliette Rossant

On the Founding of The Stonefence Review

In 1980, I helped to found The Stonefence Review because I had found no other media for creative writers when I was at Dartmouth. I guess you could say Stonefence was originally "reactionary" — a reaction to the recent founding of the Dartmouth Review, whose conservatism troubled me. My senior year, I was sharing an apartment with Mary Hart, when Peter Heller whom I knew from St. Ann's School in Brooklyn Heights, NY, approached us about the magazine. We spent the first meetings deciding how to run a magazine, judge submissions, and agree on the name.

"Stonefence" to us had several meanings. First, there are no stone "fences", only stone walls; we wanted to shake up the idea of solid, unmovable, and impenetrable stones (or ideas, literature, academics) by combining stone walls with picket fences made of wood, which are open, let you see through them, and let whatever is inside come out, like poetry, prose, illustrations. Second, Robert Frost, who had attended Dartmouth in 1892, had written "Mending Wall," and we wanted to position Stonefence Review as a New England literary magazine, deeply connected to Dartmouth. Last but not least, stone walls and picket fences throughout New Hampshire made a physical connection, acknowledging that the magazine's artwork was to be as integral as poetry and prose.

Although I knew there were many writers at Dartmouth, I was surprised by the volume of submissions which arrived that first year. As I recall, Peter was responsible for funding, while the rest of us ran the magazine. Not too surprisingly, I myself have written for magazines for years since then.

(back to Stonefence Review Vol. XXII No. 1 Fall 2000...)

(more in Juliette's bio for Super Chef...)

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