Casie Dodd, founder and publisher of Belle Point Press in Fort Smith, sits at a table inside Chapters on Main Bookstore in Van Buren. Her long dark hair is in a ponytail. Beneath her jacket, you can just make out the logo on her T-shirt. It is from Pearl’s Books in Fayetteville.
Casie’s back is to a wall of novels, and she turns to check out a few titles. She is at home here, or so her body says. She leans back in her chair, forearms resting on the table. It’s as if all the tension of the day has vanished. She is, after all, in the presence of thousands of books.
Words are the thread that runs through Casie’s life, or maybe more accurately, a typewriter ribbon. She grew up in a suburb of Tulsa. Her maternal grandmother was a writer who studied journalism and penned the family’s history. Casie’s mother was a school librarian.
By middle school, Casie considered herself a bookish kid. She was reading a lot and writing poetry. “My grandma really nurtured that interest,” Casie says. “She would get me lots of books about writing and talk to me about writing. And for every family member’s birthday, she would write them a new poem. We collected those.”
Casie spent time meeting authors and going to book signings. As for her own writing, she says, “I was interested in working with language within a structure. And I was interested in formal poetry, probably more than most people are today. I like being part of that longer literary tradition. Being part of the community in that way has always appealed to me.”
When she was a teenager, her uncle introduced her to the stories of the great southern author Flannery O’Connor, a devout Roman Catholic. “I was struck by something I didn’t understand yet. But as I got older, I realized I was being drawn toward something different. I was reading other Catholic authors, like Walker Percy.”
In college at a Baptist school, Casie took a course in the Catholic novel. Her author list grew to include Catholic writer Toni Morrison, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Beloved, Scottish novelist Muriel Spark, and English novelist Graham Greene.
In the year between finishing college and starting grad school, Casie served as a volunteer in Chicago, working at a soup kitchen run by a Franciscan organization. “I was increasingly drawn to the Catholic tradition through that experience,” she says.
When her year was up, she returned to Oklahoma for grad school. “I had a professor who was Catholic, and I’d talk to him because I was still trying to figure things out. He said, ‘There’s a new student who’s coming in that you need to meet. He likes the same things you do.’”
The student’s name was Michael Dodd, and after dating for a couple of years, Casie married him. He was from Sallisaw, Oklahoma, less than twenty-five miles from Fort Smith. But the couple didn’t move there, at least not initially. Instead, they landed in Chicago, where Michael found a job as the production manager for a publishing company. Eventually, they started their family, which now consists of a son named Tom, who’s five years old, and a daughter named Kate, who’s four.
When the COVID-19 pandemic came to call in 2020, Michael was sent home to work, which gave him the chance to prove he could do his job remotely. By then, both he and Casie wanted to move to be closer to family, and they picked Fort Smith as their perfect place.
Michael kept his Chicago job since he could work from anywhere. For a time, Casie, whose work has been published in revered publications like the Oxford American, focused on her own writing. “I tend to write about times that are isolating and lonely,” she says. “Being able to share those with others who are having the same experience, I find that worthwhile.”
Gradually, she realized she’d be happier if she also helped other writers find success. Michael, with experience in the publishing world, knew he and Casie would be a great book-making team.
“I don’t remember exactly when we decided to start Belle Point Press,” Casie says as she adjusts her glasses. “Michael came up with the name, but we never had a formal, sit-down meeting. We both really care about being connected to our local community and being loyal to our roots. Our time in Chicago was valuable but alienating in some ways. It’s not where we’re from. It’s not our people.
“When you become parents, you start to think about your history and how it’s been shaped. Because those values were important to us as people and as a family, it made sense to us to align those kinds of values with the books and writers we wanted to be part of.
“We wanted poets and writers from the mid-South who were really committed to their local places and felt a loyalty to those communities. It seems like in our current culture, there’s a belief that you have to be in a big city to get real culture. My family and my husband’s family have stretched through this whole region for so long. I really value the places here and have been shaped by them. I’ve never doubted that quality writing could exist here in these places.
“From the beginning, we didn’t want writers that were just at the universities. I recognize in literary writing there is a tendency to kind of professionalize it in a way. I didn’t want to only publish MFA poets. We’re interested in finding the people who are authentically connected to this region and see it as valuable.”
In the fall of 2021, Belle Point Press was born. Casie put out a call for submissions in February 2022 for their Mid/South Anthology. When the book came out, it featured forty regional writers, half of whom were from Arkansas. Even Russellville writer Eli Cranor, rising star and author of Ozark Dogs, You Don’t Know Tough, and the new Broiler, had a story in the collection. “There were three Poets Laureates, including Suzanne Underwood Rhodes of Arkansas,” Casie adds.
“Our first event was at Bookish in Fort Smith with Eli, Heather Dobbins, and Christian Anton Gerard. Sara Putman [owner of Bookish] has been good to us from the beginning.”
The anthology took off, and today, Belle Point Press has published thirty-nine books. Already, they have sixteen slated for 2025, and they’re just getting started.
Casie sips her coffee. The hour is growing late, and the sun has gone down. She will leave soon, headed back to her family, to bedtime stories, and then more work on Belle Point Press. When she speaks next, Casie says, “I know a lot of people love books, but it’s always funny when people are surprised at how central they are to my life and my husband’s life.”
She returns to the topic of faith, to the novels by Catholic writers that showed not only theology but examples of divine grace. When she tells the story of her decades-long decision to become a Catholic, it is not an ordinary one. There is no priest involved, no Sunday Mass. No rosary. Just words on a page.
“Long before I had any connection to actual, living Catholic human beings,” Casie says, “I was very connected to the writers and characters in the book.”
Anyone who has found pieces of themselves in a novel understands. Anyone who has felt unmoored before reading a stunning novel and after felt centered knows the magic of the written word.
Now, Casie is at the helm of a press with lofty aspirations. More than anyone, she understands that the right book in the right hands can be a lifeline, a dream come true, or even a subtle lesson in faith.
For more on Belle Point Press, visit bellepointpress.com.
words MARLA CANTRELL // images BLACKRIM CREATIVE, CASIE DODD
