How Yolande Published in The Rumpus

“The experience taught me to listen to my gut, and that excellent craft is not enough.

Yolande House reflects on writing and revising her #MeToo essay "What I Remember / What I Don’t Remember," published by The Rumpus, highlighting the resilience in embracing rejection and submitting to venues that align with her work and voice.

Welcome to the latest installment in my ongoing series exploring the real-life experiences of emerging writers as they navigate the literary magazine submission process. —Rachel

---

---

How I Published in The Rumpus

By Yolande House

My essay, “What I Remember / What I Don’t Remember,” got its start in Nicole Breit’s Spark Your Story course when I tried to write a piece about what, at the time, I called my “stupid crushes.” The #MeToo movement had just started that very week, and in my free writing, the source of my self-defeating awkwardness came out: sexual assault.

Nicole’s feedback on my assignment (which I can only call rough sketches at that point) highlighted two areas that could be expanded into essays. The piece that would become “What I Remember” expanded in small moments while I took plenty of long breaks. I also received feedback from Rachel Thompson that helped me finish a full draft. That included a push to expand the role of the friend and explore how that contributed to my subsequent “silly crushes.” I workshopped it in Rachel’s community, Writerly Love, and did a final line edit. Then, two mere weeks after the workshop ended, I submitted it to The Rumpus!

In total, this essay took about two years to write, from initial sketches to submitted draft. I could only work on the piece for so long before my nervous system got overwhelmed. Then I’d have to shut it in a drawer for a few months, so to speak. When I submitted it to The Rumpus, I knew it was too soon but I expected the process to go how most of my submissions to literary journals went: I’d wait many months to hear back only to receive a form rejection. I thought I’d have plenty of time to adjust to the idea of putting something so personal and vulnerable out into the world.

Two weeks later, The Rumpus emailed to say they loved it and wanted to publish it. I hadn’t submitted it anywhere else. I was stunned. I wrote back to say yes and spent the rest of the day feeling numb. I’d never received an acceptance so quickly before.

The next day, I nearly had a panic attack.

My heart galloped, and I could only gulp shallow breaths. I felt like I was on the verge of the panic attacks I’d had intermittently since I was a teenager after leaving my abusive mother’s home. I lay in bed, played a meditation on my phone, and tried to concentrate on lengthening out my breathing and feeling the sensations in my body. As my body began to calm, my mind raced. Why was this happening?

Then I remembered: That day, I had just signed the contract with The Rumpus. It was official. My #MeToo story would soon be on the internet for anyone to read.

I didn’t know when my piece would be published, which didn’t help my anxiety. Now I’ve learned my lesson. When an accepted essay deals with trauma, I always ask when they expect to publish it. For some journals, it’s days. For others, months. I can be flexible, but I need to know the general timeline so I can mentally prepare myself.

In this case, I spent the next two weeks fighting intense anxiety. My muscles were brick-thick, the shallow breaths persisted, and I felt skittish and antsy. It was hard to sleep, hard to concentrate, hard to think about anything other than the worst-case scenario of what could happen after publishing this piece. Finally, the intensity began to ease, and I tried to focus on doing meditation and yoga, going for long walks, and calming myself in the ways I’ve dealt with panic in the past. It took two months to feel “normal” again, nervous-system-wise.

I now understand this was a time of intense processing to help me feel ready for my rape story to go public. In that time, I read and re-read my essay, and cried a lot. The final sentence, especially, flitted through my mind as I went to work or tried to sleep. I began feeling stronger, braver, prouder of what I created and what I’d survived.

Finally, I worked up the nerve to ask the editor when they thought they might publish my piece. I was told they weren’t sure, as it depended on how long it took for my essay to go through the editing process, and then it would depend on where it ended up in their publishing schedule.

I’d received the acceptance in May. It wouldn’t end up getting published until the January of the following year!

As it turned out, I was incredibly grateful that it took so long, especially since the acceptance had been so quick. It gave me time to prepare myself for the next step. I’d submitted the essay before I was truly ready, mentally and emotionally, and the extra time was crucial to allow my mindset to catch up to my craft skills.

I wouldn’t submit a vulnerable piece so quickly again. Yes, being published is great, but my mental health is much more important. I’ve now learned that slowness suits me. It helps me avoid months of my body saying no to something it isn’t ready for.

Why did I submit this essay to The Rumpus? I’d long admired this journal, and I knew it was a “long shot” in that it had a very low acceptance rate. As I revised the essay and expanded it into the piece it would become, I pictured it being published under The Rumpus’ masthead. This was not a visualization exercise—this image came to my mind unbidden. It just felt like the story belonged there. As I continued to revise and polish it, I began to feel certain that it would fit with their ENOUGH series. I told myself that although I was writing this piece for The Rumpus, if they passed, I could always submit it elsewhere, and I had a few backups in mind. I decided not to simultaneously submit since I wanted to give The Rumpus the first shot at it.

This experience helped me learn to better listen to my instincts in the submission process. If an essay “felt right” for a journal (after I read many issues and learned a lot about their editors and sensibilities, of course), I began trusting this. Of course, I never again got a two-week acceptance at a “long shot” journal. But I did change my submission strategy to make greater room for serendipity.

Before submitting to The Rumpus, I’d read the journal extensively but had never submitted before. I was familiar with their ENOUGH column, which focuses on stories of sexual assault. They also have a section on living with addiction, as well general essays, fiction, and poetry spaces.

The Editing Process

The editor I worked with was wonderful. She let me know upon acceptance that there would be some small edits required, which I was fine with. I love having the opportunity to do a final polish of an essay before publication, especially working with a skilled editor who can help me make it better. The acceptance was in May and we did the revisions in the fall. There were a number of small line edits that helped to strengthen the piece. I accepted most but pushed back on some lines she suggested I delete, explaining they were supposed to be poetic, and she let me keep them. One line was, “A shared joint passed around like a ritual, empty beer cans tossed aside like a warning.” There are some other lyrical lines like this throughout, which I really wanted to keep as a running theme.

The biggest edit I remember was the process of anonymizing the people I wrote about. I’ve never gone through this process with an editor before or since. The editor picked out a number of descriptive details about those involved and asked me if they were accurate—and if so, could I please change them for legal reasons. The physical description of the antagonist was changed completely. One of the poetic lines she asked me to cut was based on one of these physical descriptors, but it was too identifiable. It really, really hurt to kill a writing “darling” I’d worked so hard on, but I understood why it was necessary, and so I agreed.

She also asked me about the number of people at the event and whether the remaining details would be too identifiable. I guessed there were at least twenty people present, and we concluded that a brunette and a blond (the details we settled on) should be fairly anonymous in that context. It was fascinating to go through a kind-of “legal read” like this. In my memoir writing I normally change names and identifiable details like jobs, but this experience led me to consider changing even more.

After Publication

By the time the essay was published, eight months after being accepted, I felt ready. I shared it on social media and some writing-themed Facebook groups, and got a lovely reaction from fellow writers. I didn’t share it on Facebook since I have so much family there. I had warned my father before publication that there was a scene in the piece where he might come off in an unflattering light and asked him if he wanted to read that section; he declined but thanked me for letting him know. I’d assured him I wouldn’t be sharing the essay on Facebook or with family, which I’m sure helped.

I didn’t hear much else. My big fear of what might happen if this piece were published (which was never really defined beyond my body going into panic mode) never materialized. I expect the publication credit has helped me in ways I can’t pinpoint and will certainly help as I query agents with book manuscripts.

The biggest thing this publication gave me was confidence. After receiving this acceptance, I withdrew another essay that didn’t feel ready from a different journal. The editors emailed me to apologize for being slow and to say they would have accepted it. But I was glad I withdrew it. After the near panic attack on the day I signed The Rumpus contract, I realigned my submission priorities. My intuition told me that other essay was not ready (for completely different reasons), and I trusted that. That essay still sits in a drawer. My mentor recently took a look at it, and while she agreed the craft was excellent, she validated the issues that had bugged me about it. I’m glad it’s still in a drawer, to be pulled out one day when I write an entire book on the subject and can hire a sensitivity reader early on in the process and properly grapple with the ethical issues involved. The Rumpus experience taught me to listen to my gut, and that excellent craft is not enough.

Journals I’ve submitted to recently: The Sun, The Paris Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Brevity, Kenyon Review, Humber Literary Review

As I said above, since this publication, my submission practice has changed. Before this publication, I submitted widely—one year I reached 150 submissions to journals, and another year it was 100. I don’t do that anymore. In part, it’s because I’ve turned to focusing on book-length projects, and it’s not possible to keep up that submission pace at the same time, at least not for me.

Now, I submit in spurts. Over the last few years, I’ve had one acceptance per year, and I’ve maybe submitted 20-40 pieces to journals each year. When I was submitting widely, I was publishing 2-4 pieces a year. I feel like I’m going for quality over quantity now. Sometimes, I submit nothing for months. More recently, I’ve gotten into the habit of taking one day a month to submit to a handful of places. I’m also loving Chill Subs’ submit parties, which they’ve recently started offering for free in their newsletters, where over a couple of hours I can submit to a few places. If I keep going to these parties weekly, my submissions practices are sure to change again!

Sometimes, I have a piece ready to submit, and I look for journals I think it could be a good fit for. Sometimes I see an upcoming deadline or a submission call that just opened, and one of my essays pops into my mind, and so I submit that. Especially if I can visualize my piece in its pages or it just “feels right” (and I’ve already fully researched the journal, of course), I trust that and submit! If you are newer to journal submissions and want some guidance, the course I took that taught me everything I know is Rachel Thompson’s Lit Mag Love, which I’ve taken twice. I highly recommend it! It’s so practical and will get you started in a big way.

On Rejection

When rejections get me down, I go for “small wins.” Maybe I’ve been submitting to journals that take months to respond, so I also submit (a different piece) to a journal with a quicker turn-around time. I also get writerly validation in other ways, like applying for and sometimes receiving literary grants. That’s a huge boost! To know that a committee of my peers liked my writing enough to fund more of it. I am okay with fewer writerly “wins” in lit mags when I feel accomplished in other areas of my writing life. I also subscribe to the strategy of submitting a piece again when it’s been rejected, ideally on the same day if I’m feeling down about it. Sending my writing out into the world feels like an act of hope. I feel better when I give my piece another chance elsewhere.

A huge thing I learned from Lit Mag Love is how individual editorial tastes are and how rejections reflect timing, fit with the issue, and other subjective things. Usually, in the very last place is your actual writing submission and its quality! Like dating, all you need is one “yes.” It’s about finding the right home for your essay, poem, or story. Keep going, keep trying, and keep revising and polishing. Keep working on your craft, as well as your mindset work. Pivot when something isn’t working, and listen to your gut.

I started submitting to literary journals in a serious way in 2018, and I’ve now published in more than fifteen of them. More importantly, I’m proud of the work I’ve accomplished and the paths it’s led me down, like receiving nine literary grants since I started applying in 2020. These have helped me undergo mentorship, conduct a research project, and complete drafts of two book projects. I’m excited to see where else publishing in lit mags will take me!

Yolande House is a bisexual, disabled writer whose work has appeared in literary magazines such as The Rumpus, Grain, Joyland, PRISM international, and Hippocampus Magazine. Her work has been supported by Access Copyright, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Canada Council for the Arts, and she has attended the Sage Hill Writing Experience. Originally from Fredericton, New Brunswick, Yolande now lives in Treaty 13 territory in Tkaronto. Her latest essay, “Disability Tax,” is forthcoming in The Fiddlehead. You can find her on Instagram (@healthruwriting) or at yolandehouse.com. Currently, Yolande is querying a memoir-in-pieces about being hard of hearing.