editors speak

Rainbow Rumpus

So many readers were interested when we mentioned RAINBOW RUMPUS in the Inside Markets list, so we decided to learn more about this unusual online market. This month we have the inside scoop from Editor-in-Chief Beth Wallace and Publisher Laura Matanah, and we’re very grateful to them for taking time out of busy schedules to help us know this online magazine and community better.

KMW: The readers of Kid Magazine Writers are professional freelancers, so naturally, their first interest is in getting content into RAINBOW RUMPUS. Some of our readers noted that most of your writers seem to be part of the LGBT community. Do you accept material from "straight" authors as long as the work meets your needs?
BW: Absolutely. The sexual orientation or gender identity of the author is irrelevant to our consideration of the piece. In most cases, we don't know how a writer identifies when they submit to us--most people don't include that information in a query letter or submission, thank goodness! The work has to stand on its own merit.

I haven't calculated the percentages, but I can think off-hand of four fiction writers we've published in the last year who don't identify as GLBT, but are allies of the LGBT community. The percentage is even higher for non-fiction, and at least half of our volunteer staff members don't identify as LGBT. Rainbow Rumpus is for everyone.

I think it might be difficult for someone who has absolutely no experience with the GLBT community to write convincing fiction for our audience, but I'd still encourage them to try. It's one of a writer’s best challenges, to write authentically across cultural or other boundaries. I do a lot of development editing with writers who I think are promising, and some of our best work has come from those writers who aren't afraid to go back, revise, and try again.

When considering submissions, our first test is whether the story meets our submissions guidelines; the second is the quality of the writing. By far the largest number of stories we reject because they don't meet our guidelines, or because they are poorly written. For example, we receive many submissions that don't include children with GLBT parents. Most of the time, those are no-brainers for us. Occasionally, one will be good enough that we ask the author to revise it to change the family structure--but obviously, I'd rather the writer did that before submitting!

KMW: I think it's wonderful that RAINBOW RUMPUS is a paying market -- I know how hard that is with an electronic magazine. What made you decide to take the financial risk?
LM: I wanted to create high-quality children’s literature in which youth had a LGB or T parent. Stories so good that everyone would want to read them, regardless of their parents’ sexual orientation or their own. Stories that would build bridges of understanding between various communities around lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender “issues.” That, to me, meant paying authors and illustrators. Also, my wife is a writer and my mother is a sculptor, so the importance of valuing art, and paying for it, is almost bred into me.

KMW: Could you describe how the type of story or poem a child might read in HIGHLIGHTS or SPIDER would be different when seen through your magazine's vision for its readers?
BW: Our primary concern is to make sure that kids with GLBT parents have the opportunity to read stories about families like theirs. That is really the biggest difference--the family structure of the children in the stories. We're looking for stories that address the same kinds of experiences and dilemmas in children's and young adults' lives that you'd find in any quality children's literature—the birth or adoption of a new sibling, losing a first tooth, finding the bathroom in an unfamiliar restaurant, having more than one best friend, coping with separation or divorce, spending the night at a friend's house, going to school for the first time, having an important person in your life die...I could go on and on. We occasionally publish a story that deals more directly with family structure--for example, with a kid being teased about their family, or a "this is my family and we're okay" kind of story--but this is not our main focus and most stories of this kind get rejected.

We are also beginning to publish serials--easy readers and chapter books in the kids' section, and full young adult novels in the young adult section. Print magazines have space limitations that we don't have, which makes that kind of publishing easier for us.

KMW: Can you tell us the story of how RAINBOW RUMPUS came to be?
LM: We were sitting at the table, sorting mail and paying bills, and my daughter saw this tiny black-and-white photo in a magazine and exclaimed, “Look! Look! It's two moms and twins, just like us!” Sarah, my wife, looked at me across the table and said, “I’ve told you for years we should start a magazine.” I said, “Okay, now I’m listening.”

We live in a neighborhood where there is literally a lesbian-headed family on every block, so it was interesting to me how much that photo meant to Tajah. It showed me the importance to her of seeing her family type represented in the media. I’m a teacher, and I already knew how few books and videos there were that featured LGBT-headed families. I also didn’t like much of what was out there. The existing literature mostly focused on children being teased or just explained their family structure.

When I started to research the market, I found out that there were youth living in homes with same sex parents in 96% of U.S. counties, and most had no access to a community of families like theirs. Reading the words of adults who’d grown up in LGBT-headed homes, I often heard a tremendous sense of isolation. So I thought that if a tiny photo meant that much to Tajah, who has a strong community geographically, it would mean even more to kids who didn’t have any local community of LGBT-headed families. We decided to publish on the web to make our stories accessible to kids in every community.

KMW: What are the greatest challenges you've faced with launching and running this magazine? What are some of the positive things that have come from it?
LM: The initial challenge was that my publishing background is limited, and I didn’t have any experience editing or publishing children’s literature. Luckily Beth came along quickly to fix that! She’s a wonderful editor, and our writers consistently talk about how much she helps them with their work. Finances are, of course, also always a challenge. We’re a non-profit, and just starting to bring in foundation support, but we still rely heavily on individual donors. If any of you know folks who would be excited about our mission and want to donate, please send them to the site!

The positive has been all the great people I get to work with, building the editorial vision with Beth, and, more than anything, the feedback from youth. For example, “I like that I can write stories for [Rainbow Rumpus] and read other people’s stories. I like the dragons too. I especially liked the ‘Baby Maria’ story. It’s nice to hear about people with families like mine… [The hard thing about having LGBT parents can be] people teasing you. Reading about families with two moms or two dads or whatever helps people see that our families do most of the same things that their families do.”- Andie, age 11, MN

BW: One of our biggest challenges in the past year has been keeping on top of our growth. We've gone from a volunteer staff of four to--well, I've lost count, but there are at least fifteen people involved in putting every issue together, not counting writers and illustrators. We've redesigned the site once from the bottom up, and continue to make changes. Every month our site visits increase. We have so many ideas about how the site could grow and provide even more content for kids, youth, and parents. More illustration! Interactive games! More stories and articles! Political forums! A graphic novel for the young adult section! Cartoons and animation! Resources for teachers! Digital picture books where the type and illustrations are animated! (See illustrator Jean Gralley's website, for samples.) More collaborations with artists like Bonnie Fournier! The list is endless, and we get very jazzed about all the possibilities. It's a challenge for us to stay focused on sustaining what we've already created. We pay writers and illustrators, but the rest of us are still all volunteers, and we need to be here for the long run. That means growing in a manageable way, and I hate slowing down! It's easy to be impatient; I want kids to have everything we can imagine for them, right now.

The best thing for me, hands down, is knowing that we're doing such good work for kids and families. This summer Laura and I were introduced at a workshop for GLBT parents, and the presenter described Rainbow Rumpus in response to a question about literature for kids in GLBT families. Sixty parents burst into sustained applause. It brought tears to my eyes. We get submissions from around the world (the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, Spain) and kids writing in to our message boards from all over. That's success in my mind.

The collaboration and working relationship I have with Laura is immensely satisfying to me. Her visionary spirit inspires me. We respect and trust and challenge and support each other; we are true colleagues and friends. That's a great gift. And helping to build an organization from the ground up, working with our amazingly talented and dedicated staff of volunteers--honestly, it doesn't get better.

KMW: Is there anything from your guidelines you wish writers would pay particular interest to?
LM: This isn’t in our guidelines, but we’ve committed to publishing stories about children and teens who have bisexual and transgender parents in 2008. Making a bi or trans parent’s sexual identity clear without having it be the focus of the story has been a challenge for writers, and we’re looking for well written stories that meet this challenge. We’d also like to see more stories that include a character with some type of disability.

BW: Most serious writers follow our guidelines, and I really appreciate that. It makes my job much easier. Submit on-line; don't ask me to return a printed manuscript; format your manuscript appropriately so it's easy for me to evaluate; include all your contact information; be familiar with our audience and the kind of fiction we're looking for. This stuff is pretty basic, but you'd be surprised how many people don't pay attention to it.

KMW: What changes do you dream of for RAINBOW RUMPUS in the future?
BW: Oh, we have a lot of dreams! Probably the biggest is making Rainbow Rumpus into the kind of vibrant online community we think kids and families deserve--creating a space where kids with GLBT parents from around the world can come together, and where their friends, teachers, parents and allies can find community too. We'd like to be publishing work by kids and young adults--writing, illustration, music, video, artwork--and we've been talking about creating a mentoring program for kids who are interested in professional writing and illustration. We'd like to take advantage of the digital medium and have a lot more digital content--animation, games, cartoons, streaming music and video--while keeping the site accessible for our audience, many of whom are still using dial-up. We'd like to have enough quality submissions that we could consider publishing more than one story in each age category per month. We'd like to publish fully-illustrated picture books on the site, and make them available to download. We'd like to partner with print publishers of children's books to get some of the stories we've published into print and available in the trade.

In the long run, we want to have the effect on children's book publishing that Ezra Jack Keats did for stories about African-American children. Wouldn't it be great if, in twenty years, stories about kids with LGBTQ parents were just part of the selection at the library or in the bookstore, if they were on every classroom shelf and read by all kinds of families? I grew up reading The Snowy Day and Whistle for Willie and the rest of Keats' books, because they were relevant to me as a kid. I didn't know how radical they were then, in the 1960s. I just knew they were good stories. If they're well-written and address real childhood experiences, stories and books about kids with LGBT parents are relevant to all kids and families in exactly the same way. They should be everywhere.

This page last updated on 01 January 2008