Who is The Rambling? Sarah Tindal Kareem and Crystal B. Lake co-founded The Rambling in the summer of 2018. Although they’re both “long eighteenth centuryists,” they are also both quite short in real life.
Jacquelyn Ardam is The Rambling’s Social Media Editor.
Bethany Johnsen and Tony Wei Ling are The Rambling’s Managing Editors. We were lucky to have had Samantha Morse and Margueritte Happe on board as previous Managing Editors.
Czarina Divinagracia designed The Rambling’s original website in 2018. Junior Bustamante currently serves as its website designer.
We are grateful for the support provided by the Dean’s Discretionary Fund from UCLA College’s Division of the Humanities.
Why is The Rambling? Sarah and Crystal love the long eighteenth century, but they also love rambling far afield from their academic, um, fields. They started The Rambling in order to give writers a wide space in which they could feel free to ramble, too, and hopefully meet new fellow ramblers along the way. They’ve written more about what “rambling” means to them and why they started The Rambling here.
What does The Rambling publish? We will consider publishing anything: poems, short stories, parodies, lists of all types, reviews, visual experiments, digital projects, you name it, and – of course – essays.
We are especially looking for short essays of around 2,000 words in length, although we are happy to consider shorter as well as longer pieces. We are most interested in publishing work that’s more experimental, public-facing, personal, polemical, or peripatetic than the kind published in traditional or peer-reviewed venues.
Naturally, we really like essays that ramble to, from, through, nearby, or even around the eighteenth century, which we think of as sprawling: long, deep, and wide. But because we think of the eighteenth century as sprawling, we’re happy to consider pitches for work that may not necessarily be about the eighteenth century as well as pitches for work that evokes the eighteenth century as a state of mind or as a style rather than as an historical time period.
In short: you can pitch us anything, and we’ll give it a friendly read.
How do I pitch The Rambling? Email us or fill out this short form. Feel free to send along fully-developed pitches, completed works, or just a few sentences expressing an idea for our consideration. Currently, however, we are looking at a publication timeline of six months, with openings available in our issue scheduled to release in April 2022. We try to respond to pitches within a month of receipt, but if you don’t hear from us, please feel free to reach out again in case your pitch somehow got lost along the way.
Where is The Rambling? It skiphops between Los Angeles, CA and Dayton, OH. The Rambling also gallivants on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. If you find it roaming somewhere else, definitely let us know.
When is The Rambling? Right now, The Rambling plans to release issues quarterly, starting July 2018. But if we have enough submissions and interest, we may release material more frequently in the near future, and if we loiter a little longer than planned, we’ll also adjust course accordingly.