Kelly McKisson is a PhD candidate in English here at Rice University. Her article, “The Subsident Gulf: Refiguring Climate Change in Jesmyn Ward’s Bois Sauvage,” was published in September 2021 for a special issue of the American Literature journal, which can be found here. In our interview with Kelly, read about her experiences working on and revising her essay towards publication and how it ultimately took about three years for her article to be published. 
Can you give us an overview of what your article is about?
My article, “The Subsident Gulf: Refiguring Climate Change in Jesmyn Ward’s Bois Sauvage,” reads Ward’s novels to show how the literature refigures a dominant understanding of climate change. I argue that in Ward’s fiction it is not the threat of rising sea levels but unstable ground—what I highlight as “subsident” land—that becomes the focus of the Bois Sauvage. ecology. Sea levels are indeed rising; but, as a prevalent feature of climate change discourse, rising seas often frame climate change as an engineering problem, as a problem of levees, walls, and borders. The reorientation to subsident ground can refigure the experience of climate change as one of longer historical changes that have destabilized people and their environments through acts of colonial and extractive violence.
Your article was first a seminar paper written for a graduate class and then workshopped in another course. How was the paper when you first brought it to the workshop course?
The essay was originally a pretty messy seminar paper, in the sense that it contained too many ideas, none of them fully completed. I was fortunate that the instructor of the seminar, Dr. Krista Comer, trusted me with the freedom to take the draft in different directions, to try to work through what I was doing with those ideas, with the final caveat that I think toward focusing on a main argument. And then, before the workshop course began, Dr. Rosemary Hennessy, the instructor, offered students the opportunity to meet one-on-one and discuss our papers. I remember that somewhere in that meeting Dr. Hennessy encouraged me to think about the purpose behind the essay. That is, aside from it being an essay framed by the readings and interests of the original seminar, what was it that I was trying to do, and why was I bringing certain thinkers together with these primary texts to do it?
The essay really benefitted from these conversations and these opportunities to focus and to rethink the paper as an article framed by my own theoretical apparatus and reading process. So, by the first workshop class, the paper was still messy, but I had my core readings of the texts and had started re-envisioning the piece as a coherent, independent thing.
You revised your paper in the Third-Year Writing Workshop, which is a required course for PhD students in Rice’s Department of English. How did the workshop class help in the revision process? Did you learn specific strategies about revising? How was it revising your paper in a collaborative classroom environment?
It really took the time, space, and conversation of the workshop class to get both me and the essay on track to publication. Definitely, demarcating worktime just for that one essay was helpful toward staying focused and productive on it. But I think that the really important next step for this essay was the workshop requirement to show it to others. Listening to a group of other people think carefully about my writing was immensely beneficial—their conversation about the piece pointed to what was not yet clear, either in the close readings, in the theoretical frame, or in the argument. For me, it was specifically helpful to hear readers identify how ideas were not yet hierarchized and to begin to hear which pieces of the analysis could be subordinated or edited out. I’m fortunate that my colleagues are skilled and generous readers—not only did their feedback strengthen the piece, but their responses gave me the courage and confidence to believe in the essay as something that other people might want to read. And an editing tip that will forever live in my head, which has undoubtedly made my writing stronger: Dr. Hennessy’s notes to replace instances of “This” with the referent, or to at least specify what “This” is.
What was the process to get your article published? How long did it take and what challenges did you face during the publication process?
Feedback from the workshop gave me the courage to move forward on publication, and especially to aim high. Dr. Hennessy encouraged me to look at the American Literature journal’s call for an environmentally focused special issue. I don’t remember whose advice it was to pay attention to CFPs for special issues, which can be really friendly to junior scholars, but in the end, this is where I decided to send the essay. Another way that the special issue call was helpful was that there was a deadline—this meant that at some point, I had to stop tinkering and just submit!
American Literature goes through an online platform, Editorial Manager, which I found slightly less intimidating to navigate than sending work to a person’s email address. Having worked for a few years’ at SEL: Studies in English Literature, I knew that there would actually be real people at the other end of the managing platform, and I knew to use the platform’s not-completely-intuitive text boxes to communicate with them, for example, with editors about how I had addressed the readers’ feedback.
I can say that in my experience with American Literature, the publication process was overwhelmingly friendly and supportive. It was also true of my experience that the essay continued to change as I attended to readers’ comments and revised it for the focus of the special issue. I submitted the article in February 2020, right before and as COVID-19 was disrupting much of the country. I received a response, via an email through the submission system, with reviewer comments, in the end of June 2020. The response asked me to revise the essay, attending to reviewer comments, by early August 2020 for “serious” consideration for inclusion in the journal—which I took as a good sign. The reviewers’ feedback, as well as comments from the editors, were overwhelmingly positive, generous, and aimed toward strengthening the essay: some suggested changes that took quite a bit of time to rework, while others asked that I clarify a term or make a connection to a related concept. I think it was initially a challenge for me to really let go of some ideas I had about how the article should flow in order to fully attend to the readers’ comments and make some substantial revisions—cutting whole sections, adding extra textual readings, and reframing the opening pages.
I revised the essay and then resubmitted at the beginning of August 2020. Near the end of September 2020, I received a response that the essay was accepted for publication. At this time, I was asked to revise mostly for editorial concerns (double-check quotations for accuracy, make sure the citations were appropriately formatted). I resubmitted in November 2020, and then at the
end of January 2021, I was asked to fill out a publication agreement and anticipate copyedits—this is when I started communicating via email with individuals in the editorial office, rather than through the editorial platform. March 2021 I received an email from the managing editor with copyedits attached, and I was asked to return changes within a week. At the end of June 2021, I received first page proofs of the article—that marks a year from first reviewers comments to first pages. It ended up being just under a year from official acceptance to final publication, over a year and half from submission to publication. It felt quite slow in the pipeline, but under the circumstances, I can imagine everyone worked immensely hard to keep the special issue moving along. And I know that everyone’s comments along the way changed and improved my essay. Page proofs was my last chance to make any changes to the essay, and it was also when I received the confirmation of the publication month of the issue. The next and final email I received alerted me to the publication of the essay, in September 2021, when I received author access links to share.
You worked on your article for a long time and now its merit has been officially recognized and sanctioned by our broader scholarly community. What does it feel like to see your writing published and out there in the world?
This is the first piece of writing that I’ve published in a peer-reviewed anything, and I think it’s both a satisfying and a frightening feeling. It is gratifying to see evidence of so much time spent typing into the void of a word document. It does come with a sense of accomplishment, which can be a long-time-coming in academia. It is also scary to think that the piece won’t receive further revision, that it will live on in this form forever. Ultimately, though, I am pleased that the work of so many people who have supported and shaped this essay has been rewarded with a published product.
Do you have any advice for students on trying to get published?
Find colleagues and advisors who you trust, and really listen to them. Workshop conversation about my work was invaluable. Listen to your advisors when they say the essay is ready to send out for publication, and then find or set a deadline and actually send it out. Know that the context of the journal/issue will shape the final product, and that serious revision can continue on into the publishing process: you’re likely sending just another draft to the editors, who will ask you to perform some serious revision work before the essay is published as an article. Believe in yourself and your community here at Rice.