Contrary Magazine e-Zine GUIDELINES POETRY FICTION Contrary pays $20-$60 for published work. Detailed submission guidelines are available through the link titled "On the Contrary" at www.contrarymagazine.com. FICTION We ask our fiction writers to imagine their readers navigating a story with one finger poised over a mouse button. Can your story stay that finger to the end? We have published stories of more than 6,000 words on the belief that they succeeded, but we feel more comfortable with 1,000 words or less. Some people call those short-shorts. We call them concise. We favor fiction that is contrary in any number of ways, but typically our contrary fiction defies traditional story form. A story may, for example, bring us to closure without ever delivering an ending. And we hope for fiction as poetic as any poem. POETRY We look for plurality of meaning, for dual reverberation on the planes of beauty and concern. Poetry is contrary by nature, always defying, always tonguing the tang of novelty. Contrary�s poetry in particular often behaves like fiction or commentary. We find ourselves enamored of prose poems because they are naturally ambiguous about their categorization � they tug overtly on the forces of narrative � but prose poems remain the minority of the all poetic forms we publish. NONFICTION Commentary is our word for the stuff that other people define negatively as non-fiction, nominally as essay, or naively as truth. We�re not interested in expositions on foreign policy or domestic intrigue, although the work we seek could tackle those topics. It�s the author�s approach that matters. The commentary we seek is impossible to find, yet all around us: Annie Dillard on weasels, Barbara Kingsolver on hermit crabs, Nelson Algren on Chicago, James Baldwin on France, EB White saying goodbye to 48th Street. It tends to deliver a message, a message that may be humanistic or political, but it delivers it contrarily, narratively, metaphorically, poetically.