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Submissions PLEASE NOTE: Because of Contrary’s fifth anniversary issue, which will appear in Autumn 2008, current submissions will be considered only for the following issue, Winter 2009. Deadline: Dec. 1. 1. Contrary accepts submissions only through the online form on this page. Your submission must be prepared in one of the following file formats and attached below: • Word (.doc) • portable document (.pdf) • text (.txt) • hypertext (.html) • rich text (.rtf) Please note that we cannot accept .wps or. docx files. 2. Please submit no more than one file per issue, containing no more than three short works. Again, if you submit multiple works, please submit them all in a single document. 3. Please review the following guidelines before submitting your work: Rights – Upon acceptance, Contrary acquires the following rights: 1. exclusive rights for the three-month period that the accepted work appears in the current issue of Contrary magazine, 2. the right to permanent inclusion of the work in Contrary’s electronic archive, and 3. the right to reproduce the work in print and electronic collections of our content. After the current issue expires, the author is free to seek republication elsewhere, but Contrary must be credited upon republication. Contrary rarely considers previously published work. Payment – Contrary pays $20 for each byline that appears in the left navigation bar on the front page of the site, regardless of the length, page count, or nature of the submission. We pay $60 for featured work, which usually begins on the front page and consists of a package of several works along with supplementary materials, such as an interview or profile. Domestic payments are made by check or Paypal. International payments will only be sent through Paypal. Simultaneous submissions – We accept simultaneous submissions. We do ask that you inform us when submissions are simultaneous and that you alert us promptly if the work is accepted elsewhere. Our deadline, response, and publication cycle – Contrary receives submissions throughout the year and produces four issues per year, each timed with a change of seasons. In Spring our deadline is March 1, and the issue appears with the vernal equinox on March 21. Following that seasonal pattern, our deadline for Summer is June 1, Autumn is Sept. 1, Winter is Dec. 1. We respond personally to each submission, but if you don’t hear from us, please feel free to contact us after the next solstice or equinox to check on the status of your submission, and we will respond: chicago at contrarymagazine dot 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 long stories on the belief that they succeed, but we feel more comfortable with 1,500 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 our fiction typically defies traditional story form. A story may bring us to closure, for example, without ever delivering an ending. We expect fiction to be as poetic as any poem. Poetry – We believe poetry is contrary by nature, always defying, always tonguing the tang of novelty. We look especially for plurality of meaning, for dual reverberation of beauty and concern. Contrary’s poetry in particular often mimics the effects of fiction or commentary. We find ourselves enamored of prose poems because they are naturally ambiguous about form – they tug overtly on the forces of narrative – but prose poems remain the minority of all the poetic forms we publish. Please consider that Contrary receives vast amounts of poetry and that we can publish only a very small percentage of that work. Please submit no more than three poems per issue. Commentary – We favor lyrical commentary, often narrative and always poetic. We seek commentary that delivers a message less through exposition and more through art. Our view of the genre is broad. “Commentary” is our word for the stuff that others define negatively as non-fiction, nominally as essay, or naively as truth. Examples from our own pages include “Plum Island” by Andrew Coburn, “Ascension” by Kevin Heath, and “A Spring Sunday” by Heywood Broun. Examples from the world include Annie Dillard on weasels, Barbara Kingsolver on hermit crabs, Nelson Algren on Chicago, James Baldwin on France, EB White saying goodbye to 48th Street. Mailing List — When you submit your work you will be automatically subscribed to the mailing list we use to communicate with our contributors. We use it to call for submissions no more than four times each year. You may unsubscribe at any time or otherwise manage your subscription here. Before you submit, you may be interested in reading this list of suggestions compiled by Contrary copy editor Henriette Shapar: Manuscript Checklist...>http://www.contrarymagazine.com/Contrary/Plum.htmlhttp://www.contrarymagazine.com/Ascension.htmlBroun.htmlhttps://listhost.uchicago.edu/mailman/listinfo/contraryChecklist.htmlChecklist.htmlshapeimage_3_link_0shapeimage_3_link_1shapeimage_3_link_2shapeimage_3_link_3shapeimage_3_link_4shapeimage_3_link_5
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COMMENTARY | POETRY | FICTION | ON THE CONTRARY  
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