American Nerd welcomes submissions. We’re interested in hearing about the unique interests that people obsess over. Fascinated by wolves? Wonderful-tell us why we should be, too. Really good at calculus? Great- tell the masses why it’s important. Know a guy who built a small-scale space shuttle on the roof of his apartment? We’d love it if you interviewed him. Think people should be revering Django Reinhardt instead of Eddie Van Halen? You’re sort of wrong (we should revere them both), but here’s your chance to win some converts.

We like unusual points of view presented engagingly. Being funny helps, but it’s not required and, frankly, not enough, either-bring some insight, pal.

We’re not particularly interested in anything involving US politics, at least nothing along the lines of “Bush sucks, here’s why.” Not that we’re not sympathetic, but isn’t there enough of that on the Internet already? That said, we rule nothing out because, well, you could always bowl us over with some crazy new approach.

We’re open to just about anything, really: nonfiction articles are our primary focus, but we also like fiction and have a healthy respect for (good) poetry. We’re also keen on music, photography, and comics; so if you have any of this and want to send it in, we will take a look.

We’re flexible on length-this is the Internet, after all-but there are two ranges we’re looking for: features of one to two thousand words, and shorter blips in the 500-word range.

Sadly, we can’t pay for work at this point. We’d like to, and one of the main goals of American Nerd is to get to a place where we can pay writers. In the meantime, we offer a we-scratch-your-back, you-scratch-ours deal: you give us quality material that hasn’t been published elsewhere, and we’ll give you exposure (if you live within the Minneapolis metro area, we may also buy you a beer from time to time). And with enough exposure of quality material, maybe we can all make a buck down the line.

Send pitches, completed works, or tips to editor@americannerdmag.com, with “submission“ in the subject line. When submitting completed works, we’d prefer that you paste them as text into the body of the email rather than attach them, as you never know what our spam filters are going to do to an attachment.