Rural Fiction Magazine was established to explore the beauty and drama of rural life around the world. To date, RFM has had readers and contributors from forty-six nations, many of them respected authors, poets, and/or scholars.

I intend for the magazine to have an overall positive feel which I think will be necessary for psychological safety during troubling times. I want to help people have a place of mental and spiritual refuge, a place where they can retreat to simpler, more idyllic times when the stresses of this post-modernist world overwhelm them, yet there will be enough drama and conflict to balance with the beauty and tranquility that the vast majority of readers will be intrigued and will find the material hard to put away.

Funds raised will be used to expand the magazine's outreach worldwide. RFM wants to reach people of every nation, of every culture, of every race. This will entail upgrading our current WordPress plan to the more expensive "Business Plan", expansion through Content Delivery Networks (CDN), developing overseas websites, expanding into social media, and all the other expenses of starting up a business.

RFM accepts submissions of short fiction and poetry on rural life from around the world. Works can be from any genre (though we lean toward literary and mainstream), so long as the work has a connection to rural life or to living in rural communities. RFM would love to see a variety of countries, cultures, ethnicities, peoples, settings, and situations represented to show the universal qualities that bind us together (or divide us) as human. Submission guidelines are on the website.

As someone once said, all stories are ultimately about people, genre is secondary. Submissions can be stories involving hunting, fishing, farming, wildlife, farm animals, camping, small town politics, working in the outdoors, or anything that would interest people in a rural community, but ultimately the stories will be about people.

RFM is publishing one story or poem daily, if possible, depending on the amount of submissions received. The word limit is capped at 7,500. See the Submissions page for details.

Response time may range from a day to a month but will most likely be within a week.

RFM will publish interviews with notable writers and poets soon. This may be sporadic initially and will be by invitation only.

Check in occasionally on RFM's nascent YouTube channel and other social media including Facebook, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Bluesky, Mastodon, and (hopefully soon) Instagram Business.

Phil Slattery

Publisher