As part of A SmokeLong Summer, we are offering the following one-week intensive workshops with qualified, experienced workshop leaders. All one-week intensive workshops are limited to 15 participants working in two small peer-review groups. The workshop leader is active in the small groups, providing encouragement and guidance. Each participant may submit one draft at the end of the week for feedback from the workshop leader. These workshops are asynchronous, so you can participate from anywhere in the world at the time of day most convenient for you.
If you have already booked A SmokeLong Summer and you would like to add an intensive week, please send us an email at editor@smokelong.com and we’ll help you book your intensive week at the discounted $95 price.
If you are not participating in A SmokeLong Summer but would like to join one of the intensive weeks below with places remaining, please go HERE.
June 13-19 — “Emotional resonance and restraint” with Sara Lippmann. Sold Out! When is devastation best expressed in the unsaid? A speedball of emotion, or where the outward emotion is all but wrung dry?
Sara Lippmann received a BA from Brown and an MFA from The New School. She has written for national magazines, co-hosted the Sunday Salon, a monthly NYC reading series, and taught creative writing at Rutgers University, St. Joseph’s College and with Ditmas Writing Workshops. Her stories have been published widely in print and online, nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and included in Wigleaf‘s Top 50. A former mentor for Girls Write Now, she received a 2012 Fellowship in Fiction from the New York Foundation for the Arts. Raised outside of Philadelphia, she lives with her husband and children in Brooklyn. Her story collection, Doll Palace (originally published Dock Street Press, and long-listed for the 2015 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award) has just been reissued by 713 Books. Her new collection, JERKS, is forthcoming from Mason Jar Press. Her debut novel, LECH, will be published by Tortoise Books in fall 2022. She currently teaches with Jericho Writers.
June 20-26 –“Mining History for Flash(es) of Inspiration” with Gwen E. Kirby. Sold Out. The past is as vast or as local as we want: Ancient Rome, our childhoods, the diner that used to be where the CVS now stands. In this workshop, we’ll mine the far and recent past for inspiration, experimenting with setting, voice, and limits of what we can know as they give way to the limits of what we can imagine.
Gwen E. Kirby is the author of the debut story collection Shit Cassandra Saw. Her stories appear in One Story, Tin House, Guernica, Mississippi Review, Ninth Letter, Blackbird, The Best Small Fictions, and elsewhere. She has an MFA from Johns Hopkins University and a PhD from the University of Cincinnati and she is currently the Associate Director of Programs and Finance for the Sewanee Writers’ Conference at the University of the South, where she also teaches creative writing.
June 27-July 3 — “Fairy Tale in Flash” with Jasmine Sawers. Sold Out! Folktales, myths, and fairy stories are often the blueprints through which we learn narrative as children—though their content is frequently dark and bloodthirsty. Let’s interrogate their rhetoric, musicality, and cultural insight (and impact) as we harness their sway over our imaginations with original fairy-tale flash of our own.
Jasmine Sawers is a Kundiman fellow and graduate of the MFA program at Indiana University whose fiction appears in such journals as Foglifter, AAWW’s The Margins, SmokeLong Quarterly, and more. Their work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and The Best Small Fictions, and has won the Ploughshares Emerging Writers Contest and the NANO Prize. Their first collection, The Anchored World, is forthcoming from Rose Metal Press this fall. They serve as associate fiction editor for Fairy Tale Review. Originally from Buffalo, Sawers now lives and teaches creative writing outside St. Louis.
July 11-17 — “Less is More: Putting Details to Work in Flash CNF” with Steve Edwards. Sold Out! In flash CNF every word counts–there’s no time for explanations or apologies. In this workshop, we’ll discuss how to select details that not only round out a story but resonate with readers long after they have finished reading.
July 18-24 — “Flash Scavenging” with Dustin M. Hoffman. Three Places Left. Creating art out of nothing can be intimidating. So let’s experiment with preexisting language and subjects and forms. This workshop will inspire you to scavenge, recycle, and borrow to write alchemical flash fiction.
Dustin M. Hoffman is the author of the story collection One-Hundred-Knuckled Fist, winner of the 2015 Prairie Schooner Book Prize. His second collection No Good for Digging and chapbook Secrets of the Wild were published by Word West Press. He painted houses for ten years in Michigan and now teaches creative writing at Winthrop University in South Carolina. His stories have recently appeared in Faultline.
July 25-31 — “The Flash Sequence” with Rion Amilcar Scott. Sold Out!
Sometimes ideas, themes, characters, locations, images, etc. burst from one piece of flash fiction to another until you have a sequence of sub-1,000 word pieces. We’ll look at ways to approach creating discrete pieces of flash that live on their own but combine like Voltron to form a chain, a community, a family of stories.
Rion Amilcar Scott is the author of the story collections The World Doesn’t Require You and Insurrections, which was awarded the 2017 PEN/Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction and the 2017 Hillsdale Award from the Fellowship of Southern Writers. He teaches creative writing at the University of Maryland. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Kenyon Review, Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2020 and Crab Orchard Review, among other publications.
August 1-7 — “Research in Micro-Memoir” with Jennifer A. Howard. Sold Out! Weave the stories of yourself together with your curiosities, your obsessions, even your guilty pleasures – your questions and know-how about science, history, pop culture, sports, etc. – to build dense and powerful micro-memoirs.
Jennifer A. Howard teaches creative writing and edits Passages North at Northern Michigan University, in the snowy Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Her most recent chapbook, published by The Cupboard Pamphlet, is Flat Stanley Reports Back to His Third-Grader, a collection of dispatches about true crime pop culture and other adult weirdnesses from the point of view of a paper-doll kid.
August 8-14 — “One Paragraph Flash” with Krys Malcolm Belc Three Places Left!
One paragraph flashes push the limits of association and compression. Let’s bring together a wide variety of characters, themes, and images and experiment with pressing them alongside each other to stretch the boundaries of the paragraph.
Krys Malcolm Belc is the author of the flash nonfiction chapbook In Transit (The Cupboard Pamphlet) and the forthcoming memoir The Natural Mother of the Child (Counterpoint). His work has appeared in Granta, Black Warrior Review, The Rumpus, and elsewhere and has been anthologized in Best of the Net 2018 and Wigleaf Top 50. Krys has won contests at Redivider and Pigeon Pages and his work has been supported by the Sustainable Arts Foundation. He received his BA from Swarthmore College, his M.Ed in Special Education from Arcadia University, and his MFA in Creative Writing at Northern Michigan University. Krys lives in Philadelphia with his partner and their three young children.
August 15-21 — “Get Uncomfortable: Leaning into Weakness to Explore New Possibilities in Writing” with Amber Sparks. Sold Out! We all tend to avoid certain things in writing: dialogue, setting, description, plot – whatever we feel unsure about, we tend to run hard the other way. But what if leaning into our weakness could create weird, wild, unpredictable, and wonderful art? What if your weakness became a signature move, or a gateway to a new style? That’s what we explore here, with exercises, readings, and brainstorms – we’ll figure out what we’re most afraid of and create a safe space to dig into those fears and find something new.
Amber Sparks is the author of The Unfinished World and Other Stories, and I Do Not Forgive You: Stories and Other Revenges, both from Liveright. Her fiction and essays have appeared in Tin House, Granta, The Cut, The Paris Review, and others.
A SmokeLong Summer 24!