This series of events is sold out. If you’re a workshop machine, check out SmokeLong Fitness–The Community Workshop of SmokeLong Quarterly, starting September 1.
Did you miss signing up for A SmokeLong Summer? Or maybe you’re doing A SmokeLong Summer but you can’t get enough? SmokeLong is bringing that summer feeling into September with Afterglow, a series of events and asynchronous workshops: three one-week intensives taught by the incomparable, singular, and unique Jasmine Sawers, Gwen E. Kirby, and Elisabeth Ingram Wallace.
Intensive Details:
No more than 15 participants will work in 2 small groups for asynchronous peer review. Participants will receive 5 writing tasks, one each weekday of the workshop. The workshop leader will lead large-group discussion and will be in the small groups to give guidance on drafts during the week. A reading list will be sent prior to the workshop. Participants will have the opportunity to send one draft to the workshop leader for specific feedback at the end of each intensive week.
All workshops are asynchronous. You can participate at the time of day that best fits your schedule. We recommend spending at least 2 hours each day writing and giving feedback to your group-mates.
Price: $420 (Book HERE)
Afterglow Schedule:
September 6-12 — “Fairy Tale in Flash” with Jasmine Sawers. 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.
September 17 — 3pm Pacific Time / 6pm NYC — Reading/Interview/Q&A — Venita Blackburn
This event is free to A SmokeLong Summer participants.
Works by Venita Blackburn have appeared in thenewyorker.com, Harper’s, Ploughshares, McSweeney’s, the Paris Review and others. She received the Prairie Schooner book prize in fiction for her collected stories, Black Jesus and Other Superheroes in 2017. She is founder of the literary nonprofit Live, Write (livewriteworkshop.com), which provides free creative writing workshops for communities of color. Blackburn’s second collection of stories is How to Wrestle a Girl, 2021, finalist for a Lambda Literary Prize. She is an Associate Professor of creative writing at California State University, Fresno.
September 19-25 –“Mining History for Flash(es) of Inspiration” with Gwen E. Kirby. 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.
October 1 — 2pm EST / 7pm London — Expansion in Flash (90-minute Zoom Webinar) — Christopher Allen
This event is free to A SmokeLong Summer participants.
In the flash world we talk about compression a lot, but sometimes in flash more is more. We’ll look at ways to achieve a full and satisfying narrative arc while maintaining the brevity and precision of flash.
October 3-9 — “Writing Black Comedy” with Elisabeth Ingram Wallace
Humour is what happens when we tell the truth more quickly and more directly than people are used to. We are going to write flash fiction that is jangly with honesty, by playing with tightly observed fragments, and taking risks with juxtaposition. We won’t worry about the ‘why’, we’ll write towards energy, and figure everything else out later.
Elisabeth Ingram Wallace is the winner of the Mogford Short Story Prize, Writing the Future, and a Scottish Book Trust ‘New Writers Award.’ Her work has appeared in SmokeLong Quarterly, Atticus Review, Flash Frontier and other journals and anthologies including Best Microfiction 2019. A founding editor of ‘BIFFY’, the Best British and Irish Flash Fiction series, she is currently the Senior Editor for Flash Fiction at TSS Publishing. She has a Creative Writing M.Litt. with Distinction from the University of Glasgow, and was awarded a Dewar Arts Award for Fiction as one of ‘Scotland’s Brightest and Best’.
October 15 –2pm EST / 7pm London — Farewell Party and Open Mic (Zoom)
This event is free to Afterglow participants, A SmokeLong Summer participants and anyone they invite. There will be fireworks*.
*There will be no fireworks.
