In 2024 SmokeLong hosted our second SmokeLong Workshop Prize competition. Our workshop participants reported almost 300 publications to us before November 1, 2024. In 2025, we’ll be featuring one writer each week from The SmokeLong Workshop Prize long list. It’s an excellent series of interviews, each grappling with questions about workshopping, giving and receiving feedback, and the publication process. If you are a previous or current SmokeLong workshop participant and you have ultimately published something you began in a SmokeLong workshop, remember to enter The SmokeLong Workshop Prize competition. This free-to-enter competition is on our Submittable page.
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An interview with Nora Nadjarian — “Knee-deep” in Unbroken #43
What do you remember about the workshop where you wrote this story? What was the prompt or writing task that led to this story?
It was my first-ever writing task for the SmokeLong Winter Fête (February 2024) and I remember thinking what a fun prompt it was: you had to spin an online ‘wheel-of-fortune’ which would give you the setting for your story, and mine must have been ‘a flooded kitchen’! I loved the idea of having a flooded kitchen as the starting point for a micro.
Peer-review feedback is always full of surprises. In general, what kind of feedback do you find helpful? What kind of feedback do you find less helpful?
Feedback which makes you realise that what you’ve written is working (or isn’t working) is always helpful. I’m not too sure about receiving feedback which is overly complimentary and positive. I would rather someone made me re-read and edit the piece by focusing on specific points, or even made a comment which prompted me to see the story in a different light.
To how many places did you send this story? Can you tell us a little about its journey to publication?
I sent it to three places, and it was rejected by the first two. I didn’t edit or re-write much of it as I didn’t think there was anything too superfluous or jarring in it. The third journal I sent it to was Unbroken (which accepted it) but I would have gone on submitting it as I believed in the micro and its unusual take on the theme of adultery.
What is your advice to someone considering taking part in a peer-review workshop?
My experience of peer-review is very positive. Some readers will be more generous than others with their comments, going into specific detail about what might need editing. Other participants will be brief with their comments, saying whether they enjoyed it or not, whether they were drawn in. Either way, I think it’s always useful to know if what you’ve written makes sense and resonates with the reader or whether some parts of the story are confusing or unclear, and need looking at again.
Read “Knee-deep” in Unbroken #43.
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Nora Nadjarian is a poet and writer from Cyprus. Her work was included in Europa 28 (Comma Press, 2020) and National Flash Fiction Day anthologies (2020 and 2023). Her short fiction was placed in the Reflex Fiction flash competition in 2021. She has been published in various journals, including Sand Journal, FRiGG, Milk Candy Review, Ghost Parachute, Gone Lawn, Fractured Lit and chosen for Wigleaf‘s Top 50 Very Short Fictions of 2022 (selected by Kathy Fish). Her recently published collection of poetry Iktsuarpok is available from Broken Sleep Books. https://www.brokensleepbooks.com/product-page/nora-nadjarian-iktsuarpok
In its third year, The March Micro Marathon will be, as usual, a prompt-a-day whirlwind for 24 days. You’ll exchange drafts of micro fiction, non-fiction, and prose poetry in small groups and gather for a series of online events (all recorded for participants unable to attend live). We’ll finish with 3 competitions, and participants who are not already in SmokeLong Fitness will be invited to workshop with SmokeLong Fitness until the end of April!