SmokeLong Quarterly

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 Pegah Ouji — “In the Name of Those Optimist Iranian Fools” in Split Lip Magazine and “Submerged” in Flash Frog

What do you remember about the workshop where you wrote these stories? What was the prompt or writing task that led to each?

“In the name of those optimist Iranian Fools”: It was a webinar with Sara Lippmann on time in fiction. One of the pieces we read had this wonderful way of braiding facts with a fictional story and I started looking at some facts, about stars and birds and twins, and that was the beginning of the story.

“Submerged”: This story was born during the workshop on elements and water. I remember reading the story by Christopher Allen about the boy in a lake and there is a last image in that story which really touched me, and I wanted to work with the feelings that the image in that story had left in me.

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?

I remember one of the fellow writers from Fitness commenting on the lyrical nature of the language in this piece and how she saw that was a necessity for the narrator to cling to this sense of beauty when everything else that has been beautiful has been stripped away from her and this sense of clinging to the beauty of language by a character was not something I had planned on doing but once she had pointed it out, I could work with that and refine it. At best, peers can help the writer see the story on the page with new eyes and I am always grateful when a fellow writer helps me see the work with new eyes. It’s makes it feel like a collective discovery process, one in which we are all trying to learn to listen better, to see better the places with energy in a piece.

To how many places did you send these stories? Can you tell us a little about their journeys to publication?

“In the name of those optimist Iranian Fools”: I usually send a story to five places at once and wait to hear back before submitting more. This one was the same, but it was accepted by one of the first five places in a magazine I have a lot of admiration for, which was a gift.

“Submerged”: I also sent out this story to five places and one of the five accepted it.

What is your advice to someone considering taking part in a peer-review workshop?

Do it! Perfectionism and isolation I have found to be very unhelpful in a creative endeavor. Somehow being part of a community helps one to rise to new levels of creativity and inspiration. Also learning to celebrate and experience joy at seeing other writers progress means that there whole creative work becomes so much more pleasant.

Read “In the Name of Those Optimist Iranian Fools” in Split Lip Magazine.
Read “Submerged” in Flash Frog.

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Pegah Ouji (@Oujipegah) is an Iranian American writer who writes in Farsi and English. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Joyland, Epiphany, Fugue, Necessary Fiction, Tiny Molecules, Flash Frog, and National Flash Fiction Day, among others. She is currently an Emerging Writer Fellow at Smokelong Quarterly as well as an editorial fellow at Roots, Wounds, Words.