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 Sandra Carlson Khalil — “Cloud Seeding” published in Stonecoast Review and “There Were Two Options; We Could All Go, or I Could Leave Them Behind” published in Thirteen Bridges 

 

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

“Cloud Seeding” began in response to Shasta Grant’s March 2024 task on word choice and description. We were asked to look closely at the beautiful story, “Deliver Us,” by Maureen Langloss and use three words that particularly stood out to us to create a new draft. That week, there was also an alternate task. One of the characters in “Deliver Us” is Taylor Swift, so we could also write a story that had a celebrity cameo in it.

I remember that the prompt initially struck a raw chord. At the time, I was so overcome by the ongoing genocide in Palestine, I thought, how can I write about a celebrity in the face of what’s happening right now in the world? But that contradiction, of course, that tension, is exactly what I needed to write about.

“There Were Two Options; We Could All Go, or I Could Leave Them Behind” began in response to Sherrie Flick’s April 2024 writing task, “Writing the Senses: How to Make Them Make Sense.” At the time, I had been thinking a lot about an incident that happened to me the previous spring, when a moose charged towards me while backpacking on a remote island in Lake Superior. I knew there was a story there, but I wasn’t quite sure how to approach it. Sherri’s prompt pushed me to slip back in that moment, to reconnect with what I saw, smelled, and felt during that amazing encounter.

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 have relatively thin skin, so a good old shit sandwich usually works best for me. Tell me what I did well, what I need to work on, then remind me (again) what I did well!

In the past (well before SmokeLong), I’ve received really bad feedback. Like unnecessarily unkind feedback, the kind that made me stop writing for months on end. In retrospect, I’m grateful for that experience. It made me realize how important thoughtful feedback is—and how paralyzing unconstructive feedback can be.

Any kind of noticing is always welcome: places in a story where the tone or pacing shifts, points of confusion, or details that could be expanded or condensed. I love getting specific suggestions, too. For “There Were Two Options; We Could All Go, or I Could Leave Them Behind” in particular, it was a group member’s suggestion to take the first line of my initial draft and make it the title. I don’t think I would’ve thought about that on my own. I would’ve dismissed it as too long, but her suggestion was the nudge I needed to try something new.

To how many places did you send this story? Can you tell us a little about its journey to publication?

I sent “Cloud Seeding” to seven places, but I was really crossing my fingers for Stonecoast Review because they had a theme call for Ethical Storytelling, and I thought this piece might be a good fit. They ended up accepting it first, so I withdrew it from the other publications.

I sent “There Were Two Options; We Could All Go, or I Could Leave Them Behind” out to 14 places. I got four rejections before Thirteen Bridges accepted it.

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

Sometimes a lot of feedback can be overwhelming. I usually make a list of all the comments, then pay special attention to the points that are mentioned by more than one person. Where something doesn’t resonate—or takes me in a direction I didn’t intend for the story—I set it aside. So I guess my advice would be that you don’t have to address every single comment. I’ve done that in the past and my piece became almost unrecognizable to me. It might have been better, but it didn’t say what I had set out to say. When this happens, I know I need to go back to an earlier draft and pick up my revisions process again.

That week back in March drafting “Cloud Seeding,” I remember having the distinct feeling that I was doing the prompt “wrong.” Like I was meant to take my story in a happy direction, I guess because of the celebrity challenge. There is of course no right or wrong way to respond to a prompt, but I was new enough in the workshop (the beginning of my second month) that I hadn’t really gotten that yet. The trick is to notice where the prompt takes you (many times in a very unexpected direction) and to be faithful to that, to trust yourself.

Read “Cloud Seeding” published in Stonecoast Review and “There Were Two Options; We Could All Go, or I Could Leave Them Behind” published in Thirteen Bridges.

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Sandra Carlson Khalil grew up in Minnesota but has called the Middle East her home for over a decade. Her stories have appeared or are forthcoming in The Forge, Flash Frog, and SmokeLong Quarterly, where she was a finalist for the SmokeLong Quarterly Award for Flash Fiction 2024. You can find her work at www.sandracarlsonkhalil.com.