This workshop is now sold out. If you are interested in participating in a future SmokeLong workshop, email us (editors@smokelong.com) and we’ll add you to our workshop mailing list.
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It’s back! We are offering a three-week Flash Intensive Workshop May 31-June 20!
Cost for the three-week Flash Intensive: $240 (Please send an email to editors@smokelong.com for payment details.)
How the workshop works:
The SmokeLong Flash Intensive is a lively and challenging 3-week workshop with writing tasks and prompts every weekday. Large-group discussion takes place in the comments section of the writing tasks. Participants work in small groups of five to give peer critique on story drafts, and the small groups are remixed for each module.
The workshop leader is present in both the large group and the small groups to give encouragement and direction along the way. At the end of each module, each participant may send one draft to the workshop leader for feedback.
This workshop is asynchronous (all in writing) on a website devoted to the workshop.
Workshop Structure:
Module One (May 31-June 6) — “En Medias Res” with Michael Czyzniejewski
One description of flash fiction is a piece that picks up after the story starts and finishes well before the story ends. In this module, we’ll experiment with different entry and exit points, exploring structure, pace, rate of reveal, and how all of these elements can alter your work. We’ll write flash pieces and rewrite them, discovering ideal beginning, ends, and middles.
Module Two (June 7-13) — “No Object Unturned” with Sherrie Flick
We will examine how objects are used to great effect in flash fiction. We’ll (virtually) sort through heaps of objects to see how their exacting placement helps with characterization, setting, plot, and point of view. A single, awesome object can focus your reader succinctly and place them precisely in a scene and in doing so make your compressed world come to life on the page.
Module Three (June 14-20) — “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.
Workshop Leaders:
Michael Czyzniejewski is the author of three collections of stories, Elephants in Our Bedroom (Dzanc Books, 2009), Chicago Stories: 40 Dramatic Fictions (Curbside Splendor, 2012), and I Will Love You For the Rest of My Life: Breakup Stories (Curbside Splendor, 2015). He is an assistant professor at Missouri State University, where he edits Moon City Review and serves as both Literary and Managing Editor for Moon City Press. In 2010, he received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Sherrie Flick is the author of the novel Reconsidering Happiness and two short story collections, Whiskey, Etc. and Thank Your Lucky Stars. Her stories have been performed for Selected Shorts and appear in Ploughshares, New World Writing, and wigleaf, as well as the anthologies Flash Fiction Forward, New Sudden Fiction,and New Micro. She served as series editor for The Best Small Fictions 2018 with guest editor Aimee Bender and is co-editor for Flash Fiction America, forthcoming from Norton in 2022.
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’.
A SmokeLong Summer 24!