SmokeLong Quarterly

Dear Readers,

Here is a letter full of gratitude—gratitude for this issue, which will stun you with its greatness. Gratitude for this web site, which is about three years in the making. Gratitude for all the people who helped make this web site happen, who I will talk about more later. Gratitude to our readers, who continue to support SmokeLong. And gratitude that the long, cold winter seems to be finally drawing to an end, leaving room for new blossoms, new possibilities, new warmth.

Issue 47 is dedicated to Roxane Gay, who is many things, but among those a writer and a true supporter of the arts. Because of Roxane’s generous donation to our web site redesign, we are able to pay our writers for this inaugural issue, something we wish we could do more often. Something we wish we could do all the time.

And you see it, right? Our new web site? Isn’t it great? We are skipping around like little kids, grabbing your hand, encouraging you to take a look around. See how lovely the stories look? Click on the art—see how it opens up so you can take a closer look. We still have all our archives so you can easily find a story or an author. There’s also a nifty search field now for key words, kids. We are living the life!

Oh yeah, there are still bugs or little weird things. You’ll find them. Totally. And the archives? They aren’t all there yet. They will be, I promise, but it might take us a little while to get it all going. We’re old, we’ve been around, it takes us a while to move out of one house and into the other and unpack and get everything arranged the way we want it.

In the meantime, we’ve got Issue 47! It’s so great! It’s got a lot of stories about animals, and we aren’t totally sure how that happened, but it works. We’ve got philosophical parrots and family dogs, deer and rabbits. We’ve got other non-animal related stories too!

My personal favorites this go-around are the three stories written specifically for donors of our Kickstarter campaign. As part of our web site redesign project, we enlisted the help of Matt Bell, Kathy Fish, and Gay Degani to write original flash fiction pieces with our donors as the main characters. So you can read a Kathy Fish story about Randall Brown, a Matt Bell story about Wayne Kumai, and a Gay Degani story about Kristin vanNamen. We hope they all had as much fun writing and ‘posing’ for these pieces as we had reading and publishing them.

In addition, I want to thank Patrick Calder of The Design Foundry, who created the design and the content management system for our new site. He was patient with all our crazy questions and needs, and I am grateful to him for taking on this project. Extra special place-in-heaven thanks to Danny Collier, whose amazing magical database skills have saved us days, weeks (months?), of extra work rebuilding our archives, and whose patience and encouragement pushed me over the very large intimidating hill to get this project completed. Thanks to Dave Clapper, our founder, for placing his trust in me to take over the baby that he brought into this world 12 years ago, a magazine that immediately planted a reputational stake in the ground and continues to showcase the best of both flash fiction and online publishing thanks to his guidance and foresight.

Thank you to our tireless editors, who deal with daily crazy messy emails from me and who have kept our publishing schedule on track while we redesigned. Especially Christopher Allen and Brandon Wicks for spending some quality back-end time with me last week getting the archives we have in tip-top shape. Thanks to Art Taylor, Laura Ellen Scott, and Ken Budd for advice and reactions to early design options.

And of course this web site would not have been possible without all the other Kickstarter contributors that supported our campaign. We cannot thank you enough for your gifts, and we are so excited to share this new site with you because you ARE this site. Below is a list of all our supporters. Thank you thank you thank you!

Best,

Tara Laskowski
Editor
SmokeLong Quarterly

Help Us Redesign SmokeLong Quarterly Campaign

Patrons ($200 or more)

Randall Brown

Roxane Gay

Wayne Kumai

Kristin vanNamen

 

Supporters ($20 gift or more)

Christopher Allen

Jules Archer

Cecilia Baader

April Bradley

Chase Burke

Leesa Cross-Smith

Gay Degani

Stephen Delaney

Carrie Etter

Beth Posniak Fiencke

Christina Filios

Kathy Fish

Harper Follansbee, Jr.

Pat Foran

Melissa Frederick

Whitney Freemesser

TB Gunther

Jimin Han

Jenny Hayes

Ann Hillesland

Anderson Holderness

Emily-Jo Hopson

Matt Iden

Catherine Janonis

M. Kalin-Casey

Elizabeth Kellar

Joshua Kenny

Tricia Killeen

Beth Konkoski

Brett Laney

Alexis Larkin

Hillary Leftwich

Denise Long

Robin Martin, Two Songbirds Press

Aaron McQuiston

Terri Moran

Wendy Oleson

Pamela Painter

Adam Peterson

Daniel Riordan

TJ Rivard

James Roe

Laura Ellen Scott

Debra Lattanzi Shutika

Andrew Stancek

Virgie Townsend

Mercy Tullis-Bukhari

Kevin Watson, Press 53

Emily Webber

Leigh Allison Wilson

Robert Yune

Bonnie ZoBell

Aram Zucker-Scharff