I have so much to tell you. First of all, Happy Pride. SmokeLong is thrilled to announce The SmokeLong Quarterly Trans Writer Fellowship (spring 2026) in cooperation with SAFTA. The deadline to apply for this fellowship/residency is September 1st, 2025. Find out more HERE but read my letter first! It’s short! You can find the other organizations we support HERE, but again read my letter first! It really is tiny.
This year is the fifth installment of The SmokeLong Quarterly Award for Flash Fiction (now an annual competition). As usual, we were astounded by the quality and variety of entries. Congratulations to everyone who made the lists, long and short. These narratives were remarkable and will surely find their homes soon if they didn’t make it into our special competition issue.
We discussed the top twenty-five stories for weeks, and our decision about which stories should grab the top nine places was anything but unanimous. Each of the nine narratives in Issue 88 does something different with the form. At the line level, each is impressive—which is critical since we can’t suggest edits in a competition.
As with general SmokeLong submissions, all entries were read anonymously by our fourteen judges. If a judge recognized the writer, perhaps because the judge had seen the story before as a participant in a workshop or because the world of flash is small, the judge immediately recused themself and the story was assigned to a new judge. If the author’s name appeared on the story document itself, in the filename or Submittable title, the entry was immediately disqualified.
A note about SmokeLong workshops specifically: The senior editors of SmokeLong and I create the writing tasks for our community peer-review workshops, SmokeLong Fitness, A SmokeLong Summer, and The March Micro Marathon, but we do not read or comment on specific drafts generated in these workshops except for occasional Sprint Challenges and the competitions of each workshop. If any SmokeLong editor has given feedback on or recognizes the work from a SmokeLong workshop, the SmokeLong editor must recuse themself from voting in The SmokeLong Quarterly Award for Flash Fiction. When it comes to anonymity and fairness, we’re not fooling around.
And it’s been a difficult competition year with lots of debate. What we’ve ended up with is an eclectic, challenging group of stories—narratives I’ve personally read over and over again. I’m proud to call them SmokeLong stories.
These nine narratives explore personal relationships—as flash very often does—but also the anxiety of our times. Several of these narratives access the raddled, off-kilter feeling many of us have these days. More than anything else, I see nine writers trying to figure it all out, asking all the questions.
We are in the middle of A SmokeLong Summer 25 and are having a high-energy time together. It’s way too late to join us this summer, but no worries. The next date to join SmokeLong Fitness is August 1st (if you book anytime between now and August 1st). We have more than 200 participants at present from all over this world. If you’re passionate about workshopping, we want to write with you.
Finally, thank you to everyone who made this special competition issue possible: the judges chosen from our submissions editors who read the entries with great care, the senior editors who discussed the long-list and shortlist for weeks, the interviewers led by Michael Czyzniejewski, Helen Rye who creates remarkable things, the artists, the cover artist Mia Broecke, and Patrick Calder, our web guy who comes to the rescue when things go awry.
You are all adorable,
Christopher
The core workshop of SmokeLong Fitness is all in writing, so you can take part from anywhere at anytime. We are excited about creating a supportive, consistent and structured environment for flash writers to work on their craft in a community. We are thrilled and proud to say that our workshop participants have won, placed, or been listed in every major flash competition. Community works.