SmokeLong Quarterly

The registration period for The Smokey Winter Fête has passed. If you’ve signed up for this series of events including 2 months of SmokeLong Fitness, you’ve received your invitation to join the workshop site. Please check your emails (also spam). If you do not see your invitation, please send us and email: editor@smokelong.com

To celebrate The SmokeLong Quarterly Award for Flash Fiction–in its fourth year!–we are having a party–from February 2 to March 30! Two months of fun, generative community activities. The Smokey Winter Fête will be similar to A SmokeLong Summer but colder (depending on your hemisphere; looking at you, Oceania). If you are already a member of SmokeLong Fitness or you’ve signed up for Try SmokeLong Fitness during February or March, the core festivities of The SmokeLong Winter Fête are included; the add-on events will be available through the workshop site at a discount to SmokeLong Fitness members!

You can pick and choose how you want to participate, but when you book The Smokey Winter Fête through the shop, here’s what you get:

— Two months of SmokeLong Fitness beginning February 1 — A $55 value!
— Participation in peer-review small groups (optional)
— One webinar each month (choose 2 from 4 below or HERE)
— Panel discussions, readings, and open mics during February and March.
— Up to 4 entries in The SmokeLong Quarterly Award for Flash Fiction (The Smokey) — A $32 value! (For participants who book The Smokey Winter Fête through the shop.)

The March Micro Marathon. You can add on this event when you book The Smokey Winter Fête in the shop. The March Micro Marathon is similar to other prompt-a-day happenings but with peer-review workshopping and three competitions at the end with cash prizes. Fun! Possibly lucrative. Read more about The March Micro Marathon HERE. When you add on The March Micro Marathon, all 4 webinars in The Smokey Winter Fête are included.

 

Order of Events

February

February 2 — 7pm NYC (online) — Opening Fête — A Party and Reading featuring the past winners of The SmokeLong Quarterly Award for Flash Fiction (The Smokey)
February 3 — Noon NYC (online) — Webinar — “Looking back to move forward: Using what makes us to make anew” with Sara Lippmann
February 10 — Noon NYC (online) — Checking in with AWP and Open Mic
February 17 — 11am NYC (online) — Reading — The SmokeLong Workshop Prize Top 10
February 24 — 2pm NYC (online) — Webinar — “The Moment of Being: Why Write Flash?” with Christopher Allen

March

March 1-24 — The March Micro Marathon — Draft and workshop a micro each day to prompts developed by the senior editors of SmokeLong. You’ll work in small groups to exchange first drafts of micros up to 400 words in a generative, positive atmosphere. At the end of March, you’ll have the opportunity to enter three free-to-enter competitions for work up to 100 words, up to 250 words, and up to 400 words. And there will be cash prizes. (add on to The Smokey Winter Fête for $49–This option is no longer possible.)

March 2 — Noon NYC (online) — Webinar — “The 100-Word Story” with Grant Faulkner
March 9 — 11am NYC (online) — Webinar — “The Killer Micro” with Emily Devane.
March 16 — 8pm NYC (online) — Open Mic — Come celebrate new voices!
March 23 — 10am NYC (online) — SmokeLong Editors Read!
March 30 — Winners of The March Micro Marathon announced!

The Webinar Details:

 

February 3. Noon NYC (online). Looking back to move forward: Using what makes us to make anew with Sara Lippmann

Soren Kierkegaard wrote, “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” In this webinar, we’ll  look at flash fiction pieces that incorporate history, inherited trauma, lived experience, retrospection, and the weaving of past and present. We’ll explore some of the challenges of backstory in flash, and try out ways to capture the fluidity of time and depth of character within the confines of the flash narrative.

SARA LIPPMANN is the author of the novel Lech and the story collections Doll Palace and Jerks. Her fiction has been honored by the New York Foundation for the Arts, and her essays have appeared in The Millions, The Washington Post, Catapult, The Lit Hub and elsewhere. With Seth Rogoff, she is co-editor of the anthology Smashing the Tablets: Radical Retellings of the Hebrew Bible forthcoming from SUNY Press. She is a founding member of the Writing Co-Lab, a teaching cooperative, and lives with her family in Brooklyn.

February 24. 2pm NYC (online). “The Moment of Being — Why Write Flash?” with Christopher Allen

Virginia Woolf’s obsession with her sketches and her “moments of being” is arguably the moment when the Anglo literary world went micro. Victorian literature tended to be macro: tomes of often long-winded prose (though Middlemarch is actually hilarious at times). Were Woolf’s obsessions a response to this? In this webinar we’ll look at why homing in on The Moment is at the heart of flash as we dive deep into how flash writers draft.

Christopher Allen is the author of the flash fiction collection Other Household Toxins (Matter Press, 2018). His work has appeared in The Best Small Fictions (twice) and Flash Fiction America (Norton) as well as in over 100 journals and anthologies. Allen has judged The Bath Flash Fiction Award, Micro Madness, the Cambridge Flash Fiction Award, and the Bridport Prize. He has a BA in music business from Belmont University and an MA in English from Middle Tennessee State University. Allen, a nomad, is the editor-in-chief and publisher of SmokeLong Quarterly.

March 2. Noon NYC (online). “The Art of 100-Word Stories” with Grant Faulkner
In a 100-word story, the whole is a part and the part is a whole. The form forces the writer to question each word, to reckon with Flaubert’s mot juste, and move a story by hints and implications. 100-word stories are built through gaps as much as the connective tissue of words, so what’s left out of a story is often more important than what’s included. A single sentence can serve the function that a paragraph or even a chapter might in a longer work.

In this workshop, Grant Faulkner will discuss how a different type of creativity emerges within a hard compositional limit, and how writing a story in precisely 100 words teaches a writer the fundamental craft elements of all good flash fiction.
Come prepared to write short pieces and explore the expansiveness of succinctness.

Grant Faulkner is the co-founder of 100 Word Story and the Flash Fiction Collective. He recently published The Art of Brevity: Crafting the Very Short Story. He’s also published Fissures, a collection of 100-word stories; All the Comfort Sin Can Provide; Nothing Short Of: Selected Tales from 100 Word Story; and Pep Talks for Writers: 52 Insights and Actions to Boost Your Creative Mojo.

His stories have appeared in dozens of literary magazines, including Tin House, The Southwest Review, and The Gettysburg Review, and he has been anthologized in collections such as Norton’s New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction, Flash Fiction America, Best Small Fictions, and Best Microfiction. His essays on creativity have been published in The New York Times, Poets & Writers, Literary Hub, Writer’s Digest, and The Writer.

Find Grant online on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Listen to his podcast Write-minded and subscribe to his newsletter Intimations: A Writer’s Discourse.

March 9. 11am NYC (online). “The Killer Micro” with Emily Devane

In this webinar, Emily Devane will explore the elements that make up micros that resonate. How do you know when a micro is a micro? How can you elevate a so-so draft to something that grabs the attention of competition judges and editors? How can you add depth and meaning by drawing on the reader’s sense memory bank?

Emily Devane is a writer, editor, bookseller and teacher based in Ilkley, West Yorkshire (UK). She has taught workshops and courses for Comma Press, Dahlia Press, London Writers’ Café and Tracks Darlington. She has won the Bath Flash Fiction Award, a Northern Writers’ Award and a Word Factory Apprenticeship. Emily’s work has been published in SmokeLong Quarterly (third place, Grand Micro Contest 2021), Best Microfictions Anthology (2021), New Flash Fiction Review, Lost Balloon, Ellipsis, Janus Literary, Ambit and others. She is a founding editor at FlashBack Fiction. Last year she was shortlisted for the Mogford Prize for Food and Drink Writing, and she also won second place in the Bath Short Story Award. Emily runs regular spoken word nights and teaches at Moor Words.