Use this form to receive at least three senior editors' comments from the Submittable queue on ONE story under 1000 words. These comments are general but actionable feedback and comments about what's working and what's not. If you are looking for more specific feedback, please see below. If you do not want feedback, we offer a free submissions option and always will.

Use this form also to receive actionable feedback on a story that has been rejected by SmokeLong, especially if you received a second-tier rejection indicating that the story sparked a discussion among our editors. Please indicate RESUBMISSION in the title. 

For more detailed feedback from one editor, please use the Senior Editor Critique and Feedback form. We also offer 4-week asynchronous workshops led by three experienced creative writing teachers each quarter as well as one-week Flash Intensive workshops. If you would like to be on our workshop mailing list, please send an email to editors@smokelong.com. 

To help us give relevant and targeted feedback, please let us know whether the story is fiction, creative non-fiction, or hybrid. Please put this information directly in the story document.

Please be aware that we are editors/writers competent to give feedback on literary flash fiction. We may not be the right sounding board for fantasy, sci-fi, horror, romance, children's lit, etc. You story must be under 1000 words.

Although you should use this form with the understanding that your story will in all likelihood not be accepted by the journal, if we decide to accept your submission (obviating the need for feedback), your fee will be reimbursed.

In the overwhelming majority of cases, you will receive a response through Submittable marked COMPLETED, and the editors' comments will be included in the response. We try to respond with feedback within 14 days, and we would appreciate a brief note letting us know you received our message and feedback. 

Christopher Allen

Editor, SmokeLong Quarterly

SmokeLong Quarterly Senior Editors

Shasta Grant  is the author of the chapbook Gather Us Up and Bring Us Home (Split Lip Press, 2017). She won the 2015 Kenyon Review Short Fiction Contest and the 2016 SmokeLong Quarterly Kathy Fish Fellowship. She has received residencies from Hedgebrook and The Kerouac Project and was selected as a 2020 Aspen Words Emerging Writer Fellow. Her work has appeared in cream city review, Epiphany, Hobart, wigleaf, and elsewhere. She has an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and divides her time between Singapore and Indianapolis.

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.

Helen Rye lives in Norwich, UK. She has won the Bath Flash Fiction Award, the Reflex Fiction contest and third place in the Bristol Short Story Prize. Her stories appear in The Best Small Fictions 2020 and have been shortlisted for the Bridport Prize, nominated for The Pushcart Prize and published in many journals and anthologies. She has an MA in Prose Fiction at the University of East Anglia, where she was the 2019/20 Annabel Abbs Scholar.

General Guidelines:

SmokeLong publishes flash narratives up to 1000 words. This word limit is firm. We do not consider poetry. On our blog we publish essays on craft and teaching flash. Please see the appropriate Submittable form.

Please send ONE previously unpublished story at a time and wait until you hear from us to send another.
Include a print-ready, third-person bio with your cover letter. 

Our editors read blind, so please do not include your name or other identifying information anywhere on the story document, in the filename, or in the Submittable title. Your name and bio should appear in the cover letter on Submittable, which is hidden in our blind editing process.

We pay $50/story, upon publication in the quarterly issue. Payment will be issued via PayPal, and the writer may be responsible for any associated fees if applicable.

Online Rights: If we publish your work, we require exclusive electronic rights to it for 3 months and non-exclusive rights indefinitely so we can include it in our online archives.

Print Rights: We require non-exclusive print rights, for potential annual anthologies and promotional materials. All other rights remain yours.

You Might Want to Know Before Submitting:

As with any literary journal, the best way to figure out what we're looking for is to read the journal. We have thousands of stories archived on our site. Why not spend a couple of hours browsing the quarterly archives? The SLQ aesthetic remains an ever-changing, ever-elusive set of principles, but it most likely has to do with these kinds of things:

 * language that surprises and excites,
 * narratives that strive toward something other than a final punch line or twist,
 * pieces that add up to something, often (but not necessarily always) meaning or emotional resonance,
 * honest work that feels as if it has far more purpose than a writer wanting to write a story.

We publish spring, summer, fall and winter quarterly issues, featuring each story with an interview in the subsequent weeks. We invite an editor/teacher from the flash fiction community to join our team each quarter as a senior editor and workshop leader.

Our intent is to respond as quickly as possible. Please allow us up to four weeks to inform you if we have accepted your work for publication. Rejection will sadly come much more swiftly. (Note: Our emails sometimes get caught by spam filters, so please add "smokelong.com" to your allow list. We also can't respond to any third-party spam filter programs, so please don't submit to us with an email address that has that kind of security set up.)

We gladly consider simultaneous submissions, but please consider where you'd like your work to appear before you send it to 10 journals. We usually respond within 7 days. Please inform us immediately if your work has been accepted elsewhere for publication.

We look forward to your words. Before you hit SEND, please make sure your name is removed from the story and that your word count is 1000 or fewer.

Christopher Allen