SmokeLong General Submissions with Feedback
Use this form to receive three senior editors' comments from the Submittable queue on ONE story under 1000 words. These comments are general but actionable feedback regarding 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.
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 form. We also offer a variety of workshops and webinars including SmokeLong Fitness, the year-round community workshop of SmokeLong. If you would like to be on our workshop mailing list, please send an email to editor@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 (narratives under 1000 words). We may not be the right sounding board for fantasy, sci-fi, horror, romance, children's lit, etc.
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 7 days, and we would appreciate a brief note letting us know you received our message and feedback.
As a thank-you for using this service, we are offering a $7 discount coupon to be used on anything in the SmokeLong shop anytime before December 31, 2024. To receive this discount, please use the coupon code THANKS. Please be aware that this discount is not available on events already discounted.
Christopher Allen
Publisher, SmokeLong Quarterly
SmokeLong Quarterly Senior Editors
Christopher Allen is the publisher and editor-in-chief of SmokeLong Quarterly. He is also the author of the flash fiction collection Other Household Toxins (Matter Press) and the episodic satire Conversations with S. Teri O'Type. His work has been published in over 100 journals including Booth, Indiana Review, Split Lip Magazine, and PANK. Allen has judged The Bath Flash Fiction Award, The Cambridge Flash Fiction Award, and flash portion of The Bridport Prize. A teacher and workshop leader for over two decades, Allen is a nomad.
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.
Jan Elman Stout’s fiction has appeared in Pure Slush, Literary Orphans, Jellyfish Review, Midwestern Gothic, Pidgeonholes, 100 Word Story and elsewhere. Her flash was nominated for the Best Small Fictions anthology in 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2020. Jan’s flash appears in the Best Microfiction2020 anthology. Jan is currently working on a story collection. She can be reached on Twitter @janelmanstout.
Erin Vachon writes outside Providence, RI. They are the Multigenre Reviewer-at-Large forThe Rumpus. Their writing appears in theWigleaf Top 50,Black Warrior Review, SmokeLong Quarterly, The Pinch, DIAGRAM, Brevity, andThe Anarchist Review of Books, among others. Their writing was nominated for The Pushcart, Best of Net, Best Microfictions, and Best Small Fictions. They were aSmokeLongFellow for Emerging Writers, and they received an MA in English from The University of Rhode Island.
Melissa Llanes Brownlee (she/her), a native Hawaiian writer living in Japan, has work published and forthcoming in Quarterly West, Wigleaf, The Threepenny Review, Matchbook, Bluestem, Sunlight Press and Cutleaf Journal, and honored in Best Small Fictions, Best Microfiction, and Wigleaf Top 50. Read Hard Skin (2022) and Kahi and Lua (2022) and look out for Bitter over Sweet (2025) from Santa Fe Writers Project. She tweets @lumchanmfa and talks story at melissallanesbrownlee.com.
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 $100/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 that your word count is 1000 or fewer.
Christopher Allen