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Distinctive readership: How would you describe the readership of SmokeLong Quarterly? What distinguishes your readers from those of other literary publications, and what kinds of stories or literary experiences do you think resonate more strongly with them?

SmokeLong Quarterly has a global readership, having published flash fiction and nonfiction online for more than 23 years. While the flash community is much larger in the United States than in other countries, SmokeLong has always had an international focus and audience. It’s difficult to say what distinguishes our readers from those of other literary publications. SmokeLong is often the first place someone encounters flash. These are the curious writers trying to figure out the form, and I hope we contribute to their understanding of it. We do have a loyal following of seasoned flash writers, though. They expect to be surprised and delighted by literary, meaningful stories that they’ll want to return to again and again. They expect to find innovative voices that slay them. 

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Literary tradition and rituals: Are there any recurring traditions, annual events, submission practices, or community activities that have become an integral part of SmokeLong Quarterly's identity? How have these traditions developed over time?

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In 2019, Helen Rye and I did a workshop series in various cities in the UK. Then COVID happened. I don’t want to give COVID too much credit, but the pandemic did nudge us to start online workshops. In 2022, we hosted our first A SmokeLong Summer mega community workshop with more than 300 participants. We just finished our fifth summer-long series of events. A SmokeLong Summer is definitely a tradition now. Our workshop participants have published more than 1000 stories since that first summer. We now offer several other community workshop opportunities. SmokeLong Fitness has been running since 2022, and The March Micro Marathon is a popular task-a-day peer-review workshop. We’ve also hosted Promptember twice. Promptember is a free series of workshops and write-ins. 

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We regularly host social media challenges. We’ll be doing The Archive Challenge again soon on Bluesky, X, Instagram, and Facebook. The Archive Challenge encourages readers to do a deep dive into a flash journal’s archives, sharing a few stories each week. We give a cash prize to a randomly chosen participant at the end. It’s our sneaky way of getting people to read flash journals.  

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Shared values and literary philosophy: What core values or principles unite the SmokeLong Quarterly community, or their particular beliefs about storytelling, literary experimentation, accessibility, or whose voice deserves to be heard, that shape your editorial philosophy?

What a good question. I wouldn’t want to put too many constraints on our community in terms of how they tell a story. I would hope that they know we appreciate experimentation, innovation, and heart—and the greatest of these is heart. We love to read a story obviously written by someone who has some astonishing insight to share with the world. But having an important story to tell doesn’t make someone a writer. Having an important story to tell coupled with a wild and compelling sense of timing, voice, rhythm, mood, and structure (and all the other layers of the flash narrative) deserves publication at SmokeLong. This is not to say that other voices don’t deserve to be heard. Don’t all voices deserve this?

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Recurring themes and literary identity: Looking across the work published in SmokeLong Quarterly, are there recurring themes, narrative techniques, or preoccupations that you believe distinguish your literary community? If so, what do you think draws writers and readers towards these ideas? 

Over the last 23 years, we’ve published stories about everything under the sun. There are no intentional recurring themes. It’s often said that flash writers tend to write about loss ad nauseam, and I suppose there’s some truth to this. Loss is such a huge umbrella for all the sorts of sadness we feel in life. Flash writers almost always write about strong emotion. Flash is like a burst of emotion. An epiphany. It’s natural that a lot of stories will be about pain. And that’s ok. We do, however, need the story to do something new (a feat). 

I’ve just finished an article on our emerging flash narratology. Flash writers do indeed use different techniques than writers of longer narrative forms. There is a massive gap between the narrative techniques of flash and those used to write the conventional novel. Our writers and readers are more likely to appreciate the short-short form. 

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Community and cultural continuity: Beyond the story itself is what makes SmokeLong Quarterly feel like a literary community rather than simply a publication. How do interactions between editors, writers, and readers help preserve its identity while allowing it to evolve across generations of contributors?

Such thoughtful questions. Thank you. Honestly, I’m sure not every author who publishes at SmokeLong has exactly the same experience. I would hope they feel celebrated. I’m not sure SmokeLong’s identity has been preserved through individual interactions between editors and writers. We’ve always tried to be professional with our contributors. Respect. Kindness. Pay.

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We need to work on our interaction with readers. With many literary journals, publication is one-way communication. We don’t allow comments on the site. Of course we see the numbers, so of course we know people are reading. We share work on social media and get some response, but I do lose sleep trying to figure this one out: readers also need to be celebrated. The Reader—is there a more adorable human?

I think the preservation of a journal’s identity is more about the evolution of the journal across generations of editors. SmokeLong has been so fortunate to have a lineage of editors who have all been passionate, professional workhorses. When I joined SmokeLong in 2014, our editor-in-chief, Tara Laskowski, asked me fairly soon thereafter if I wanted to take over the journal. I did, but we co-edited the journal for a few years just so no one would notice I wasn’t Tara. Shhh. I occasionally receive emails addressed to Tara still today, which is fine. So many brilliant minds have contributed to making SmokeLong a well-oiled machine. We have 25 of these miracles on staff actively right now. These are the people who keep SmokeLong going. Helen Rye, Shasta Grant, Sherrie Flick, Michael Czyniejewski, Jan Elman Stout, Erin Vachon, Melissa Llanes Brownlee, Daniel DiFranco, Farhana Khalique, A W Earl, Gillian O’Shaughnessy, Sara Siddiqui Chansarkar, Clarie Gor, Hema Nataraju, Janna Miller, Julia Strayer, Marcus Tan, Ellisa Field, Dawn Miller, Beth Sherman, Ani King, Vaibhavi Kerkar, Shareen Murayama, Lisa Muschinski, and Noémi Scheiring-Oláh.