SmokeLong Quarterly

So, I’m curious about your experience so far as our first Quarterly Guest Editor. Do you have any thoughts on the kinds of stories you’ve found in the submission queue? 

Well, there have been a lot of quarantine/backdrop stories—understandably.  And there seems to be a real uptick in second person stories. I’m not here to shit on second person; I totally love a good second person POV (and have written my own recently)— but it’s a choice, like any other. And sometimes the choice feels organic and integral to the story, inevitable even, and other times, it feels like overlay, as if the author is trying to wrangle the reader’s investment without trusting the narrative itself to get us there. Of the pieces we’ve accepted thus far, a common thread is they all transport with language as startling and textured as the stories they serve—and it’s been very exciting to watch this issue come together, and to discuss these stories with the other wonderful editors. I haven’t been on a masthead in a while—and realize how much I miss the collegial interaction and dialogue, and the feeling of falling hopelessly hard for a blind submission in the slush. 

You’re teaching in the SmokeLong online summer workshop right now. Can you tell us a little about the topic you’re teaching?

I’m really excited to be in the same virtual room as Michael Czyzniejewski and Chris Allen for this summer long course. My weeks will focus on that fine line between emotion and restraint in order to strike resonant gold, to maximize feeling without veering into sentimentality. As readers, we want to feel flash has worked its magic on us, shifted our temperature, left us forever changed. But we also want that emotion to feel intrinsic and not spoon-fed or contrived. When to reel in and when to let the line out? How do we know what’s right for our particular telling? We’ll talk a lot about balancing overwriting with underwriting—and trust! In my opinion (slash experience), we often undermine our best work because of a failure to trust—both ourselves as storytellers that we’ve nailed the image/feeling and can move on, and our readers to make those inferences and to meet the demands of a given story. My hope is for us to get out of our own way as much as we can, so this can be a generative and nourishing and unself-conscious workshop, where students are encouraged to play around with the various emotional knobs of flash fiction by experimenting with elements of craft—and developing a stronger sense of trust.

How is your summer reading going? Any books you’d like to recommend? My favorite book so far this summer is Parakeet by Marie-Helen Bertino. It’s bizarre and amazing and I want to convince everyone to read it!

I love Marie-Helene Bertino! Talk about magic. (I once read with her when she was on tour for her first novel (2 a.m. at the Cat’s Pajamas) and she fully burst out into pitch perfect blues that blew us all away.) So far this summer I’ve been unmoored and educated by the masterful vitality of Girl, Woman, Other by Bernadine Evaristo; Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi; The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead. I also just re-read Forward: 21st Century Flash Fiction, an anthology of flash and craft essays by writers of color edited by Megan Giddings, which is going on my fall syllabus. On deck: The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett, A Burning by Megha Majumdar, and Want by Lynn Steger Strong.

Aside from reading, how are you spending your summer? Does it look different from your usual summers?

Usually, I teach writing at the camp my kids attend during the summer, but when camp was canceled, and we were facing another 3 months of indoor isolation, I became increasingly worried about our mental health. Then we fell into a washed-up bungalow community a little more than an hour outside the city. Popular during the Borscht belt days, it had kind of fallen into disarray in recent years. So we rented a bunk and told a few of our friends about it, and now are essentially living in kibbutz style quarantine. Picture family camp. A 16-year-old actually has spearheaded a day camp here that my kids are working at—basically shepherding the younger children around a bunch of hours a day doing crafts and drama and games so parents can work. Of course, there is a calculated risk we’ve all bought into—we are staying outdoors and practicing social distancing and only seeing each other—but after months of not seeing anyone, not going outside, not having an inch of freedom—it makes me cry every day to see how my kids have sprung back to life, roaming in the woods, or swimming the lake, or kicking their legs on the swings—being children again. I know soon enough we’ll be back in the city navigating the subway and the DOE and the infinite challenges that await but right now we are awash in bungalow love and I feel so goddamn grateful to be here.

What’s even more ironic—in the novel I just completed, the main character lives in a 300 square foot bungalow that was transported from a colony after it closed and brought to his private stretch of land. So it’s almost like my life is imitating fiction. (Now if only that novel….)