In looking over the stories for this issue, I was trying to decide if there was a common thread running through the them that tied them together in some way. And really, there isn’t. Each story is pretty different from the last—and not just because we had guest editors choosing some of the pieces for us.
The truth is, I never know what is going to hit me in the face—which is part of the fun of reading for a literary magazine. I think we are constantly and pleasantly surprised by the wide range of stories we get, and the kinds of stories that we are drawn to.
This time around, I fell in love with Meagan Cass’s “Egg Toss, August 1989,” which isn’t quite as shocking to me given that traditionally I tend to be drawn toward these kinds of narrative pieces about family and nostalgia and memory. (Not to mention the sentences are gorgeous.) The stories that did surprise me were pieces like “Exposure” by Katy Resch, an expository story that leaves one character and jumps into another—Katy calls it a “baton-pass” story in her interview with me, and I love that idea. Or “Sovetskoye Shampanskoye” by Berit Ellingsen, which gives us an entire life portrait of a man in 10 paragraphs. Or the very lyrical and fairy-tale-like story “Never Never” by Amber Sparks, which draws upon the story of Peter Pan.
All of these pieces are marvelous, and I love them even though (or probably because) they are nothing like the kinds of stories I myself usually write. And looking over the remainder of the stories that make up the 17 for this quarterly, I think that once again we’ve managed to capture the best flash fiction that’s out there, and that’s really exciting.
Thank you for supporting SmokeLong!
Tara Laskowski
Senior Editor, SmokeLong Quarterly
September 27, 2011
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