SmokeLong Quarterly

In 2024 SmokeLong hosted our second SmokeLong Workshop Prize competition. Our workshop participants reported almost 300 publications to us before November 1, 2024. In 2025, we’ll be featuring one writer each week from The SmokeLong Workshop Prize long list. It’s an excellent series of interviews, each grappling with questions about workshopping, giving and receiving feedback, and the publication process. If you are a previous or current SmokeLong workshop participant and you have ultimately published something you began in a SmokeLong workshop, remember to enter The SmokeLong Workshop Prize competition. This free-to-enter competition is on our Submittable page.

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An Interview with Allison Field Bell — “Habit” published by South Florida Poetry Journal

What do you remember about the workshop where you wrote this story? What was the prompt or writing task that led to this story?

The prompt that inspired this CNF piece was Boogie Wonderland, specifically the alternate writing task that said: Create a character who, for better or for worse, becomes a different person at night. Does your character lead a double life? I was thinking a lot about my own past—writing a lot of CNF—and this prompt triggered a memory of my pseudo double life as an undergraduate twenty-something-year-old, spending my days writing and then sometimes turning into a kind of hippie party girl at night. It helped that the theme of the whole month’s prompts was Earth, Wind, and Fire—a group whose music was often played at 80s night in Prescott.

Peer-review feedback is always full of surprises. In general, what kind of feedback do you find helpful? What kind of feedback do you find less helpful?

I always find specificity helpful. Any particular moment that can be pointed to in a story or CNF and then critiqued or questioned. I also find language-level feedback endlessly helpful (wrong words or phrases). The vaguer the feedback, the less helpful it becomes. It is my pet peeve to hear that my female characters are unlikeable. If that comment is coming from a place that actually identifies a problem in a story, great, but more often than not, I find the origins of character unlikability (particularly when it comes to women characters) to be more of a moral judgement that has little to do with the story at hand. I don’t mean to go off on it, but it is a common criticism I’ve received—not so much in the SmokeLong Workshop setting, but more in my graduate school programs.

To how many places did you send this story? Can you tell us a little about its journey to publication?

I had just started sending this piece out when it was accepted by Southern Florida Poetry Journal. This is not common though; I often send pieces out to many places and receive many rejections before the piece finds a home. I am starting to get a better feel for flash journals and editors out in the world though, and maybe I can be a bit more confident in knowing that a certain piece might be a fit for a certain journal, but often it feels like a bit of a numbers game.

What is your advice to someone considering taking part in a peer-review workshop?

Part 1: DO IT. Part 2: Every time I teach creative writing, I tell my students this: you learn more about writing from the feedback you give than from the feedback you receive. I think this holds true for any workshop. And often we lose sight of this. It’s so easy to get excited about receiving feedback, about having eyes on our own work, but really it is our ability to read and read closely that teaches us how to write better. And the lessons we learn through providing feedback become more universally applicable to our writing in general. It is not about perfecting one story; it’s about learning to write and write well. I believe this no matter what stage you’re in, no matter how long you’ve been a writer. If you’re not learning, you’re not really writing.

Read “Habit” by Allison Field Bell in South Florida Poetry Journal.

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Allison Field Bell is a PhD candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Utah, and she has an MFA from New Mexico State University. She is the author of the poetry chapbook, WITHOUT WOMAN OR BODY, forthcoming 2025 from Finishing Line Press and the nonfiction chapbook, EDGE OF THE SEA, forthcoming 2025 from CutBank Books. Allison’s flash narratives have recently appeared in Best Microfiction 2024, Best Small Fictions 2024, DIAGRAM, SmokeLong Quarterly, CRAFT, The Journal, and elsewhere. She is a Fiction Editor for The Rumpus and for Waxwing. Find her at allisonfieldbell.com.