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 Emily Rinkema — “Driving my Seven-Year Old Nephew to Visit His Mother at Rehab” second-place winner in The Bath Flash Fiction Award
What do you remember about the workshop where you wrote this story? What was the prompt or writing task that led to this story?
This story was born in the March Micro Marathon 2024, during a cold morning on Day 9, which focused on the interrogative. I went with the “alternative alternative prompt”: “Draft a (not more than) 250-word story with a question at its heart.” The March Micro Marathon was intense, writing a story a day, and by Day 9 I had gotten into a rhythm where I would read the prompt when I woke up, think about it on my 45-minute commute, and then spend 30 minutes writing whatever I had come up with and submitting it. Because of the pace of the month-long workshop, I couldn’t worry about perfection (or even decency); I had to let go and trust that I’d get a few gems out of the month and stretch my creativity. This story started with the first sentence–once I knew that, the first draft came quickly.
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?
First, I love feedback that includes specific details that worked or didn’t work for the reader. This may be a sentence or a phrase or a specific moment that either stopped the flow or made the reader have to pause (not in a good way), or the opposite, that bit that brought everything together. Second, I like it when readers provide suggestions to drastically revise–like cut it in half or change the POV or take out a character. I appreciate when someone forces me to look at a draft differently. Honestly, I find almost all feedback helpful–in that I can get a sense of the reader’s response–but I guess broad feedback like “I loved this,” or “This didn’t work for me,” without specific details about why is the least helpful to me.
To how many places did you send this story? Can you tell us a little about its journey to publication?
I submitted this story to two places at the same time–both flash competitions. When I first made the longlist for Bath Flash, and they offered publication in the anthology, I withdrew from the other. I was thrilled to have made the LL, and then bowled over to get the email that my story had won second place.
What is your advice to someone considering taking part in a peer-review workshop?
I have learned more about myself as a writer and have improved my craft more than I could have imagined by being in these workshops. There are three main reasons I love them (this sounds like a middle school essay now!). First is the forced discipline. Discipline is not a strength of mine, and the workshops give me the deadlines I need to actually create. Whether it’s writing daily in the March Micro Marathon, three times a week in A SmokeLong Summer, or once a week during the regular SmokeLong Fitness, I produce words regularly. Some of those words are dreadful…but there are always pieces within them that I can come back to. The second reason I love these workshops is that I have “met” amazing writers and built a community of support with people who share the same passion. I am so inspired by the variety of styles and the immense skills and the willingness of everyone to take risks and share whatever comes out of our heads. This is probably where my craft has grown the most: having the opportunity to carefully read stories almost daily teaches me so much about writing and narrative and character–about what works and what doesn’t–and sometimes about why something that really shouldn’t work, does. The third reason I will keep taking these workshops (because all good middle school essays have three reasons…) is because they are just fun. I love the playfulness of the SLQ editors and the contests and then cheering on my new writing friends when I recognize stories out in the wild that were started in a workshop. In conclusion (just kidding)…So, my advice to someone considering joining, is just do it.
Read “Driving my Seven-Year Old Nephew to Visit His Mother at Rehab” second-prize winner in The Bath Flash Fiction Award.
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Emily Rinkema lives and writes in northern Vermont, USA. Her writing has most recently appeared in X-R-A-Y, Variant Lit, Flash Frog, and Mudroom Magazine, and she has stories in the Best American Nonrequired Reading, Bath Flash, and Oxford Flash anthologies. She won the 2024 Cambridge Prize and the 2024 Lascaux Prize for flash fiction. You can read her work on her website (https://emilyrinkema.wixsite.com/my-site) or follow her on X, BS, or IG (@emilyrinkema).
