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 replying to 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 Kim Magowan — “Claw” published in Vestal Review
What do you remember about the workshop where you wrote this story? What was the prompt or writing task that led to this story?
I wrote this story during the first week of SmokeLong summer, in response to a prompt of Christopher Allen’s about pacing. Or, more accurately, I rewrote the story. It was an abandoned draft in my “Starts” file. “Claw” was one of those stories that coalesces around a disturbing image–in this case, I’d watched someone drop a live crab into a pot during a dinner party. But the story had no real plot, no forward motion, until I looked at it again with Christopher’s prompt in mind.
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 love the SmokeLong workshops! I love the detail and care participants put into feedback. For me, the most useful feedback are comments that flag both what does and doesn’t work in a story. I tend to revise by cutting: trimming all the fat. So I’m grateful for comments that identify for me lines that are disposable, places I over-explain, redundant images. This is particularly an issue for me with endings—I’ll often end a story a few beats after where it should end. SmokeLong participants have helped me locate the real ending. The less helpful feedback is when writers want you to write an entirely different story than the one on the page—”What if the MC were a man? What if he were neurodivergent? What if this story took place in Honduras?”—but though I have had my share of annoying “what-if” workshops in the past, that has never (truly never!) been my experience at SmokeLong. SLQ participants know what they’re doing.
To how many places did you send this story? Can you tell us a little about its journey to publication?
This one got picked up quickly. I workshopped it that first week in June. I made a few tweaks after receiving feedback from my (awesome! amazing!) Group 7 mates, and then submitted it to 6 of my favorite flash fiction journals. I submitted it to Vestal Review 6/9, and David Galef accepted it the next day—so the only journal quick enough to reject it in that speedy time frame was The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts. (David had sent me a few encouraging rejections prior to this story; I’m glad to have finally placed a piece in Vestal Review, a journal I really admire.)
What is your advice to someone considering taking part in a peer-review workshop?
Well, here I’m thinking of the feedback that works best for me, and this may well not be universal—but I’d say, be specific and concrete about both what you think works in someone’s story and what could use tweaking or refining. I really appreciate it when fellow writers flag lines for praise but also indicate places where they get tripped up. And this probably goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway—be respectful! (Again, I’ve never experienced this as a problem with SmokeLong, where the participants have been so supportive and acute.) As far as putting your own work out there—of course it’s scary, of course it makes you (and all of us) feel vulnerable and exposed. But that’s what it means, to be a writer. The thing that has made all the difference for me as a writer is finding sharp, talented, and honest first readers: that’s what helped me level up. So I am a huge believer in workshops.
Read “Claw” in Vestal Review.
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Kim Magowan lives in San Francisco and teaches in the English Department of Mills College at Northeastern University. She is the author of the short story collection Don’t Take This the Wrong Way, co-authored with Michelle Ross, forthcoming from EastOver Press; the short story collection How Far I’ve Come (2022), published by Gold Wake Press; the novel The Light Source (2019), published by 7.13 Books; and the short story collection Undoing (2018), which won the 2017 Moon City Press Fiction Award. Her fiction has been published in Colorado Review, The Gettysburg Review, SmokeLong Quarterly, Wigleaf, and many other journals. Her stories have been selected for The Best Small Fictions and Wigleaf‘s Top 50. She is the Editor-in-Chief and Fiction Editor of Pithead Chapel.
