SmokeLong Quarterly

I have so much to tell you. It’s been a crazy few months. The SmokeLong Grand Micro Contest is in the bag, and we have the top six micros in this issue. Writing a memorable, fresh micro is hard. It’s an art. A burst, a spark. And we are in love. In March we are going to host The March Micro Marathon again, and it’s going to be a wild whirlwind of words just like last year’s marathon. Twenty-four days with twenty-four writing tasks, three webinars, an interview and reading with Michelle Ross and the editors of 100 Word Story, and more. Stay tuned for information. Last year’s marathon produced thousands and thousands of micros, some of them finding their home even before the marathon was over. We can’t wait to do this again with all new tasks.

We’ve shared the long list for The SmokeLong Workshop Prize, a free-to-enter competition for participants and previous participants of SmokeLong workshops, on social media and will be sharing interviews with the authors and story links to these published narratives throughout 2025. Later this month, we’ll announce the winners of The SmokeLong Workshop Prize out of nearly 300 published flash narratives started in SmokeLong workshops and reported to us in 2024. If you are a participant, previous or present, of SmokeLong workshops, please remember to keep track of your publications and enter The SmokeLong Workshop Prize through Submittable when we re-open for entries on January 1. Find out more about the competition HERE.

SmokeLong is going on the road again! We’ll be in Singapore in January and Perth, Australia in February. We’ll be posting more information about these trips soon. Then, in May/June, we’re hosting a writers’ adventure through Europe, A Ticket to Write. If you’re just now hearing about this and are thinking WHAT? Not without me! Sign me up! send us in email (editor@smokelong.com) so that we can start a discussion.

If you are thinking about signing up for SmokeLong Fitness but aren’t sure that you can commit to a year without first giving it a spin, you can join us for January and February for not much money. Try it out.

Issue 86 is an ensemble of ten narratives that challenge us to see ourselves in new, often frightening, ways. Human nature. Desire. Shame. Hope. Empathy. Each one of these memorable pieces of art asks us to rethink, resee, re-examine. I think we have arrived at such a cohesive, reflective set of stories—which is absolutely coincidental. We never try to arrange an issue in a certain way; we simply and always publish work we love.

And my goodness do we love these narratives. As you dig into this issue, please share the work if you love it too.

Oh yes, and I nearly forgot: If you have not already found us on Bluesky, why not come on over to @smokelong.bsky.social. There’s a lot of blue sky in this world after all. We’re still on The Train Wreck Formerly known as Twitter but, honestly, only because Barack Obama follows us. You can also find us on Instagram and YouTube and any other social media platform where dog pics and otter videos are frequent.

Christopher