Reckon Review

Author: reckonreview

  • For Ethan

    Fiction by Grace Buckner I’m only telling you this because it’s important. After I’m gone, there’re some things I need folks to understand, things they don’t understand right now. I’m standing in the kitchen watching this happen and it’s all these stories that shouldn’t be all mixed up together, but I love my son and…

  • Calling Card

    By Sean Jacques Doe Run was supposed to be a movie. My movie. My meal ticket into Hollywood glamor and fame. You’ve heard the story: the long dark walk down the Boulevard of Broken Dreams. I. EXPOSTION: I grow up as a rowdy country kid in the Missouri Ozarks, flunk out of state college, migrate…

  • Sometimes when I’m driving I get a call

    Creative Nonfiction by Pat Foran and I don’t pick up. Not when I’m driving. I don’t look at the phone. Not when I’m driving. If they want to reach me they’ll leave a message, I sometimes think. So I let it ring. I let the ring fall I let it fall down this ring it…

  • Love and Blood

    A Review of Morgan Talty’s Fire Exit By Maud Lavin Morgan Talty’s novel, Fire Exit, is about ill fits among blood, belonging, and love. Set on the Penobscot River with the Reservation on one side and extraneous whites on the other, the story is also about parenting, about stepfathers raising kids with devotion, about missing…

  • Buried Nitrogen: On Sharks and Spanish Daggers—and Publishing a Novel

    By Sandra K. Barnidge Lately I’ve been feeling caught in an undertow. Too many deadlines crashed in at once this spring, while I also juggled the ever-constant code-switching between “writer” and “mother.” The most important of the writerly commitments was revising the novel that’s officially slated for release next June and sending those revisions back…

  • Mr. William

    Fiction by Ali Pensky Mr. William is coming over tonight. I’m making spaghetti, spicy meatballs, and garlic bread. I have a bottle of red wine, but I always mess up opening the bottle. I’m sure Mr. William won’t mind. Mr. William says the hardwood floors are one of the most expensive things in the gallery.…

  • The Pie Was a Final Draft: Holding Up the Mirror

    By Michaella Thornton At the end of May, I traveled to Hermann, Missouri to hang out with three of my closest girlfriends, women I’ve known since I was a teenager. Somehow I’ve kept these friends for almost 30 years. One of us lives near Portland, Maine. The rest of us reside in or near Kansas…

  • Purebred Hustle

    Fiction by Evan Morgan Williams They arrested Benito Luna in the principal’s office Friday afternoon. Arrested him for the murder of Jontiel Robinson the week before, the corner of Yamhill and 199th, the apartments beneath the tall firs. To be clear, there would be no flowers left on the sidewalk for Jontiel Robinson—such a punk,…

  • Fiction is Trouble

    By Jim Roberts The late Chuck Kinder1—creative writing teacher to Michael Chabon and close friend to Raymond Carver—once told me that “fiction is trouble.” This was sometime around 1990 when I was just starting to write seriously, having fantasized about it for over twenty years, imagining myself vaulting the wall of my gray corporate cubicle…

  • The Psychic’s Apprentice

    Fiction by Esmé Kaplan-Kinsey The boy needs a job. It’s unfortunate, really. Really, what he’d like to do is sit on a park bench and watch the leaves change from green to ghost. But this foolishness is out of the question, so the boy gets on his computer and loads Craigslist recent job postings. The…