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PAVING PARADISE AND REDISCOVERING YOURSELF | by Susan Schirl Smith
The Joni Mitchell song “Big Yellow Taxi” has been running through my mind lately. I have thought of that lyric referencing “paving paradise and putting up a parking lot” when stories of drilling in National Parks and abolishment of protections for wild creatures are reported. The ides of eliminating environmental protections and destroying the irreplaceable…
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MY REVIEW | by E.A. Aymar
I was a reluctant crime fiction reviewer. I never rarely want to make another writer feel bad, and writing is a small world and feels like one in which every writer knows each other, particularly in my genre. And I know how much a bad review can bother someone. Some writers defiantly claim that they…
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KEEPING THE CHAOS AT BAY | Nonfiction by Josh Dugat
My first teaching job was in 2009, at a public high school in New Orleans. I was hired as the science teacher two days before the school year began. Here’s me: an earnest, lanky, white kid, about fifteen minutes older than my oldest student. My oldest student: a parent, an emcee, a Katrina refugee returning…
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ALCHEMY AND CREATIVITY | by Brandy Renee McCann
Lately I have been a serious student of herbalism—the art and craft of healing through plant medicine. Part of the attraction is my fascination with the ancient science of alchemy. One way to make plant medicine is through distillation and I dream of distilling plant-based medicines in a copper still in my back garden. In…
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CHRONICALLY WRITING: Making Time to Write with Chronic Illness | by Jessica Cory
Sometimes in craft talks, books, readings, or workshops, an author will discuss (or be asked by an audience member) about their writing routine: what time of day they write, how many words they strive to pen, whether they use yellow legal pads following Toni Morrison’s method or type everything on a computer (or a typewriter,…
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THE LONG WEEKS | by Acie Clark
I started writing the poems in my first book, Small Talk, in 2019, in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. It didn’t occur to me that these poems were anything substantial until Kwoya, my mentor, said something along the lines of have you considered that you’re writing a book? (in her gracious and capacious way) a few years later.…
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DUDE, WORST TITLE EVER | Nonfiction by Jim Roberts
“There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.” That quote is attributed to W. Somerset Maugham, although no one seems to know for sure if he wrote it. Deciding which advice to accept and which to reject is, for me, the most difficult part of writing fiction. There’s…
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SEASONS | Nonfiction by Laurel Hightower
It’s mid-winter in Kentucky and the ground is frozen solid, the trees bare and gray. It’s twenty degrees outside, so for this rare holiday weekend we’re hunkered down and making use of the black marble fireplace, my pitbull curled up under multiple blankets, occasionally knocking my laptop out of her way or adding her input…
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Closing Time (inspired by a Semisonic song we aren’t quoting for copyright reasons)
By Stuart Phillips Editor’s note: It’s been 5 years and just over a week since I published the first story here at Reckon, “Country Roads” by Stuart Phillips, so it feels particularly fitting that Stuart is sharing his thoughts with us this week. Back then I wasn’t sure that anyone wanted to read stories about…