Reckon Review

Category: Wind & Root

  • Buried Nitrogen: The Parallel Plot of Pawpaws and a Local Park

    By Sandra Barnidge I have become the proud keeper of an orchard. A real, living orchard. I am so thrilled about it I can barely breathe. Begrudgingly, I can admit that perhaps my orchard is not yet especially picturesque—in fact, when I show images of it to friends and family, I sense the concern for…

  • Flexing My Creative Muscles: Training to Failure

    By Melissa Llanes Brownlee I have been doing my yearly ukulele challenge for the month of September, where I am playing ten Elvis songs, some new to me, some not, and posting my videos on the place formerly known as twitter and my ukulele Instagram. These videos are not me showcasing my best. It’s just…

  • Soundscapes: Word Treasure

    By Erin Calabria I am fifteen, sitting cross-legged on the floor of my bedroom with a book of poems in my hands. Because I am fifteen, I don’t talk to anyone. I spend much of my time alone in this room, but then again, I am not really there either. Instead, I am traveling between…

  • Artful Academics: A Sermon and Prompt for An End Time

    By Brandy McCann The world is changing. The wheel is turning. The tower is crumbling. It’s post-pandemic; it’s the dismantling of the old patriarchy; it’s little and big resistances to the-way-things-were everywhere. These are exciting times; these are scary times. We’ve been wandering around in the wilderness for nigh on 40 years now, and sometimes…

  • Parental Reckonings

    See The Sections: A How-To Guide To Giving Birth By Amy Barnes I give birth to my first words when I’m in kindergarten, three letter words that rhyme about baby kittens and mittens. My teacher pushpins the wobbly words with their crayon illustrations to a bulletin board with other stories. My high school creative writing…

  • How to get ahead (by really trying):

    An interview with debut novelist K.J. Micciche By Stuart Phillips This strikes me as a painfully believable story. That was the first line of my critique of K.J. Micciche’s first manuscript from her first workshop at the Fairfield University MFA program. Our group had exchanged excerpts, and we were plowing through in an effort to…

  • Lazy Days in a Tropical Haze

    By Melissa Llanes Brownlee Have you ever wanted to run away to a tropical island? Laze away on a beach, sipping cold drinks, eating food made by someone else, listening to the tide roll in and back out again? I did just that. I flew to an island off the coast of Tokyo and for…

  • The Fractured Mirror – The Fabulous Fiction of Folklore: A Conversation with Icy Sedgwick

    By Edward Karshner Icy Sedgwick is a blogger and host of the Fabulous Folklore Podcast which explores a range of folklore and mythology including its appearance in art and film. She is working on a PhD about haunted house films. When research gets tiresome, she writes dark fantasy and gothic horror fiction. You are the…

  • Adversity: Sacrificing Your Scribbles and the Six Sacred Sentences

    By Barlow Adams Everyone has heard about killing their darlings, but few writers talk about sacrificing their scribbles—at least not directly. We address it in a roundabout way when it comes to drafting, but even then we tend to put a positive spin on it. We are improving. We are refining. Transferring written lead into…

  • Healthy Habits: Intentional Steps Required

    By Valerie Peralta When I started chronicling my journey toward healthier habits in Reckon Review, the stakes were high. I had eaten myself to high cholesterol and the largest pants size I had ever needed. Never one to embrace the phrase “it is what it is,” I did not want to take a spate of…