Reckon Review

Tag: Creative Nonfiction

  • ROLL WITH IT: How Gaming Leveled Up My Writing | by: Jessica Slee

    Billie the Kid was a goat barbarian (Path of the Totem Warrior: Goat, obviously), with a Stomach of Holding who gained sapience after eating an enchanted artifact from the wizard who lived next door to the field where her herd liked to graze. Ever since, her only goals in life were to stomp her enemies…

  • 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…

  • THE WORDS I SAY BACK TO YOU | by Jeffrey-Michael Kane

    He pauses mid-sentence now, the way a man might stop at a door he meant to walk through and forget what waits on the other side. A small stilling of the hand. The fingers lift, hover, as if the word might be caught in the air if he gives it a second longer. Sorry, he…

  • 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…

  • 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,…

  • 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.…

  • BURIED NITROGEN: On writer’s block and six-toed cats | by Sandra K. Barnidge

    The smell is what surprised me most about visiting the Ernest Hemingway house in Key West, Florida. Specifically, the dominant smell of the idyllic, subtropical garden surrounding the meticulously preserved Spanish colonial house: cat pee. The undeniable—inescapable—scent of litterboxes and free-range territory marking. It hit me immediately after handing over my $20 for a ticket…

  • I KNOW NOW WHY THEY CALL IT STILLBIRTH | Nonfiction by Lacey Rodriguez

    I think I know now why they call it stillbirth. I always thought it was because of the nature of a child not alive… Still. Cold. Lifeless. But now I think it is because the room goes still. Time stops. More like, you exist outside of it. The entire universe is encapsulated in that little…

  • ORANGE JUICE, 2000 | Nonfiction by Mary Thorson

    We believe in Orange Juice. We have many beliefs, and orange juice is one of them. And plane crashes. On the morning of the day that Uncle Willie died, he came back from his car to the kitchen three times. The first was to tell his wife that he loved her. The second was because…

  • SOMETIMES A BOY JUST HAS TO LIE | Nonfiction by J.R. Welch

    Hayti, Missouri — 1979 The trailer was white with faded green trim, paint peeling from the metal siding still hot from the day’s sun. I sat in the back of the cop car, vinyl sticking to my legs. In the Delta, cops had a way of making everyone sweat. That night, it wasn’t just the…