Reckon Review

Tag: Creative Nonfiction

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • MOTHERING, 21ST CENTURY EDITION | Creative Nonfiction by Alina Zollfrank

    Because I held them after; Because I felt them before they clawed their way into the dim of the delivery room; Because I channeled our dead when I lifted my firstborn to the heavens and said, Look, she’s here and cried tears of relief because the new life lived; Because I spilled over when baby…