Reckon Review

Tag: Creative Nonfiction

  • Ghosts: Creative Nonfiction by Meredith McCarroll

    Turning my rental car toward the lake, the road has been widened and the house where Amity grew up is nothing. A spot between roads. The gravel lot where I used to park is a condominium now, so I make my own spot in the grass. I prop my foot onto the tire to tighten…

  • Fire to Tend To

    I started writing because I wanted to cut out the pain that had been festering in my chest and put it on the table where all could see it clearly. I had just moved off to college and had left home for the first time in my life. My mother was struggling with opioid addiction,…

  • Ball

    Creative Nonfiction by Zach Benak The first night of August I sat in the back of my mom’s Honda, heading home from Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Church. The setting sun reflected onto Papillion’s muddy creek and white stadium lights warmed the surrounding soccer and baseball fields busy with late-season games. I opened my phone…

  • Exercises in Adversity: Translating Trauma Without Sentimentality

    By Barlow Adams I’d like to share a creative nonfiction exercise with you. It’s nothing fancy. It might even come across as simplistic if you’re a master of the form. Regardless, I use it time and again when I cannot produce under any other conditions. It rarely fails. It may seem counterintuitive, but you cannot…

  • Nude in a Naked City

    CREATIVE NONFICTION BY DENISE TOLAN It is 8:30 pm. The temperature is ninety-five degrees. Because it is early June, we locals still complain about the heat. Soon we will abandon clothing and hope and accept the drying earth and scalding sun as fact. Newcomers to San Antonio are often startled by our thick humidity and…

  • Changing the Story of Rejection

    Creative Nonfiction By Megan E. O’Laughlin Many years ago, I gave up on writing. I was only 25, floundering after years of travel post-college, and decided to get an MFA. After receiving a small pile of envelopes from various graduate schools, I quickly gave up. I shuffled the rejection letters into a little pile in…

  • Ten Minutes of Pride

    Creative Nonfiction by Alina Zollfrank Saturday, 11:03 am: We could frame this moment. It’s the best humanity has to offer. A loud procession, planned and jumbled, approaches from downtown. On the sidelines, acquaintances hug and hand each other multicolored flags and homemade buttons. Strangers nod amiably, raise optimistic thumbs, smile gently with their eyes. A…

  • 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…

  • 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…