Reckon Review

Tag: Creative Nonfiction

  • 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…

  • Fiction is Trouble

    By Jim Roberts The late Chuck Kinder1—creative writing teacher to Michael Chabon and close friend to Raymond Carver—once told me that “fiction is trouble.” This was sometime around 1990 when I was just starting to write seriously, having fantasized about it for over twenty years, imagining myself vaulting the wall of my gray corporate cubicle…

  • Country Craft: Parking Your Writing

    By Stuart Phillips My friend, Susan Muaddi Darraj, is a proselytizing member of the five a.m. writers’ club. Frankly, not a club I’ve ever had any interest in joining. Instead, I have contented myself by building my “writing life” on the fringes of my “real” life. And there’s the rub. I tell myself I will…

  • Anti-Depression

    CREATIVE NONFICTION BY ASHLEY ESPINOZA I don’t want to write about my depression. I don’t want to make sense of it. Follow it around a path, a spiral. I don’t want to find the source of it. I want to wallow. To sink deep into it. I want to let it engulf me. To take…

  • Suing for Peace

    By Russell W. Johnson When I’m not busy trying to be a writer, I make my living as a lawyer. I know, I know. How original? Another John Grisham wannabe. I admit it has become kind of a cliche given the number of attorneys turned author. Scott Turow, Richard North Patterson, Meg Gardiner, Theodora Goss,…