Reckon Review

Tag: Creative Nonfiction

  • The Pie Was a Final Draft: A House on Fire

    By Michaella Thornton It’s a little after 8 p.m. and my cozy brick bungalow smells of my favorite recipe for chocolate chip cookies. While we may not have much, I can always whip up a little bit of magic on a Friday night as my six-year-old daughter builds new worlds out of little plastic bricks…

  • 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…

  • The Nitty Gritty: Interview with Paul Crenshaw

    By Charlotte Hamrick Paul Crenshaw and I have at least one thing in common, we both grew up in a small, conservative, rural town in the American South. But while he was still a boy in the 1980’s, I was a young adult just moved to the big city. Our experiences during that time were…

  • 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…

  • My Rugby Life. My Writing Life.

    By Chris McGinley I should’ve started earlier. I didn’t begin writing fiction until I was fifty.  Yes, I’m pleased with what I’ve achieved so far.  I’m thrilled to be included in writerly events, to exchange rejoinders with people way more talented than me–Bonnie Jo Campbell, Chris Offutt, Julia Franks, Silas House.  And I’m over the…

  • 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…

  • Seventeen, locked up again

    Creative Nonfiction by Carrie Lynn Hawthorne 1998 – Northridge Adolescent Psych Ward. Woke up in a Pepto Bismol pink room. The day before, my hospital roommate, Lucy, had found out she was pregnant. By her dad. When Lucy slept, she looked so much younger than fourteen. Too young to be motherless, with no home to…

  • 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…