Reckon Review

Tag: Creative Nonfiction

  • Rest

    Creative Nonfiction by Dani Nichols The snow softens the sound of everything – the gate thuds instead of clanging, the horses’ feet clomp softly through the drifts. A week or two ago someone slid off the highway into a cow pasture – we heard sirens coming to help, but not the crash. Everything is muffled…

  • Buried Nitrogen: The Parable of the Persimmon

    By Sandra K. Barnidge The persimmons on her tree were still green, but Cheryl the Neighbor told us to go for it anyway. “Before the critters get ’em,” she said. Possums had been spotted on a neighbor’s persimmon tree the week before. A raccoon family was prowling the neighborhood, too. It was now or never,…

  • Flexing My Creative Muscles: Playing the Ukulele, UAS, & 30-Day Challenges

    By Melissa Llanes Brownlee I know. I know. The ukulele, right? How stereotypically Hawai’ian of me. Would you believe me if I told you that I had never owned an ukulele in my entire life until I moved to Japan? Well, it’s true. I bought a $50 (well 5000 yen) ukulele around 2010 from a…

  • What’s Mine and Yours

    Creative Nonfiction by Sam DeLeo Our plan, if it could be called that, had been to catch a few long rides all the way to Los Angeles. Once there, we’d lounge poolside for the holiday weekend at the home of Will’s wealthy family, who were, according to him, direct heirs to the Hilton Hotel fortune.…

  • Altered Earths – Storyteller as Scientist: An Experiment in Four Variables

    By S.E. Hartz I want to write this essay as a scientist would. I do not come with a conclusive thesis but with a working theory and a hypothesis to guide my investigation. The theory: things I have learned or explored in the laboratory and field can guide my fiction in new directions. The hypothesis:…

  • Adversity and The Artist: The Persistent Myth of Inspirational Suffering

    By Barlow Adams There’s a certain hubris in agreeing to pen a column about writing through adversity. It’s an invitation to the powers that be to take you down a notch. Let me tell you, those bastards listen. In the months since I signed on to write this column it’s been an onslaught of death,…

  • How Should a Writer Be?: GOOD, HARD WORK

    By Nick Rees Gardner My love for working class literature goes back to my preteen years when, over the summer, I rode with my dad to mid-Ohio car dealerships where we’d repair car interiors and windshield chips. We walked the hot asphalt and sweated. I listened to my dad trade stories with smarmy dealers and…

  • She Leaves

    Creative Nonfiction by Jennifer Robinson The elms on the grounds of this Mennonite school have been tied with bright orange ribbons and at first glance, she thinks they are marked for death. The city arborists use the same neon orange to paint a ring around trees infected with Dutch Elm, identifying the ones to be…

  • Flexing My Creative Muscles: Art Nights, Line Art, & Daily Doodles

    by Melissa Llanes Brownlee If I told you that I once got busted for doodling in my Composition Notebook in math class, my hearts carved into its speckled black and white cover, stars streaking across polynomials, dragons roaring at word problems I didn’t want to solve, would you believe me? Until that day, doodling in…

  • Altered Earths: Beyond Dystopia

    Tackling the Narrative Challenges of Climate Change, On and Off the Page By S.E. Hartz This past weekend, I coped with a particularly bad bout of climate anxiety by watching seven straight hours of Stranger Things. Something about witnessing a group of young kids repeatedly face down various iterations of the same catastrophe, beating back…