Reckoning Press Occasional Podcast

Subscribe via RSS, Google Podcasts, Android, Stitcher, iHeartRadio, Apple or Amazon. Welcome back to the Reckoning Press Podcast! It's me, Michael J. DeLuca, publisher, and we are coming back out of hiatus just for a minute to celebrate that Our Beautiful Reward, our special issue on bodily autonomy, comes out in print on March 16th. We're having a virtual launch party on Sunday the 19th at 8PM eastern US time aka GMT-5, which will feature readings from contributors Leah Bobet, Marissa Lingen, Julian K. Jarboe, Linda Cooper, M. C. Benner-Dixon, Riley Tao, Dyani Sabin and Juliana Roth. And we'll draw names and give away books and t-shirts and talk about bodily autonomy and reproductive justice. Editor Catherine Rockwood will emcee, Julie Day and Carina Bissett of Essential Dreams Press and The Storied Imaginarium will host. It'll be grand. I'll post the link to RSVP on the website. In the meantime, I have Catherine here with me today, and we're going to talk about Our Beautiful Reward! [Bio below.] Michael: I should add that Catherine and I recently met in person for the first time after having worked together on Reckoning staff for several years, and it was lovely, relaxed and intellectually stimulating in ways I had honestly almost forgotten face-to-face human interaction could be in these isolating times. So I hope to share with you all a little bit of that today. Welcome Catherine! Catherine: Thank you! Michael: I am excited to try this out with you—we're doing a new thing here, using the Discord chat where we all have our editorial staff discussions on a daily basis to record a conversation. Catherine is the editor of Our Beautiful Reward, our special issue on bodily autonomy, and I've got some questions for her to get us going discussing what makes us so excited about it and how we had such a good time putting it together. First of all, Catherine: what did you learn editing this special issue? Catherine: I learned a lot. One of the things that I learned is just purely personal and that's just that I enjoy editing, which I didn't know before. I learned to be really super grateful for Reckoning's readers. They saved me from making a lot of mistakes, I think, they helped me read better. Everyone I forwarded things to got back to me with great advice and insights. That's not to say I didn't make mistakes, I did, but other people can't fully save you from that. However, a generous advising team like the one at Reckoning helps improve outcomes. We're proud of the issue. Part of the reason I feel proud of it is because of the people who helped me put it together. It wouldn't be as good as it is without everybody. I think the other thing that is really exciting is, I learned that editing expands the imagination kind of like reading does, and there's a very different feel to it. So you're not really asking yourself what does this individual poem or story do, but instead you're thinking—and this was totally new to me, and so interesting—what does this poem or story do together with this other poem or story? And you kind of do that, and you do that, and you find new things, and you find new combinations, until you hit your page limit. Which, it should be said, we had a little difficulty putting a page cap on this issue. We kind of went over our initial limit because there was so much great stuff that was coming in and so many pieces that we wanted. But speaking in terms of what it's like to edit: it's super intense to be bringing that togetherness of this set of works into its final shape. And I loved it, but also: I was tired once we were done. Michael: [Laughing] Me too! It is kind of magic how a group of people who don't know each other can be all thinking about the same topic, and be brought together after they've written something on that topic into a physical/conceptual object—an issue of a magazine—and actually begin to feel like a community, mutually inspiring, mutually supporting.

Subscribe via RSS, Google Podcasts, Android, Stitcher, iHeartRadio or on iTunes! Welcome back to the Reckoning Press Podcast! We surface briefly from hiatus to bring you the last piece of fiction from Reckoning 6, Luke Elliott's "What Good is a Sad Backhoe?", read by the author. This is one of the most relentlessly hopeful-in-the-face-of-everything stories in the issue. We are all going to need a lot more like this. I daresay you need it right now. First, may I briefly update you as to Reckoning's status? We won four Utopia awards! Hooray! Congratulations to Priya Chand, Remi Skytterstad, Leah Bobet and Cécile Cristofari! The fundraiser this summer was a success (and will be low-key ongoing)! You donated enough to raise our rates to 10 cents a word in 2023, and to help us qualify for public charity status! Thank you! Read more at reckoning.press/support-us. Our special issue on bodily autonomy, Our Beautiful Reward, edited by Catherine Rockwood and with vulva monster cover art that is just... mwah... is available for preorder as of today! It comes out in ebook on October 16th, and as usual, new content will be appearing online weekly thereafter. And then Reckoning staff will get to work in earnest putting together Reckoning 7, our oceans issue, edited by Priya Chand, Octavia Cade and Tim Fab-Eme, which comes out in the new year. After that: maybe back to a regular podcast. For now: [Bio below.] "What Good is a Sad Backhoe?" by Luke Elliott

Subscribe via RSS, Google Podcasts, Android, Stitcher, iHeartRadio or on iTunes! Hey, yes, it's me, Michael J. DeLuca, and today on the Reckoning podcast I will be reading you what turns out to be the last of our Utopia Award nominees that will appear here, Remi Skytterstad's novelette about the colonization of the Sami people of Norway, "A Song Born". We had six nominations total, but the last two are for Tracy Whiteside's artwork series "Too Hot to Handle", which is awesome but doesn't translate well to audio, and for Reckoning 5 itself, thanks to editors Cecile Cristofari and Leah Bobet, without whom we wouldn't have been able to bring any of this amazing work to light. As with Oyedotun's story last week, though I have had ample help from Remi, I must ask you to bear with my clumsy pronunciation and assume responsibility for any f-ups. Voting for the Utopia Awards is open now through August 21st. Please go vote? You can find the link here at reckoning.press or on twitter. And our fundraiser is still on, and I'm very pleased to announce we have passed the threshold that will allow us to raise payrates to 10c/word, $50/page for poetry. Hooray! And thank you! Now we get to move on to other worthy goals like paying our staff more than the token honorarium they currently receive, and putting out a print edition of Our Beautiful Reward, our forthcoming special issue on bodily autonomy, edited by Catherine Rockwood. We have now laid eyes on the vulva monster Mona Robles made us for the cover, and it is brain-scramblingly good. You can find out how to help make that happen at reckoning.press/support-us. [Bio below.] "A Song Born" by Remi Skytterstad

Subscribe via RSS, Google Podcasts, Android, Stitcher, iHeartRadio or on iTunes! Welcome back to the Reckoning Press Podcast. Today, I, Michael J. DeLuca, am going to read you Oyedotun Damilola Muees' PEN Robert J. Dau Prize Winning and Utopia-nominated story, "All We Have Left Is Ourselves" from Reckoning 5. I going to need to ask you to bear with me. This heartbreaking story about living with the consequences of corporate environmental exploitation is written in a culture and an English vernacular far from my own. I've had help, I've been practicing for this, psyching myself up. Oyedotun says my pronunciation's not bad, it doesn't have to be perfect. All my time reading Nigerian twitter at 5AM instead of writing is about to pay off! Voting for the Utopia Awards is open now through August 21st. We've been podcasting the nominated work over the past few episodes, and next week if all goes well I'll have Remi Skytterstad's nominated novelette, "A Song Born". Please go vote; you can find the link at reckoning.press or on twitter. Our fundraiser is still on, we are oh so close to being able to raise payrates to 10c/word, $50/page for poetry, and I have been out in the woods and fields collecting blackberry prickers in my hands so I can offer Patreon supporters some delicious wild preserves. Don't let my suffering have been in vain! Just kidding, I love it. Anyway, you can read about the fundraiser at reckoning.press/support-us. [Bio below.] All We Have Left Is Ourselves by Oyedotun Damilola Muees

Subscribe via RSS, Google Podcasts, Android, Stitcher, iHeartRadio or on iTunes! Hi, it's me again, Reckoning publisher Michael J. DeLuca, reporting from droughted, heatwave-beset northeastern North America. Is it brutally hot and dry where you are? Is your representative democracy hamstrung by corruption? While you're waiting around for the revolution, cool off with me for a minute or two and listen to Ashley Bao read her effervescent, beachy-apocalyptic poem, "when the coral copies our fashion advice". This is the second of five podcast episodes featuring our Utopia Award nominees from Reckoning 5. The Utopia Awards, organized by Android Press as part of CliFiCon22, will be up for public vote between August 1 - 21, and winners will be announced at the conference in October. We really hope you'll listen and be inspired to vote. I'll include links to the voting pages here once they're live. Also, in case you missed it: we're having a fundraiser! We'd love to pay everyone better and give more folks a chance to feel invested in this undertaking while making more cool stuff and amplifying more radical, revolutionary, restorative ideas. There will be rewards! Take this opportunity to sport some antifascist, pro-environmental justice Reckoning bling. Maybe win a personal critique of your writing from one of our editors. Or encourage our staff to generate some bespoke educational content on how to make the world a more livable place from right in your own backyard or local biosphere preserve. Come on over to reckoning.press/support-us to learn more. [Bio below.] when the coral copies our fashion advice by Ashley Bao

Subscribe via RSS, Google Podcasts, Android, Stitcher, iHeartRadio or on iTunes! Hi, it's me, your nominal host, Michael J. DeLuca. Today on the Reckoning Press podcast we have for you Reckoning 7 nonfiction editor Priya Chand introducing and reading her Utopia-nominated essay, "On the Destruction and Restoration of Habitats". This is the first in a series of what will hopefully be five episodes highlighting work from Reckoning 5 nominated for the inaugural Utopia Awards. The Utopia Awards, organized by Android Press as part of CliFiCon22, will be up for public vote between August 1 - 21, and winners will be announced at the conference in October. We really hope you'll listen and be inspired to vote. I'll include links to the voting pages here once they're live. My pitch for Priya's essay is as follows: she's doing what solarpunk fiction projects, and she's encountering the complexities and conflicts of the real world making that work harder, more fraught. It's the work we all need to be doing. Follow Priya's example. Also, in case you missed it: we're having a fundraiser! We'd love to pay everyone better and give more folks a chance to feel invested in this undertaking while making more cool stuff and amplifying more radical, revolutionary, restorative ideas. There will be rewards! Take this opportunity to sport some antifascist, pro-environmental justice Reckoning bling. Maybe win a personal critique of your writing from one of our editors. Or encourage our staff to generate some bespoke educational content on how to make the world a more livable place from right in your own backyard or local biosphere preserve. Come on over to reckoning.press/support-us to learn more. [Bio below.] "On the Destruction and Restoration of Habitats" by Priya Chand

Subscribe via RSS, Google Podcasts, Android, Stitcher, iHeartRadio or on iTunes. Past episodes are here. Today on the Reckoning Press podcast we have Catherine Rockwood reading Nicole Bade's quiet flash story "Sold for Parts", about surviving, coping, in a world of loss. This piece seems particularly relevant here in the U.S., after a series of Supreme Court decisions that signals a precipitous erosion of rights, hope for safety and well-being and progress towards justice of all kinds, for everyone. I hope listening to it provides you some solace, a little peace. In case you haven't heard, we've just announced a new submission call for a special issue about bodily autonomy and environmental justice, Our Beautiful Reward, edited by none other than Catherine Rockwood. To read that call and submit, you can go to reckoning.press/submit. We're also running our first-ever fundraiser, with the goal of raising payrates for writers, staff, and podcast readers, potentially producing a print edition of Catherine's special issue featuring cover art by Mona Robles, and including cool rewards like pins, t-shirts, personal story critiques from some of our editors past and present, and other weirder fun stuff. Go to reckoning.press/support-us for details. Thank you for listening! [Bios below.] "Sold for Parts" by Nicole Bade

Subscribe via RSS, Google Podcasts, Android, Stitcher, or on iTunes! Hi everyone, I'm Catherine Rockwood, and today on the Reckoning Magazine Podcast I'm going to be reading "The Watcher on the Wall" by Rebecca Bratten Weiss. And this poem is featured in Reckoning 6, which we are very proud of and which hope you will pick up or survey. So the way we'd like to order the podcast is, first I'm going to tell you a little bit about Rebecca, and then I'm going to say a few words about what we really loved about this poem when it came through in the submissions, and then I'm going to read you the poem. Okay, so here goes. (Rebecca's bio appears below.) So on to some thoughts about the poem itself. Here I would just say that what we loved about Rebecca's poem was its clarity and anger, its willingness to fully engage with difficult human relationships with which and by means of which we try to understand the enormous danger and uncertain outcomes of environmental destruction. When climate communicators talk about the need to face difficult things, well, you'll see what this poem does with that. It embodies the process of facing difficult things in a way we found both grave and uncanny, disturbing and galvanizing. And we hope you agree. "The Watcher on the Wall" by Rebecca Bratten Weiss

Subscribe via RSS, Google Podcasts, Android, Stitcher, iHeartRadio or on iTunes! Welcome back to the Reckoning Press podcast! This week we have for you a beautifully wistful performance by Sophia Eilis Singson of "When Teens Turned Into Trees" by Sigrid Marianne Gayagnos. This is the first of two stories that appear in Reckoning 6 about people turning into trees, the other being Wen Yi Lee's "Rooted", which comes out online next month. Both are beautiful and haunting. Both deal with familial love and loss--in particular with a loss, and relinquishing, of control. I'd encourage you to read or listen to them side by side when you have the chance. We also received quite a few other stories on this theme in the submissions! I don't know what it is about this moment--honestly I'm still trying to figure it out, so if you have any thoughts please let me know--but it seems to be an idea whose time has come. Sigrid's story is particularly compelling for me because it provides a desperately needed window on what it must be like to be growing up in a time when the world around us is failing and there seems to be only so much left to be done. Two small pieces of news before we get going. In case you haven't heard, we've just announced a new submission call for a special issue about bodily autonomy and environmental justice, Our Beautiful Reward, edited by Catherine Rockwood. To read that call and submit, you can go to reckoning.press/submit. Next week we'll be announcing our first-ever fundraiser, with the goal of raising payrates for writers, staff, and podcast readers, and including cool rewards like pins, t-shirts, personal story critiques from some of our editors past and present, and other weirder fun stuff. Please check back for details. Thank you for listening! [Bio below.] "When Teens Turned Into Trees" by Sigrid Marianne Gayangos

Subscribe via RSS, Google Podcasts, Android, Stitcher, iHeartRadio or on iTunes! Welcome back to the Reckoning Press podcast. It's been ages, but we're ramping up to a lot of cool new stuff in the coming year and beyond, including lots more podcasts, a fundraiser to increase payrates to 10c/word, $50/page for poetry and pay staff better too, t-shirts, pins, who knows what else. Homebrew recipes. Foraging instructions. Bespoke lectures about culling invasive species. We're flush with ideas, as we should be, but we're always looking for more. Drop us a line if you've got any? Reckoning Press is a US-based nonprofit; we flourish under your regard. Please support us on Patreon, consider donating directly, buy a book or an ebook, read our contributors' beautiful work for free online, and submit! We're always open to submissions, we're always excited in particular to read work from Black, brown, Indigenous, queer, disabled, trans, or otherwise marginalized poets, writers and artists. You can find all this and more on our website at: reckoning.press/support-us. You can subscribe to this podcast on iTunes or by visiting reckoning.press/audio. Thank you very much for listening. Hi folks, Joey Ayoub, the swift-talking and firily intellectual host of the excellently named political SF podcast The Fire These Times, asked me if I would record this essay for him. He's devoted quite a bit of time on the podcast to the theory and efficacy of solarpunk, and this is great and necessary work--as you may know I am extremely enthusiastic about criticism of solarpunk--I feel like the more critical thinking we devote to the direction we're all taking in imagining a livable, equitable, practicable future, the better chance we have of pulling it off. I had not until this moment thought of this essay, "On Having a Kid in the Climate Apocalypse", as part of solarpunk. I wrote it as the editorial for Reckoning 2 back in 2017, when I was still the editor and not merely the publisher of Reckoning, but even then, I'd been thinking of Reckoning as a counterpoint to solarpunk. A journal of creative writing about environmental justice. A practical, constructive approach to imagining the future, a repudiation of climate denialism, fatalism, ecofascism, an acknowledgement of and focus on the feelings all this evokes for us now, in the present. That's what this essay is. And I dearly hope that solarpunk has adapted and will continue to adapt to encompass all that. Because we need a big tent. A tent big enough to hold the world? My kid is almost five now. Hopefully that means I've got some distance from the feelings that drove me to write this, but I should warn you that every other time I have attempted to read this aloud has involved tears.

Subscribe via RSS, Google Podcasts, Android, Stitcher, iHeartRadio or on iTunes! Welcome back to the Reckoning Press podcast. It's been ages, but we're ramping up to a lot of cool new stuff in the coming year and beyond, including lots more podcasts, a fundraiser to increase payrates to 10c/word, $50/page for poetry and pay staff better too, t-shirts, pins, who knows what else. Homebrew recipes. Foraging instructions. Bespoke lectures about culling invasive species. We're flush with ideas, as we should be, but we're always looking for more. Drop us a line if you've got any? Reckoning Press is a US-based nonprofit; we flourish under your regard. Please support us on Patreon, consider donating directly, buy a book or an ebook, read our contributors' beautiful work for free online, and submit! We're always open to submissions, we're always excited in particular to read work from Black, brown, Indigenous, queer, disabled, trans, or otherwise marginalized poets, writers and artists. You can find all this and more on our website at: reckoning.press/support-us. You can subscribe to this podcast on iTunes or by visiting reckoning.press/audio. Thank you very much for listening. Today's episode has E. G. Condé reading his own story from Reckoning 6, "Somnambulist", a fever dream of radically revisionist postcolonial Indigenous futurism—what he calls "Taínofuturism". As I understand it, this is E. G.'s first piece of professionally published fiction, but I defy you to detect that in the utter confidence with which he delivers this performance. I don't want to risk breaking the spell, so I'll let his words speak for themselves. [Bio below.] "Somnambulist" by E. G. Condé

Subscribe via RSS, Google Podcasts, Android, Stitcher, iHeartRadio or on iTunes! Today I'm going to read you an essay by Paulo da Costa, "Enclosures", from Reckoning 6. I think of this piece as a new perspective in an ongoing conversation that started, for me, with Kate Schapira's essay "On Political Change, Climate Change, and the Choice to Not Have Children" that appeared in Catapult in 2017, and my editorial piece in Reckoning 2, "On Having a Kid in the Climate Apocalypse" (which just ran in audio form on the excellent Lebanese political podcast The Fire These Times, and which we're planning on re-running here sometime in the next couple weeks). It's a conversation that leads from all the young people all over the world who are throwing themselves out in front of the extractive capitalist machine, begging for a future, and asks how we, the older generation, parents and potential parents and caregivers and people who love children everywhere, are to prepare them for this future we and our parents and ancestors have made for them. How do we adapt the values and skills and ways of understanding the natural world that nurtured us which were instilled in us by older generations in such a way as to honor what they taught us but not let our children be bound, doomed, by all the parts of that which cannot sustain. It's a long, hard conversation, and I'm very grateful to Paulo for continuing it. I also think this works brilliantly as a followup to the discussion Juliana Roth, E.G. Condé and Priya Chand had here the other week about animal rights and consciousness. I should warn you that this essay is full of some quite vivid cruelty to animals. Also, I should prepare you for the fact that my foreign language background is in Spanish; paulo speaks Portugese and there is a great deal of Portugese in this story which I am going to muck up considerably. Thank you for bearing with me. [Bio below.] "Enclosures" by paulo da costa

Subscribe via RSS, Google Podcasts, Android, Stitcher, iHeartRadio or on iTunes! Hi everyone, my name's Catherine, and today for the Reckoning Press Podcast I'm going to be reading you the poem "Dramatis Personae of the Apocalypse", which is a poem that appears in Reckoning 6, and it is by the author Avra Margariti. This is a poem with particularly dark content, I don't think Avra would argue with that—as you will see when we get to her bio, she is an author who works deeply in horror, and she has an entire collection of horror poetry which is now out from Weasel Press and is titled The Saint of Witches, and if you like what I'm about to read you, you should go check it out. I think one of the things that allows me to read this poem and not descend too far into the darkness (which is not my preferred location, because I'm kind of a scaredy-cat) is that it's very cleverly structured to be understood as a self-contained short play, a tragedy: and that's where we get the title, the dramatis personae or players of the play, who are going to take us into this content but then also let us go from it, when the action is over. And we can kind of imagine that the poem is, like, a short interlude: it's really difficult stuff, but it's also formal, stylized, there's a sense that this is something—an entertainment, a frightening one—which is being set to the side of what we might call realism. So even for me, generally a non-horror-reader because I'm so good at freaking myself out without anybody else's help, I can work with that: and I'm grateful for the vivid starkly lit scenes that Avra shows us here, their argument that in fact there are formal methods for talking about the things that frighten us. I'm going to proceed to Avra's bio and then I'll read you the poem. [Bio below.] Dramatis Personae of the Apocalypse by Avra Margariti

Subscribe via RSS, Google Podcasts, Android, Stitcher, iHeartRadio or on iTunes! Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the Reckoning Press Podcast. It's me, Michael J. DeLuca. I'm here for a very special experiment; we're going to try our first roundtable. I have here with me Priya Chand, E.G. Condé and Juliana Roth, and they're going to talk about animal consciousness, animal rights, and human rights. [Bios below.] Take it away, Juliana!

Subscribe via RSS, Google Podcasts, Android, Stitcher, iHeartRadio or on iTunes! Welcome back to the Reckoning Press podcast. It's been ages, but we're ramping up to a lot of cool new stuff in the coming year and beyond, including lots more podcasts, a fundraiser to increase payrates to 10c/word, $50/page for poetry and pay staff better too, t-shirts, pins, who knows what else. Homebrew recipes. Foraging instructions. Bespoke lectures about culling invasive species. We're flush with ideas, as we should be, but we're always looking for more. Drop us a line if you've got any? Reckoning Press is a US-based nonprofit; we flourish under your regard. Please support us on Patreon, consider donating directly, buy a book or an ebook, read our contributors' beautiful work for free online, and submit! We're always open to submissions, we're always excited in particular to read work from Black, brown, Indigenous, queer, disabled, trans, or otherwise marginalized poets, writers and artists. You can find all this and more on our website at: reckoning.press/support-us. You can subscribe to this podcast on iTunes or by visiting reckoning.press/audio. Thank you very much for listening. Today I'm going to read you Tim Fab-Eme's poem "Heat". [Bio below.] He is also the current poetry editor for Reckoning 7! So for those of you interested in submitting, this is a chance to get a window on the inside of his head. Tim may be the writer who's work has appeared most often in Reckoning's pages. Three different Reckoning editors, including me, have selected his work for publication. I hope you can imagine how delighted I was when he agreed to edit for us. His writing style, the impact it has on me, is hard to quantify, though I keep trying. There's an intensity to it, a personal closeness that comes from an incredibly narrow-focused first-person POV and always leaves me fairly devastated. He's obviously interested in form but not bound by it, his lines have a lyricality that comes from rhythmic agility, surprising internal rhyme, and are always informed by his startlingly close observation of people. There's so much here! I'm afraid I'm too much of a fanboy at this point to articulate any of it much more coherently than that, and with respect to this poem, I think anything else I say will be doing the words themselves a disservice. So now I'm going let the poem speak for itself. Heat by Tim Fab-Eme

Subscribe via RSS, Google Podcasts, Android, Stitcher, iHeartRadio or on iTunes! Welcome back to the Reckoning Press podcast. It's been ages, but we're ramping up to a lot of cool new stuff in the coming year and beyond, including lots more podcasts, a fundraiser to increase payrates to 10c/word, $50/page for poetry and pay staff better too, t-shirts, pins, who knows what else. Homebrew recipes. Foraging instructions. Bespoke lectures about culling invasive species. We're flush with ideas, as we should be, but we're always looking for more. Drop us a line if you've got any? Reckoning Press is a US-based nonprofit; we flourish under your regard. Please support us on Patreon, consider donating directly, buy a book or an ebook, read our contributors' beautiful work for free online, and submit! We're always open to submissions, we're always excited in particular to read work from Black, brown, Indigenous, queer, disabled, trans, or otherwise marginalized poets, writers and artists. You can find all this and more on our website at: reckoning.press/support-us. You can subscribe to this podcast on iTunes or by visiting reckoning.press/audio. Thank you very much for listening. This week we're taking a break from Reckoning 6 content to bring you a flash back to a story from Reckoning 5: "The Talking Bears of Greikengkul" by Sandy Parsons, read by the author herself. This is a weird, creepy story that blurs the line between human and animal and examines some of the ethical implications. [Bio below.] The Talking Bears of Greikengkul by Sandy Parsons

Subscribe via RSS, Google Podcasts, Android, Stitcher, iHeartRadio or on iTunes! Welcome back to the Reckoning Press podcast. It's been ages, but we're ramping up to a lot of cool new stuff in the coming year and beyond, including lots more podcasts, a fundraiser to increase payrates to 10c/word, $50/page for poetry and pay staff better too, t-shirts, pins, who knows what else. Homebrew recipes. Foraging instructions. Bespoke lectures about culling invasive species. We're flush with ideas, as we should be, but we're always looking for more. Drop us a line if you've got any? Reckoning Press is a US-based nonprofit; we flourish under your regard. Please support us on Patreon, consider donating directly, buy a book or an ebook, read our contributors' beautiful work for free online, and submit! We're always open to submissions, we're always excited in particular to read work from Black, brown, Indigenous, queer, disabled, trans, or otherwise marginalized poets, writers and artists. You can find all this and more on our website at: reckoning.press/support-us. You can subscribe to this podcast on iTunes or by visiting reckoning.press/audio. Thank you very much for listening. This week's episode features Nancy Lynée Woo reading her poem "When someone says the world is a fish" from Reckoning 6. You're going to wish you had Catherine Rockwood here to help ground you in this delightful, funny, nesting puzzle of a poem, but she's off for a bit, so you're stuck with me. I'll make it quick. The way I read it, this is a poem about metonymy, the endlessly regressing act of replacement that we're always performing when we engage in language. We use language to situate ourselves in the world, in nature, but each time we interpose a word describing a thing—a silk worm, a rat, a wisteria—we distance ourselves from that thing by introducing another layer of interpretation. It doesn't take many iterations of a poem interpreting a children's science book interpreting science interpreting nature before we arrive at something that feels and works a lot like decadence. How do we find our way back? Can we? What gets lost on the way? [Bio below.] When someone says the world is a fish by Nancy Lynée Woo

Subscribe via RSS, Google Podcasts, Android, Stitcher, iHeartRadio or on iTunes! Welcome back to the Reckoning Press podcast. It's been ages, but we're ramping up to a lot of cool new stuff in the coming year and beyond, including lots more podcasts, a fundraiser to increase payrates to 10c/word, $50/page for poetry and pay staff better too, t-shirts, pins, who knows what else. Homebrew recipes. Foraging instructions. Bespoke lectures about culling invasive species. We're flush with ideas, as we should be, but we're always looking for more. Drop us a line if you've got any? Reckoning Press is a US-based nonprofit; we flourish under your regard. Please support us on Patreon, consider donating directly, buy a book or an ebook, read our contributors' beautiful work for free online, and submit! We're always open to submissions, we're always excited in particular to read work from Black, brown, Indigenous, queer, disabled, trans, or otherwise marginalized poets, writers and artists. You can find all this and more on our website at: reckoning.press/support-us. You can subscribe to this podcast on iTunes or by visiting reckoning.press/audio. Thank you very much for listening. Hi everyone, my name is Catherine Rockwood, I'm a staff member at Reckoning Magazine, and today I'll be reading and discussing two poems from issue six: “The Loss of the Moon,” by Ken Poyner, and “Snuffing the Night Candles,” by Scott T. Hutchison. Ken Poyner's poem is already up and free to read at https://reckoning.press, in case you want to follow along or go back to re-read it. Scott T. Hutchison's “Snuffing the Night Candles” will be released on the website on May 8th. These poems speak so effectively to each other, and to the work of the magazine, that we decided to discuss them in the same episode. I think probably the way this will work best is if I read you the poems first and then add some thoughts afterward. So, here goes, starting with author bios. [Bios below.] "The Loss of the Moon" by Ken Poyner ["Snuffing the Night Candles" by Scott T. Hutchison will be available to read for free online on May 8th and in print on July 1st; if you'd rather not wait, get the ebook now.] So, after listening to them, you probably have some thoughts about these poems: and the different levels of immediacy they bring to a shared consciousness of being present in a time of loss. “Snuffing the Night Candles” is more abstracted, its narrator's depiction of his own experience more constrained by a sense of personal isolation, though the poem reaches out at the end for something I'll talk more about in a minute. In Ken Poyner's poem, the narrator is always thinking about making it back home to his wife—temporarily isolated, but striving for connection. His habitual yet threatened return to his own home and partner is connected in the poem to the recurrence or return of things we depend on in the natural world: the changeful yet reliable moon, the changing yet predictable tides. So when the bottom falls out of all of it, in the poem, it's a huge shock. It feels personal, as it's meant to. “The Loss of the Moon” is so effective, I think, partly because it activates for the reader a lifetime of sense-memories of watching the moon from a moving car, or a moving vehicle of some kind. And in that scenario, you can't fully keep track of what's in the night sky, because your visual orientation changes all the time. The moon goes behind trees, you go behind a hill, there's a truck—etc. But, we learn to live with this (mostly)—kids don't like it, at first, but they get used to it: they (we) get to the point of yes, there's the moon, (wow, the moon!) and I'm in a car again, and even if that means sometimes I can't see her, I trust she'll recur eventually. Until she fucking doesn't. Until it turns out her visual instability of presence, which we had accommodated ourselves to by constructing a faith in the eternal return of the moon,

Subscribe via RSS, Google Podcasts, Android, Stitcher, iHeartRadio or on iTunes! Welcome back to the Reckoning Press podcast. It's been ages, but we're ramping up to a lot of cool new stuff in the coming year and beyond, including lots more podcasts, a fundraiser to increase payrates to 10c/word, $50/page for poetry and pay staff better too, t-shirts, pins, who knows what else. Homebrew recipes. Foraging instructions. Bespoke lectures about culling invasive species. We're flush with ideas, as we should be, but we're always looking for more. Drop us a line if you've got any? Reckoning Press is a US-based nonprofit; we flourish under your regard. Please support us on Patreon, consider donating directly, buy a book or an ebook, read our contributors' beautiful work for free online, and submit! We're always open to submissions, we're always excited in particular to read work from Black, brown, Indigenous, queer, disabled, trans, or otherwise marginalized poets, writers and artists. You can find all this and more on our website at: reckoning.press/support-us. You can subscribe to this podcast on iTunes or by visiting reckoning.press/audio. Thank you very much for listening. Hi folks, it's me again, your host, Michael J. DeLuca. I'm about to read you Nicasio Reed's story from Reckoning 6, "Babang Luksa". It is a beautiful, quiet, sad story about family and facing the real consequences of hard choices. I don't think you will find your time with it ill-spent. It's extremely evocative for me, as an Italian-American from a big family on the East Coast I don't get to see very often. But I have great confidence in its broader applicability, because it's impossible not to see the incredibly skillful hand with which Nico has sculpted these characters and sense that he's looked them in the eye. And if you're not having to make these kinds of choices already--well. Don't let me jinx it. But it's good to be prepared. [Bio below.] "Babang Luksa" by Nicasio Andres Reed

Subscribe via RSS, Google Podcasts, Android, Stitcher, iHeartRadio or on iTunes! Welcome back to the Reckoning Press podcast. It's been ages, but we're ramping up to a lot of cool new stuff in the coming year and beyond, including lots more podcasts, a fundraiser to increase payrates to 10c/word, $50/page for poetry and pay staff better too, t-shirts, pins, who knows what else. Homebrew recipes. Foraging instructions. Bespoke lectures about culling invasive species. We're flush with ideas, as we should be, but we're always looking for more. Drop us a line if you've got any? Reckoning Press is a US-based nonprofit; we flourish under your regard. Please support us on Patreon, consider donating directly, buy a book or an ebook, read our contributors' beautiful work for free online, and submit! We're always open to submissions, we're always excited in particular to read work from Black, brown, Indigenous, queer, disabled, trans, or otherwise marginalized poets, writers and artists. You can find all this and more on our website at: reckoning.press/support-us. You can subscribe to this podcast on iTunes or by visiting reckoning.press/audio. Thank you very much for listening. Hi, everyone. My name is Catherine Rockwood, and today for the Reckoning Magazine Podcast, I'm going to be reading "Move, Mountain, Move" by the author Russell Nichols. So, I'll begin with some commentary on the poem and then tell you a little bit more about Russell Nichols and then read you the poem itself. What affects me when I read this poem is its insistence that we can make something new and better—something external to, and common to, all of us—from our climate grief. And Russell Nichols has used old images, Biblical images, to show us how to imagine this something better. You'll notice there's a mention of mustard seeds in the poem, confirming its close literary relationship with the Book of Matthew chapter 17:20, where Jesus says to his disciples “If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place; and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible unto you.” A mustard seed is proverbially tiny, and yet the plant that emerges from the seed is tall—so through this simile we understand, both in the Bible and in Nichols's poem, that if you have even a little bit of germinal matter to start with, you can turn it into something very meaningful and expansive indeed. In the Bible, the germinal matter is faith; in Nichols's poem, it is grief. We must start there, he argues, but we do not end there. If you're a Reckoning reader and subscriber, you probably agree. When Nichols writes, “there is no relief/ without release,” I think of how often the speaker (or singer) of the Psalms mentions weeping, and the necessity of weeping, in times of trouble. As the King James version of Psalm 6:6 has it: “I am weary with my groaning; all the night make I my bed to swim; I water my couch with my tears.” And this is how we communicate our grief and make it manifest—but in Nichols's poem, it is also how we build. Here is a little more about the author. [Bio below.] Russell Nichols, “Move, Mountain, Move”

Subscribe via RSS, Google Podcasts, Android, Stitcher, iHeartRadio or on iTunes! Welcome back to the Reckoning Press podcast. It's been ages, but we're ramping up to a lot of cool new stuff in the coming year and beyond, including lots more podcasts, a fundraiser to increase payrates to 10c/word, $50/page for poetry and pay staff better too, t-shirts, pins, who knows what else. Homebrew recipes. Foraging instructions. Bespoke lectures about culling invasive species. We're flush with ideas, as we should be, but we're always looking for more. Drop us a line if you've got any? Reckoning Press is a US-based nonprofit; we flourish under your regard. Please support us on Patreon, consider donating directly, buy a book or an ebook, read our contributors' beautiful work for free online, and submit! We're always open to submissions, we're always excited in particular to read work from Black, brown, Indigenous, queer, disabled, trans, or otherwise marginalized poets, writers and artists. You can find all this and more on our website at: reckoning.press/support-us. You can subscribe to this podcast on iTunes or by visiting reckoning.press/audio. Thank you very much for listening. Hey, it's me, your sometime host, Michael J. DeLuca. I'm going to read you a short story, "Gills" by Nicholas Clute, from Reckoning 6. If you'd like to read along with me, you can, it's free online at reckoning.press/gills. The author's extremely succinct bio goes like this. [Bio below.] First I'm going to tell you a little about why I love this story. In it, you will meet two brothers, Allas and Young. Their relationship, the bickering, loving, supportive, competitive relatability of it, is what drew me through from beginning to end. I've got younger sisters who I desperately want to make it through this crisis, and the next one, and the one after that. Whenever I get to the end of a submission and find myself surprised it went so quickly, that's a pretty good sign I'm going to want to publish it. This was like that. It's 4,200 words and it felt like half that. We all thought it worked particularly well juxtaposed with Nicasio Reed's story "Babang Luksa", which is also about family amid risen seas and I encourage you to check out. The other thing about "Gills" is the surreality, for which I am a sucker. This is a post-collapse future that's just weird enough I can inhabit it without dragging along all the dread and anticipatory grief and guilt I'll be bringing with me to the real future. And it's such a relief! Here's hoping it does the same for you. "Gills" by Nicholas Clute

Subscribe via RSS, Google Podcasts, Android, Stitcher, iHeartRadio or on iTunes! Hi everyone, my name is Catherine Rockwood and today on the Reckoning Magazine Podcast, I'll be reading "water-logged roots" by Cislyn Smith, which is a poem that's featured in Reckoning 6. We want to start a practice on the podcast of talking a little bit about what we loved about the pieces that are in the magazine. And so I'm just going to say a little bit about what particularly draws me to "water-logged roots" as a poem and how I see it applying to climate justice, which is our theme as a publication. When I first read "water-logged roots" when it came through in the submissions, one of the first things I was struck by is how skillfully it uses visual images of a world turned upside-down and then sort of enchants the images so they become part of a knowledge-gathering dialogue. And this is a dialogue with the dryad in the poem, which is just, like, it's so wonderful! But this dialogue really moves the narrator from the place where she first stands, outside her family home in the aftermath of a hurricane, to a place where she can imagine taking a next step that doesn't leave her as stuck in where she is and what she's doing. And it's not a decision without cost, but it's an extremely pivotal moment and an adaptive moment. So again, personally speaking I loved the way Cislyn's poem took an image of climate destruction and began to think about it in very compelling adaptive ways, tying all this to extremely striking imagery. So here we go. We'll start with Cislyn's biography. (Bio below.) "water-logged roots" by Cislyn Smith

Subscribe via RSS, Google Podcasts, Android, Stitcher, iHeartRadio or on iTunes! Welcome back to the Reckoning Press podcast. It's been ages, but we're ramping up to a lot of cool new stuff in the coming year and beyond, including lots more podcasts, a fundraiser to increase payrates to 10c/word, $50/page for poetry and pay staff better too, t-shirts, pins, who knows what else. Homebrew recipes. Foraging instructions. Bespoke lectures about culling invasive species. We're flush with ideas, as we should be, but we're always looking for more. Drop us a line if you've got any? Reckoning Press is a US-based nonprofit; we flourish under your regard. Please support us on Patreon, consider donating directly, buy a book or an ebook, read our contributors' beautiful work for free online, and submit! We're always open to submissions, we're always excited in particular to read work from Black, brown, Indigenous, queer, disabled, trans, or otherwise marginalized poets, writers and artists. You can find all this and more on our website at: reckoning.press/support-us. You can subscribe to this podcast on iTunes or by visiting reckoning.press/audio. Thank you very much for listening. Hi, everyone, my name's Catherine Rockwood, and today for the Reckoning Magazine Podcast, I'm going to be reading you "Surprise" by Tom Barlow, which is featured in Reckoning 6.

Subscribe via RSS or on iTunes! Welcome back to the Reckoning Press podcast! Reckoning is a nonprofit, annual journal of creative writing on environmental justice. I’m Michael J. DeLuca, publisher. Reckoning 4 comes out the first of the year, which is in less than two weeks! In the meantime, we have for you a reading … Continue reading "Podcast Episode 6: Vivian, Radiant"

Subscribe via RSS or on iTunes! Welcome back to the Reckoning Press podcast! Reckoning is a nonprofit, annual journal of creative writing on environmental justice. I’m Michael J. DeLuca, publisher. Tomorrow, September 1st, we raise our rates for prose to 8 cents a word! Thank you profusely if you’re among those who helped us accomplish … Continue reading "Podcast Episode 5: Fuck You Pay Me"

Subscribe via RSS or on iTunes! Welcome to the Reckoning Press podcast. Reckoning is a nonprofit, annual journal of creative writing on environmental justice. I’m Michael J. DeLuca, publisher and sometime editor. Today I am very pleased to share with you Marie Vibbert’s reading of “The Eater of Dirt”, her flash story from Reckoning 3, … Continue reading "Podcast Episode 4: The Eater of Dirt"

Subscribe via RSS or on iTunes! Welcome to the Reckoning Press podcast. Reckoning is a nonprofit, annual journal of creative writing on environmental justice. I’m Michael J. DeLuca, publisher, and also the editor of Reckoning 2. For our third episode, here’s an interview I did with Phil Merkel of WUSB Stonybrook in Long Island back … Continue reading "Podcast Episode 3: Michael J. DeLuca Interviewed on Natural Alternatives"

Subscribe via RSS or on iTunes! Welcome to the Reckoning Press podcast. Reckoning is a nonprofit, annual journal of creative writing on environmental justice. This podcast will feature very occasional poetry, fiction and essays from the journal, plus interviews with the authors. I’m Michael J. DeLuca, publisher, and also the editor of Reckoning 2. This … Continue reading "Podcast Episode 2: Lanny Boykin Rises Up Singing"

Subscribe via RSS or on iTunes! Welcome to the Reckoning Press podcast. Reckoning is a nonprofit, annual journal of creative writing on environmental justice. This podcast will feature very occasional poetry, fiction and essays from the journal, plus interviews with the authors. I’m Michael J. DeLuca, publisher, and also the editor of Reckoning 2. For … Continue reading "Podcast Episode 1: Delta Marsh"