Reckoning Press Podcast

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Welcome back to the Reckoning Press podcast! It's me, your erstwhile host and publisher, Michael J. DeLuca. We've had some exciting news here, which, in that frustrating way that seems unique to publishing, I don't feel at liberty to share with you yet. But please check back in a month?

In the meantime, here we have for you Bernie Jean Schiebeling's short story, "The Donor", from Reckoning 8, read for you by the author themself. This is a quietly intense story about the commodification of identity and the gulf of misunderstanding that lies between colonizer and colonized. It's an important story, I feel like, and it has stuck with me. Here's hoping it works the same for you.

This episode was recorded and produced by our new audio editor, Aaron Kling.

"The Donor" by Bernie Jean Schiebeling

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Welcome back to the Reckoning Press Podcast! Hey folks, it's me, Michael J. DeLuca, publisher, here with the exciting news that not only do we have a new episode for you, featuring Casey June Wolf reading Danielle Jorgensen Murray's beautiful, Angela Carter-inflected story "Riverine" from Reckoning 5, but we've got a new audio editor and future host, Aaron Kling, whose work you will be hearing here, and which also means hopefully we will have more new episodes coming soon!

So I've got three bios to read you. First, just let me remind you that Reckoning is always open to submissions, and we're currently reading for Reckoning 9, which is a general, unthemed issue—if it's creative writing on environmental justice, we want to read it. ¡Y gracias a nuevo miembro de nuestro departamento editorial Guillermo Mendoza, ahorita tenemos directrices para envíos en español!

Thank you very much for listening, and I hope you enjoy!

"Riverine" by Danielle Jorgensen Murray

Casey's coda: My name is Casey June Wolf, and I chose to read this story because it is so beautiful. It's beautifully written. The way she uses language is enchanting, to me, but it's also beautifully understood. The characters, their experience of the world, their difficulty in understanding, or even seeking to understand, each other. There is still a lot of mystery in the story for me. I guess I'm going to have to listen to it next.

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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Today on the Reckoning Press podcast we have Catherine Rockwood reading NIB'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 NIB

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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