Reckoning Press Podcast

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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

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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

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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

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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,