Reckoning Press Podcast

Reckoning Press Podcast

creative writing on environmental justice read less
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Episodes

Podcast Epsiode 29: Catherine Rockwood on Editing Our Beautiful Reward
Mar 6 2023
Podcast Epsiode 29: Catherine Rockwood on Editing Our Beautiful Reward
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.
Podcast Episode 28: What Good Is a Sad Backhoe?
Oct 9 2022
Podcast Episode 28: What Good Is a Sad Backhoe?
Subscribe via RSS, Google Podcasts, Android, Stitcher, iHeartRadio, Apple or Amazon. 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
Podcast Episode 27: A Song Born
Aug 10 2022
Podcast Episode 27: A Song Born
Subscribe via RSS, Google Podcasts, Android, Stitcher, iHeartRadio, Apple or Amazon. 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
Podcast Episode 26: All We Have Left Is Ourselves
Aug 3 2022
Podcast Episode 26: All We Have Left Is Ourselves
Subscribe via RSS, Google Podcasts, Android, Stitcher, iHeartRadio, Apple or Amazon. 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
Podcast Episode 25: when the coral copies our fashion advice
Jul 28 2022
Podcast Episode 25: when the coral copies our fashion advice
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
Podcast Episode 24: On the Destruction and Restoration of Habitats
Jul 21 2022
Podcast Episode 24: On the Destruction and Restoration of Habitats
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
Podcast Episode 21: When Teens Turned Into Trees
Jun 29 2022
Podcast Episode 21: When Teens Turned Into Trees
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
Podcast Episode 20: On Having a Kid in the Climate Apocalypse
Jun 22 2022
Podcast Episode 20: On Having a Kid in the Climate Apocalypse
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.