Author: Michael J. DeLuca

A brown oak leaf floating in a black glacial inkpot carved out of granite.
Publisher Michael J. DeLuca’s short fiction has been appearing since 2005 in markets such as Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Mythic Delirium and Apex. His novella Night Roll was a finalist for the Crawford Award in 2020, and his debut novel The Jaguar Mask came out from Stelliform Press in August, 2024. He lives in the rapidly suburbifying post-industrial woodlands north of Detroit with wife, kid, cats, plants and microbes. For more, try his website: The Mossy Skull.

One More Call for Support

I hate asking for money. We asked for money in 2022 and it was rough: a lot of work, a lot of feeling sorry for pressuring people in those ridiculously hard times. But we managed, and it let us raise pay rates and put out a special issue we’re proud of.

These times are harder. I can only imagine they’ll get harder still. It seems almost impossible to pick a place to start with environmental justice from which you can’t grab on and shake and watch the whole thing spread out below it in a beautiful, hideous umbrella pattern, but the catastrophic stratification of wealth in the hands of the worst sure is one of those. The corporate industrialist billionaires hoard more and more to themselves and there’s less for everyone else.

We’ve been boosting a lot of calls for help. From Atthis Arts, from folks fundraising for Gaza aid. We helped raise some money for Gaza aid. We helped raise some money so Martins Deep could go to grad school. There are so many more people in need, and so many ecofascists taking away what they need rather than helping. It’s disheartening, but we carry on. Buoyed up, maybe, occasionally, by a beautiful piece of writing.

Anyway: since our 2022 fundraiser, our Patreon supporters have very gradually been tapering off, as is wont to happen, we gather, when everybody’s in crisis and we haven’t been asking loudly for help. After the fundraiser we got up above $200 per month—which may not sound like much, but it was enough. This month, we took in just over $160. Which may not sound like much less! But it’s getting close to the point where we’re going to be struggling to be able to keep up with our new, increased payrate—which is the opposite of what we want!

So please: if you’re able, if you’re not among those needing help with rent or escape from a dangerous situation or basic survival, if you’re not overwhelmed by the volume of calls for help out there, would you consider donating a little to Reckoning?

You could do that by supporting us on Patreon or by preordering Reckoning 8 or buying a past issue.

Or, instead, you could donate to any of a myriad of other worthy arts and aid organizations and individuals the world over who are in need, including any of the following:

We’ll be incredibly grateful either way. Thank you.

On Ongoing Prejudice in the SFF Community and What Is to Be Done

Let me begin by repeating that Reckoning is actively seeking work by marginalized writers and artists, we would love to publish more work in translation, we pay translators the same rate we pay authors (10 cents a word for prose, $50 per page for poetry and art), and though we are not currently able to review or translate work written in Chinese, Arabic, Russian, and a myriad of other languages, we can and do read in English, French, Swedish, and Spanish, and we get excited every single time we encounter in our submissions a new piece of translated work, or any work from part of the world or from a perspective we’ve never encountered before. We are very lucky to be able to say we’ve now got a native Spanish speaker on staff, who will hopefully open us up to many more of those experiences and enable us to publish even more diverse work.

Reckoning is a non-profit journal of creative writing on environmental justice. Lifting up and celebrating voices marginalized and shut out by the uninterrogated imperialist and extractive-capitalist mainstream is environmental justice. The concentration of wealth, which is the operating principle of colonialism, also concentrates agency and the power to be heard in the hands of wealthy and overwhelmingly white perpetrators of colonialism. The hegemony of the fossil fuel and plastics industries, the destruction of the earth’s forests, the depletion of the earth’s oceans, the deterioration of public health, and the spread of fascism are the exact and direct results of this. It’s our mission to resist and countermand those forces.

Apropos of the disaster that was the Hugo awards administration for 2023, it feels imperative to say out loud a few things about the science fiction and fantasy field as a whole, of which we’re proud to consider ourselves a tiny but vital part.

We perceive the dangerous potential, as daily worse things seem to come out about the behavior of a Hugo admin committee responsible for hurting so many great authors and the entire fandom of China—not to mention individual humans in their immediate vicinity—of writing them off as irrevocably evil outliers and therefore not representative of problems in our field. We don’t want this latest crisis to overshadow the previous, ongoing crisis or the one before that. That the Hugo committee has provided a scapegoat to whom consequences can be applied cannot be allowed to obscure the fact that, for one glaring example, the insidious shutting-out of Palestinian voices is still going on. There are so many compounded crises, anyone can be forgiven for not addressing every one all the time loud enough so nobody else forgets. Individually, we must choose one injustice at a time to address, with our voices, our donations, our votes, because otherwise we’ll all implode from the pressure. But we can’t let the latest injustice blot out the rest.

How do individual people get to act this terribly? They get encouraged. If they’re entitled white men, that encouragement need amount to nothing more than looking the other way. How do individual people get encouraged to be better? By positive peer pressure. By example.

The antidote to bureaucratic power-clutching and uninterrogated fascist creep, like the problem, is manifold. We need juried awards with juries of accountable, well-intentioned people empaneled by accountable, well-intentioned people. The Ignyte awards are one such. So are the Shirleys. Support them, care about them, pay attention to who wins. Our fellow Detroit-based indie press Atthis Arts bent over backwards this past year rescuing an anthology of Ukrainian SFF, Embroidered Worlds, from the slag heap. Pay attention to what they’re doing. Lift them up. We need magazines like Strange Horizons (who published a Palestinian special issue in 2021), Fiyah (who did one in 2022), Clarkesworld (who have long been in the vanguard of championing translated work and translators), Omenana, and khōréō (their year 4 fundraiser ends 2/29). We need magazines whose editors and staff are actively listening to, seeking out, boosting, celebrating, paying—and translating, paying, and celebrating translators of—Chinese, Taiwanese, Palestinian, Yemeni, Ukrainian, Russian, Israeli, Indigenous, Aboriginal, Congolese, Nigerian, disabled, neurodivergent, queer, and trans voices. Do we in that litany miss anybody currently getting shut out? Undoubtedly. This work is unending. We choose to keep at it.

The Hugo admins aren’t the only ones failing at this. The PEN Awards have recently been actively lifting up pro-genocide voices and suppressing Palestinian voices. A story we published, “All We Have Left Is Ourselves” by Oyedotun Damilola Muees, won a PEN Award for emerging writers in 2021. How can the administrators of an award designed specifically to remedy the way the publishing establishment has systematically ignored marginalized voices side with imperialism? There’s an open letter calling the PEN organization to task for this. Reckoning is among those who have signed it.

Over my eight year tenure as publisher of Reckoning, I’ve heard complaints from a number of authors about a number of fiction markets which shall here remain nameless who insist on paying authors with PayPal or not at all. PayPal recently auto-suspended Reckoning’s account because we used their service to pay a Palestinian author for their work (and then unsuspended us only after we called in the BBB and CPA, a tactic we glowingly recommend). They also have routinely shut us out from paying Mexican, Russian, Nigerian and Bangladeshi authors. Do we then throw up our hands and not pay those authors? No, we find another service, we pay the fees, we jump through the hoops until they get paid.

Our contributors routinely tell us what an exceptionally relaxed, kind, professional, supportive experience it is selling us their work. I do not generally talk about this, though it is among the most rewarding things about publishing Reckoning. I tend to feel pleased but uncomfortable about it, because from my perspective, I did not do anything special. I was polite. I told them out loud how much I actually liked the work I was offering to pay them for. I paid promptly, and if obstacles got in the way of that payment, I surmounted those obstacles. I celebrated their work. I submitted it for awards. The end.

To be clear: Chinese dissident voices should not be discarded outside the gate to the field’s most popular award. Palestinian and dissident Israeli voices should not be suppressed because anyone is squeamish about genocide or the politics of wealth. English should not be the lingua franca of the future nor English speakers its arbiters, and all tools at our disposal should be employed to circumvent that. Translators should be credited and paid. Figureheads and bankrupt institutions should be torn down, not pandered to.

Thank you for your kind attention. Please send us your work.

Pushcart Nominations 2023

The Pushcart nominations deadline has snuck up on us again, and we got ours in just under the wire. 2023 is the year of our oceans issue, Reckoning 7, edited by Priya Chand, Octavia Cade and Tim Fab-Eme. As is the case every time we’ve had to pick just a few pieces to submit for any award, I bristle at the implication all our contributors might be anything less than eminently worthy to have accolades heaped upon them! But in this case, we could only send six.

Poetry

Fiction

Creative Nonfiction

Warm wishes for luck and leg-breaking to you all.

Wild Harvest Sale

It’s wild harvest season, maybe my favorite time of year, and this year’s—unlike others recently and in the future— is a pretty good one. So let’s celebrate while we can!

Buy any back issue of Reckoning (R6 or earlier) and while the wild harvest lasts, I’ll include either a wild mushroom spore print or an artisanally squashed wild brambleberry print on the title page. Plus you can have $3 off, AND I’ll include one of these cute little Mona Robles skull monster pins leftover from the fundraiser last year.

This way I can clean out my basement a little to make way for all the weird preserves.

Our Beautiful Reward Mini-Interviews: Dyani Sabin

interviewed by

We’ve got one more late-entry mini-interview for you on the eve of the Our Beautiful Reward launch event! (which is tonight, and for which you can still RSVP, click that link!).

Dyani Sabin’s searing poem about love amid oppression, “This is a romantic comedy” is online here.

 
Michael: How do the tools of speculative writing help you to think and communicate about what’s being done to personal freedoms around our bodies?

Dyani: I think that sometimes the only way to talk about issues that are so close to home, painful and traumatic, is to put on the gloves of metaphor, so to speak. Speculative fiction offers a lense into our reality that is unparalleled, because it automatically creates distance. That distance is what allows speculative writing to closely examine these issues—in the same way that memoir only works when the writer has enough emotional space and wisdom to see events with the understanding of time, speculative fiction allows us to do the same thing with culture.

 
Michael: What are you reading and thinking about that helps put this issue in perspective for you?

Dyani: I recently read Jeanna Kadlec’s Heretic, which I thought was just fantastic, a look at body autonomy and queerness through the lens of someone leaving an evangelical church to find the tarot and a queer community. I also enjoyed—in a totally different vein—Sara Mueller’s The Bone Orchard, which is a speculative fiction novel where the owner of a brothel is forced to investigate the death of the Emperor who captured her—and is entirely about consent, autonomy, and the struggle to define yourself in a world where there are gendered expectations.

 
Michael: Tell us, if you’d like, about something you’re doing, outside of writing, to make the world a less hostile and dystopian place for human beings with bodies to exist in?

Dyani: I work, every day, to reach out to my world with kindness! There are so many things you can do—lobbying, donating your time and money, calling your congresspeople—and all of that is important, but the thing that makes me feel human is going out into my community and making connections. Meet people in your community, and see other people who are learning and trying and believing in a better world—bit by bit you start to feel like together you can make it happen. And we will.

 
Michael: That’s a great answer! Thank you very much.

Our Beautiful Reward Mini-Interviews: Leah Bobet

interviewed by

To celebrate the official print release of Our Beautiful Reward on March 16th (virtual release party Sunday the 19th, you’re invited!), I asked some of the contributors a few of the questions foremost on my mind. It’s been too long since we’ve run many interviews here, and I’ve missed it; getting to know writers and how they think and feel has been one of the most rewarding aspects of Reckoning for me since the beginning. I hope their answers prove as englightening to you as they have been to me.

We’ve been posting one mini-interview a day. This one is the last—at least for now….

Leah Bobet’s devastating poem “fertile week” is online here. She was also poetry editor for the award-winning Reckoning 5.

 
Michael: How do the tools of speculative writing help you to think and communicate about what’s being done to personal freedoms around our bodies?

Leah: In some ways, speculative fiction is the literature of consequences: it’s not much of a jump from what if? to if-then. And the question of personal freedoms, of bodily autonomy, strikes me as being fully a question about consequences. When you make the decision to restrict people’s intimate physical choices, what happens to their lives? What happens to their world as those individual consequences silt up and impact each other?

One of my favourite (and most frustrated!) questions in the past few years is: “And what did you think would happen five minutes after that?” and speculative fiction is sincerely a good place to play that consequence-modeling out. Not to scare people, not to go “it could happen to you!” but to think well. To show each other, in digestible format, what and how we’ve been thinking.

 
Michael: What are you reading and thinking about that helps put this issue in perspective for you?

Leah: This month, Maude Barlow’s Still Hopeful: Lessons From a Lifetime of Activism. Barlow is a climate organizer who started in the 1970s Canadian women’s movement—at quite a high profile—and moved through that into free trade and water sovereignty issues; the book is a small condensation of what she knows about going the distance for a cause.

I was born just after women’s lives changed massively in Canada—higher awareness around domestic violence, wage gap legislation, and women having our own bank accounts—and I always find a lot of perspective in reading about the 1970s women’s movement, especially from people who didn’t stop there, but expanded their work from it. It helps me peel apart always from the world that had just started to happen when I was born, and see attitudes I’d assume were static as the result of motion—and deliberate action.

That reading helps me think about the rollback of rights happening now as the result of kinetic—and moveable—forces, too. Things that moved once can be moved again. It’s a way to rotate the problem: to look at the flood of daily horror stories as not inevitabilities, but calls to organize around each other’s needs and show up for each other.

I’m also keeping up with One Million Experiments, which is one of the million ideas Mariame Kaba’s involved in: a place to profile community-based projects that rethink what it means to keep each other safe. It’s a great space for looking up a model, seeing what you can get involved in, or feeling less alone with the work, because people are out there doing it. We’re doing it every day. There’s a reproductive justice section, and if anyone’s feeling stuck when it comes to community work, organizing, or just how to show up and do the thing with your colleagues, their podcast is excellent. It’s all you need to know about trying, failing, adjusting, and getting back up.

 
Michael: Tell us, if you’d like, about something you’re doing, outside of writing, to make the world a less hostile and dystopian place for human beings with bodies to exist in?

Leah: The project that’s getting most of my time right now is a 300-person mutual aid network that’s delivering home-cooked food to unhoused and underhoused people in downtown Toronto.

It’s pretty simple: in early 2021, a few people found out what hot or nourishing food unhoused and underhoused Torontonians actually want, and told a few friends, and so forth. We cook it at home on a weekly signup roster, and a small network of volunteer drivers brings it to the Seeds of Hope resource centre. People who need nourishing, hot food get fed—but more importantly, they get that weekly, persistent reminder that hello, we are here, we are a community, we care about them. They are not discarded. And those of us doing the cooking get that weekly, persistent reminder that we are a community too, and we aren’t helpless in the face of any of this. We can take care of each other. We are being constant for and with each other.

I’ve moved from cooking once every other week to being one of a core group of volunteers that’s come together to make this thing sustainable. We redesigned our backend and dropoff/delivery system this fall, cross-trained each other to share more responsibility together, and relaunched this winter. We’re looking at how we can work better with other mutual aid groups now.

I knew no one involved in this project before we started. They’re amazing people. I’m so glad I signed up.

 
Michael: That’s awesome! Thank you very much for these answers—and for doing that work.

Our Beautiful Reward Mini-Interviews: Riley Tao

interviewed by

To celebrate the official print release of Our Beautiful Reward on March 16th (virtual release party Sunday the 19th, you’re invited!), I asked some of the contributors a few of the questions foremost on my mind. It’s been too long since we’ve run many interviews here, and I’ve missed it; getting to know writers and how they think and feel has been one of the most rewarding aspects of Reckoning for me since the beginning. I hope their answers prove as enlightening to you as they have been to me.

We’re posting one mini-interview a day til we run out.

Riley Tao’s “Hangs Heavy On Their Head” (which you can read online here) is a delightfully inventive flash story narrated by some human hair motivated to make both the attached body and the earth a healthier, more nurturing place.

 
Michael: How do the tools of speculative writing help you to think and communicate about what’s being done to personal freedoms around our bodies?

Riley: It’s painful to think about the specifics of how trans bodies (or bodies in general, but this is where my knowledge is most personal) are being policed, and wrapping that pain in the vehicle of fiction allows me to handle emotionally difficult topics in more depth and with more objectivity than I would otherwise.

Michael: What are you reading and thinking about that helps put this issue in perspective for you?

Riley: Strangely, it helps for me to read the actual text of laws that are being passed. Sometimes they are disturbingly short; other times their length exceeds my ability to care about. But either way, the bone-dry language in which they are written also helps me achieve that distance that I need in order to clearly think about the situation.

Michael: Tell us, if you’d like, about something you’re doing, outside of writing, to make the world a less hostile and dystopian place for human beings with bodies to exist in?

Riley: Some internet communities make the world better than they make it worse. I’ve tried to grow a couple of my own.

Michael: Thank you!

Our Beautiful Reward Mini-Interviews: Juliana Roth

interviewed by

To celebrate the official print release of Our Beautiful Reward on March 16th (virtual release party Sunday the 19th, you’re invited!), I asked some of the contributors a few of the questions foremost on my mind. It’s been too long since we’ve run many interviews here, and I’ve missed it; getting to know writers and how they think and feel has been one of the most rewarding aspects of Reckoning for me since the beginning. I hope their answers prove as enlightening to you as they have been to me.

We’re posting one mini-interview a day til we run out—today it’s Juliana Roth, whose poem “Roses in Washington Square Park” you can read online here along with a bunch of her past work, all of which is thoughtful and excellent.

 
Michael: How do the tools of speculative writing help you to think and communicate about what’s being done to personal freedoms around our bodies?

Juliana: I feel that all writing is speculative writing–in that we are taking pieces and fragments of observation and alchemizing them in some way, to present some outcome or sort of epiphany. I think that opening up to what we think can be examined in literature allows readers and writers to explore new possibilities or consequences of current circumstances in a concentrated way. In writing Roses in Washington Square Park, I felt myself drawn to discovering the intentions of another artist and different modes of public interactions: audience with art, overhearing a stranger’s conversation, protest. In doing so, I felt myself make what feels like a wish for a world where boundaries around bodies are respected, understood. Because this isn’t a current reality at all times in the present, I feel it is in that sense speculative, but one that is possible. One that can certainly be more than a wish.

Michael: What are you reading and thinking about that helps put this issue in perspective for you?

Juliana: A lot of poetry. Poets like Ross Gay, Ocean Vuong, Ada Limon–those who really study the land, animals, and communities.

Michael: Tell us, if you’d like, about something you’re doing, outside of writing, to make the world a less hostile and dystopian place for human beings with bodies to exist in?

Juliana: I’m a professor of writing and I work with undergraduates. I teach a class called “Documenting Beauty,” in which they explore the “eye” of their watching, how they think, what they think, how they may resee preconceived notions. Spending a few hours a week studying these concepts together, and reading widely, I hope elevates the room, if only for that short time. Hopefully beyond.

Michael: Thank you very much!

Our Beautiful Reward Mini-Interviews: Marissa Lingen

interviewed by

To celebrate the official print release of Our Beautiful Reward on March 16th (virtual release party Sunday the 19th, you’re invited!), I asked some of the contributors a few of the questions foremost on my mind. It’s been too long since we’ve run many interviews here, and I’ve missed it; getting to know writers and how they think and feel has been one of the most rewarding aspects of Reckoning for me since the beginning. I hope their answers prove as enlightening to you as they have been to me.

We’re posting one mini-interview a day until the release party (or we run out, whichever comes first.)

Today’s answers come from the prolific Marissa Lingen, whose unflinching and intense litany poem “Exception”closes out Our Beautiful Reward.

 
Michael: How do the tools of speculative writing help you to think and communicate about what’s being done to personal freedoms around our bodies?

Marissa: Oh Lordy. Speculative fiction writing is one of my favorite tools for thinking and communicating about everything. It’s literally what I’ve trained my brain to do. So for me this is a baseline thing.

I think one of the interesting questions that’s coming up with a lot of issues right now is how to find angles to illuminate them that haven’t been overused already. We’ve had The Handmaid’s Tale for a while, you know? I reread Suzy McKee Charnas’s Walk to the End of the World recently, and it isn’t any less applicable than it was when Suzy wrote it before I was born—it isn’t any less brutal—but I think just the very fact that it is a novel from before I was born means—we already have that one. If that perspective is going to get through to someone, we can hand them Walk to the End of the World, we can hand them all these other classics that have been looking at this topic. And so I think there’s a very interesting challenge, how to get a different angle so that people won’t think, yes, I’ve already heard that argument, it’s already been handled—and pulling in sff genre furniture is an interesting way to go about that.

 
Michael: What are you reading and thinking about that helps put this issue in perspective for you?

Marissa: I’m a member of more than one disabled writers’ community, and gosh, if there’s anyone who talks about bodily autonomy, it’s us disabled folks. And I think that’s what really tied environmental and reproductive justice for me, moving in those spaces with those people and having those conversations.

I also found Diana Athill’s essay about her miscarriage really interesting on this front.

 
Michael: Tell us, if you’d like, about something you’re doing, outside of writing, to make the world a less hostile and dystopian place for human beings with bodies to exist in?

Marissa: One of the things my immigrant rights group does is to provide very basic backpacks of toiletries, seasonally appropriate clothing in the person’s correct size, a snack, and book or other bit of entertainment for people who are released from ICE detention and have a bus ride back to their friends and family ahead of them. I think this is the sort of thing we too often take for granted—of course people will have a toothbrush, of course people will have a coat, of course the government of my country would not release someone—someone they have agreed is free to pursue their life in the community—in ill-fitting and seasonally inappropriate clothes. And yet that’s exactly what happens if we don’t do something about it. So we are.

Bodies are inconvenient, messy, smelly, unpredictable. If we watch for the places where people try to deal with that by just skipping it entirely, we’ll see a million cracks in the system that are opportunities to do the work together.

 
Michael: Thank you very much!

Our Beautiful Reward Mini-Interviews: M. C. Benner-Dixon

interviewed by

To celebrate the official print release of Our Beautiful Reward on March 16th (virtual release party Sunday the 19th, you’re invited!), I asked some of the contributors a few of the questions foremost on my mind. It’s been too long since we’ve run many interviews here, and I’ve missed it; getting to know writers and how they think and feel has been one of the most rewarding aspects of Reckoning for me since the beginning. I hope their answers prove as enlightening to you as they have been to me.

We’ll post one mini-interview a day until the release party or we run out, whichever comes first, starting here with M. C. Benner-Dixon, author of the vividly evocative novelette “Those Dark Halls”, which you can read for free online here.

 
Michael: How do the tools of speculative writing help you to think and communicate about what’s being done to personal freedoms around our bodies?

M. C.: To some extent, it’s an issue of precision. We need a thousand different ways to talk about bodily autonomy because our bodies and the decisions we make about them are not uniform. The stories of our bodies simply cannot fit into a few, easy “this is how it is” narratives. By stepping outside of accepted reality, speculative writing expands the palette for talking about this issue—and that allows for both specificity and variety. Having a body that is the subject of legislative, religious, and social control feels like this, and this, and this, and this. In the speculative sphere, there is room for everyone’s story.

Michael: What are you reading and thinking about that helps put this issue in perspective for you?

M. C.: Every time I encounter a news story that reveals the cruelty of depriving people of bodily autonomy, I am grateful to the journalists who took that story on—well after it has ceased to be “news,” well after reader interest has drifted to the next tragedy or frivolity. The repetition of this reality is essential. It makes the truth indelible in our minds.

Michael: Thank you!