Category: Audio

Russell Nichols read by Catherine Rockwood

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”

Nicholas Clute read by Michael J. DeLuca

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

Cislyn Smith read by Catherine Rockwood

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

Tom Barlow read by Catherine Rockwood

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.

Bernadette Marie Oliver

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 by Dayna K. Smith of Bernadette Marie Oliver’s “Vivian, Radiant” from Reckoning 3, which you can read for free on our website, reckoning.press.

Dayna K. Smith is a writer and comics creator living in north Chicago.

She’s an Intrepid Soul from the 2015 Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers’ Workshop at University of California, San Diego. That adventure left her richer 20-some-odd best friends and one reverse mermaid tattoo.

She also wandered into the 2014 CSSF Spec Fic Novel Workshop, and wandered back out as a Merchant of Anarchy. Novels are brewing….

…And she brews them with the Happy Little Comets retreat each year!

Frequent attendee of WisCon Writer’s Conference in Madison, Wisconsin. She may even be teaching a workshop or gabbing on a panel… Come say hi!

Known to draw if no one’s watching, sing when you’d rather she not, and bake cookies by the hundreds.

Website: www.daynaksmith.com
Twitter: @daynasm

Bernadette Marie Oliver is a 2015 graduate of the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop and received an MFA in Creative Writing from Roosevelt University.

Bernadette has taught fiction writing, screenwriting, literature, and composition; curated FeedBack, an experimental music concert series; ran a staged reading series for screenwriters; served as Assistant Artistic Director for the Tamale Hut Café Reading Series in North Riverside, IL; served on the Board of Directors of the University City Arts League in Philadelphia; and recently worked as a volunteer at the Lambda Archives of San Diego.

Stories in Five on the Fifth, A cappella Zoo, Blood and Lullabies, Collective Fallout, Crack the Spine, and Up the Staircase Quarterly.

This is a story about toxic masculinity and the love of nature. It’s dark, it’s unsettling, there’s sexual violence. It’s an important story to me. Honestly, I hope it’s a story you don’t need. I hope you’re safe and secure in your identity enough to share that with others and encourage them to find the same thing. I hope you get to love nature–and people–the way you want to, as hard as you want to. But even if you do, I think there’s always fulfillment to be had in hearing about another person’s struggle to achieve that.

I’ll leave you with a quote from Vivian’s dad’s co-worker Rick, the best man in this story. “We’re all posing at being the men our fathers wanted us to be, and it ain’t cracked up for shit.”

Thanks for listening.

This podcast is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). Content and audio recording are copyright by the author.

Marie Vibbert

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, the text of which comes out today at reckoning.press.

Besides selling thirty-odd short stories (six to Analog!), twenty-some poems and a few comics, Marie Vibbert has been a medieval (SCA) squire, ridden 17% of the roller coasters in the United States and has played O-line and D-line for the Cleveland Fusion women’s tackle football team.  Her college coursework was in Environmental Geology but by day she is a computer programmer.

And as of this spring, she’s a member of Reckoning’s editorial staff!

Let me just offer a friendly warning: Marie’s performance is, how shall I put it, intense. You might want to listen someplace private? I hope you enjoy!

Thanks for listening! In case you haven’t heard, we’re fundraising to increase our pay rate for prose from six to eight cents a word by September. If you like what we do and want to help us help writers like Marie, visit reckoning.press/support-us.

 
 

This podcast is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). Content and audio recording are copyright by the author.

Michael J. DeLuca

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 in September, in which we listen to a climate change aria, talk about environmental justice, climate SF, and some realities of post-industrial Southeast Michigan that influence what I’m doing with Reckoning, then wrap up with an excerpt from Jess Barber’s reading of “Lanny Boykin Rises Up Singing.”

 
 

This podcast is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). Content and audio recording are copyright by the author.