creative writing on environmental justice
Read “Eel of the Lake” in Reckoning 1.
Michael: I love this story of personal identity in the context of collective activism. As I probably told you when I bought it, it made me cry, I think partly because I know how ineffectual and insignificant working for positive change in the world can feel, and the idea of getting such a personal acknowledgement . . .
Read “Papa Bois and the Boy” In Reckoning 1.
Michael: I’d never heard of Papa Bois until I read “Papa Bois and the Boy”. Now I know a little, but only in the abstract. How did you find out about him? I imagine the poem must be engaging with the myth, and with what the myth means to the people, in ways I’m not getting. Can you tell . . .
Read “Wine and Wistera” in Reckoning 1.
Michael: When we were first talking about “Wine and Wisteria”, you told me you tend to write in English, but you acknowledged some Spanish influence on the structure of your writing “creeping in” (which made me happy, in the context of a story about taking care of old grapevines). . . .
Michael: Since Giselle Leeb and Christopher Brown happen to have appeared together in both my editorial efforts in the world thus far, and since they seem to me to share a certain radical sense of humor and outlook on the world, I figured there must be something significant to be learned by all parties in introducing them.
Read “Kill or Be Killed” in Reckoning 1.
Michael: I have been waiting to ask you and talk to you about the tension that is at the core of “Kill or Be Killed” pretty much since I read it. I’ve thought a lot about what constitutes civilization, how the way we negotiate killing in order to live has changed as what it means to be human has . . .
Read “Plague Winter” in Reckoning 1.
Michael: The more of these interviews I do, the more clearly I perceive common threads that recur through many of the pieces in Reckoning 1. It seems they ought to be telling me something–about myself, about all of us writing and thinking along these lines. “Plague Winter” touches on so many . . .
Read “Civitas Sylvatica” in Reckoning 1.
Michael: This story I feel like has gotten exponentially more topical in the time since I first read it. We’re shown two people caring about each other and doggedly pursuing the advancement of knowledge while the world turns to ashes around them. Thank you for showing me that. It turns out I needed . . .
Check out the four pieces from Travis MacDonald’s Concrete Jungle that appeared in Reckoning 1.
While the project as a whole has not yet been gathered in one place, other pieces can be found in a number of online and print journals:
The Clearing: Little Toller‘s New Journal for Landscape, Writing and Place Written River Journal of Eco-Poetics Unlost: . . .Michael: Continuing in my campaign to foster creative cross-pollination among contributors to Reckoning 1, I asked Aozora Brockman, whose poem “Kill or Be Killed” is forthcoming on the site in a few weeks, to interview Chloe N. Clark about her poem “Sidelong Catastrophe”.
Aozora: I love that your poem “Sidelong Catastrophe” surprises . . .
Read “The Olive Harvest” in Reckoning 1.
Michael: Thank you so much for sharing this story with me, and for giving me the chance to pepper you with questions about it.
It seems to me it takes a lot of aplomb to tell a story with this level of clarity and directness. I love a parable, I love a folktale, but it’s not easy to tell a new one in a way that feels . . .