I’m wondering first if you could tell us a little about what Reckonings might mean as a title here. It's a word that covers so much ground. The opening introduces “Reckoning,” “Dead Reckoning” and “Day of Reckoning” - how does the book move around these different terms?
TF: Reckoning: yes, a summing up; an evaluation; a settling of accounts.
‘Dead Reckoning’ is from my years as a (trimaran) sailor on open oceans. Calculating location by estimating distance covered and one’s direction. No visible landmarks or stars. Unsettlingly liable to accumulating errors, ensuing jeopardies. Writing Reckonings, I was thinking about where we were at on July 4, 2025–both our country and oneself at age eighty-one. Good, I felt, to remember to be tentative in conclusions drawn.
As for Day of Reckoning, though I neither believe nor disbelieve in god(s), like others I’m sometimes prone to be (too?) eager to hold others to account. Also, at my age, unable not to be taking the measure of what I’ve done in this long life.
When I was a child in Boston, I only-ever heard the word ‘reckon’ in movie or TV Westerns—cowboys opining, foreseeing. Hollywood dialogue. Now, as I approach ‘second childhood’, it amuses me to recall the voices of those long-ago stage cowpunchers.
All in all, reckonings (plural).
In relation to that question, the cover shows William Blake’s The Simoniac Pope, which itself depicts a moment of reckoning or punishment for crimes of simony (the selling of ecclesiastical privileges). Throughout the book we’re also presented with Hieronymus Bosch’s paintings of chaotic hellscapes and scenes of punishment. How did you see the role of visual art in general in this book?
TF: One possible serendipity when writing a book? Later, as it’s transformed from manuscript during the publishing process, you may get to work with talented others. Author/editors Frank Stewart and Pat Matsueda in Hawai’i came up with the Blake and H. Bosch, making ‘days of reckoning’ visual. Each time I reread Reckonings I’m unsettled and dazzled by these wild images. Blessed that my words have such a counterpoint!
One moment that struck me: “Testaments. When you read this, July 4, 2025, will already be a while ago. By then, this particular message-in-a-bottle sender may himself be some time ago.” I was fascinated by the way in which our current, daily reality of politics is also folded into a broader discourse about time, how it might be being taken from us, and the craft of writing in Reckonings.
TF: I do ask in Reckonings whether it’s the book I should be writing. Also interrogate the value of satire (as even Jonathan Swift did). Also question whether I should be doing “something other than this writing life I seem to have chosen or that chose me nearly sixty years ago.”
Age-appropriate wonderings.
Meanwhile, of course our current political mayhem is taking–EXTORTING; STEALING–much of our attention and time.
How did you settle on this length of short, prose paragraph as the dominant form of the book?
TF:Over the years, books of mine came to be published as “creative nonfiction”, “short fiction”, “the epigrammatic”, “novels”. While writing, however, I never thought in terms of genre or form or marketing categories. Was free–impelled–to go where I needed on the page. In Reckonings, I felt there was lots for the reader to chew on in each short paragraph, wanted white space between them. Also, the differences/distinctions between, say, (some) prose and (some) poetry can be overstated.
My several books of epigrams no doubt reinforced such strategies–having to leave breathing room between one-liners–but the impulse goes way back in my writing life. Years ago, untitled very ‘short stories’ (1977’s Who Wrote the Book of Love?), for instance, or a wry episodic meditation on the writing life (Compared to What?,1988).
There’s a moment in the opening of the book in which you describe a moment of two truths that were “forced” upon you - the first is “No one chooses to be born,” and the second “No one can help being what they are.” Could you say something about them or the moment of their dawning?
TF: Such a Berkeley experience! Year two of the pandemic, I was seventy-seven. Sitting outside what used to be called The French Hotel. Suddenly, it occurred to me that passersby heading for the Cheese Board, all of them, would one day die.
But of course!
But still…
Then, age eighty, former French Hotel redux, these two “truths”. Notions. New for me, since I was raised after WWII by extraordinary parents in a time-worn city where the gospel was that you could and should work to improve yourself.
And now?
Now I tend to think “No one chooses to be born.” Not trying to convince anybody–I’m not “in sales”–but…my current feeling. If so, any shift in how one reads others?
As for “No one can help being what they are”, my having stumbled on the age-old slugfest of “free will” versus “determinism”. This notion comes to mind only intermittently, but then does impel me to reconsider thoughts about others. And, perhaps, the self.
More, in our bitter political times, while clamoring for change and justice I may feel a shade less…punitive. Less in need of retribution? Living, possibly, with a toke more understanding.
