McKinley Johnson: Before we start, I just want to say thank you! It was great getting to talk to you briefly at AWP, and I was really excited to be able to make this happen. I absolutely loved Reckon. I know we’re only about halfway through the year, but it is for sure my favorite collection of 2026.
Logan Phillips: Wonderful to hear, thanks so much!
MJ: Even getting to go back through and reread it to prepare for this, and it’s only been a few months, I was excited for a reread, so I think that’s always a good sign.
LP: Heck yeah, that’s awesome. Yeah, I was excited for you to see the actual physical edition because it’s so different than the pre-renders of it.
MJ: Yeah, yeah, it’s gorgeous! It’s a gorgeous book. So, thanks so much. To start, I know you’ve spoken about this in other interviews, so I’m not going to ask you to spend a ton of time rehashing it, but I felt like I would be remiss to not mention the really fascinating stuff you’re doing with genre in this collection. We get poetry, memoir, a musical script, newspapers, movie stills, family photos, museum exhibit tour, and even more! It’s all crafted together really beautifully and seamlessly. So the one question I’ll ask you about genre is, did that approach feel like a choice or a challenge that you chose to take on with making this book, or did it feel like it was sort of a necessity for what you were trying to achieve with Reckon.
LP: The multi-genre approach just felt intrinsic to the subject matter, because in a lot of ways, the book is about how history gets recast in genre and how genre acts on story, right? The movie version versus the novel version versus the history book version. I’m really interested, having grown up seeing real life turned into a tourist attraction, how that move inherently emphasizes or obscures different elements of the story. And at the time, writing the book, I was writing in InDesign, so it was easy to pull in visuals and other subject matter that I was working with.
It’s such a loaded place, and it’s such a loaded topic—so much has been written and said, and so much imagery has been created from this history—that it feels disingenuous to ignore those images. Not only in the larger zeitgeist, but in my own family history: I have the family portraits of visiting my uncle Steve on the movie set at Mescal, where Tombstone was filmed, and not referencing those things felt irresponsible. And at a certain point I figured I was creating something that was unpublishable anyway, so then that opened up a whole feeling of freedom in creating the work.
MJ: That’s really interesting, and I guess another connection that I had to the book that I didn’t think about until now is that I’m also from a small historical tourist town, in a very different region, but, I think that definitely feels true to my experience as well.
LP: Which town is that?
MJ: Dahlonega, Georgia. It’s in the foothills of the Appalachians. It’s the site of the first major gold rush in U.S. history. So lots of historical tourism, which I think is a very interesting kind of tourism because of what you were saying about the shifts with history and the changes that we give history when we’re retelling it.
LP: It’s story as consumable product.
MJ: Yeah, and the marketing exactly! That leads to another question that I had really well. So a big question of the book is the question of truth, of history and memory and how they can or can’t be trusted to stand on their own as believable. At one point, two of the book’s characters, GROWNME and KIDME, are having a discussion where GROWNME is led to question his memory of the events that he’s retelling, and he admits that his grasp of memories is maybe a weak point and that this fact is actually the very thing that led GROWNME to poetry.
I was wondering if you would speak a little about your views on truth in writing, because I think one’s level of commitment to truth is a decision that every writer has to make, whether it be a commitment to the spirit of the truth or to the more historical account of the truth. That’s, I think, something that is foundational to a lot of writers’ identities, and generally we see perspectives on that fall along genre lines in interesting ways, so I would love to hear your thoughts as someone that is committed to working across and beyond those lines of genre.
LP: That’s such a great question, and by that I mean it’s not an easy one to answer. In some ways, the book is my best answer to that question because it’s not simple. Growing up surrounded by debates about “what really happened,” right?
I have an aversion to proclaiming allegiance to an interpretation of a historical detail from a hundred years before I was born. Though I have plenty of respect for historians and the work of uncovering the past, as a poet I feel a very strong aversion to thinking I can really know a world that I didn’t get to experience.
This is one of the reasons that I couldn’t write this book until later in my life, because as a younger artist to even write about where I am from felt like it would put me in the place of having to enter those debates, which are not winnable debates and, more importantly, don’t strike me as particularly productive. It’s historical debate as gunfight, as spectacle, as career building, being an expert in some minute aspect of some historical figure’s life. So there’s that part of it.
I wanted this book to be true to my experience of the place and of these stories as told in my family, as told in the museums that my dad worked in, as told in the books that were on our shelves as a kid. While I did research a lot for this book, I also had to draw some lines and some limits around how much I would dig, because it’s an endless topic and it’s impossible to read all of the takes on all of the history. And there was a burden that I used to feel in writing, which was, I can’t say anything until I know everything. I can’t offer anything until I’ve digested all that’s already been said, which is an impossible task and therefore a silencing task. So this book was about speaking from what I could remember. About memory as necessarily subjective and imperfect. And thinking about how “capital H History” intersects with my own life, how I have experienced these stories.
MJ: Yeah, that’s the feeling that the book gives across, is that it is this unanswerable question, particularly with, as you say, “capital H History.” You bring up in the book that even outside of the debates about topics where we can’t really know what happened, often our culture is not particularly committed to telling the whole story about the things that we do know happened. You mention this culture of cowboying as we know it, actually has a very diverse history. While most of our current picture of cowboying is of white actors playing cowboys in media, it actually goes back to Mexican vaqueros, then to shepherding Spanish peasants, and then all the way to—as you point out, like many pieces of American culture—its initial roots with Black Africans. Yet, this is just a fact that, despite not being one of those unanswerable debates, is not something that we consider in our cultural history.
You said research was a big part of Reckon and you discussed your thoughts on personal truth, but I was wondering, as a researcher, how do you reconcile with those shortcomings of, not necessarily “capital H History” history books, but of cultural history and of what American culture has decided to ignore in history? How does this impact your approach as a researcher and as a storyteller of these histories?
LP: Yeah, it’s another great question. Well, it’s difficult to hear what has been silenced and it’s difficult to hear what our ears have been socialized to not hear. And by that, I mean it takes work to unlearn white supremacy and to see the lies that are right in front of our eyes.
For me, growing up being in a place like the state of Arizona where so many of the Indigenous peoples still reside on the land that they have always occupied, there is a very clear material counterpoint to the idea that “Indians” aren’t here anymore, right? Or that native history is something that happened, or that colonization is a process that was unfortunate and happened a while ago and is no longer happening. Those lies were just easily disproven with what was right in front of my eyes, and so I can extrapolate that to always doubting the mainstream cultural beliefs that I was raised in. If this country has never grappled with the genocide, land theft, and enslavement and kidnappings that it was founded upon, that means it’s necessarily going to have to lie about a whole lot of other things.
MJ: You mentioned these various shortcomings in the foundation of our culture, like white supremacy. It seems that one of these big shortcomings that the book is really interested in is the question of patriarchy, the question of masculinity, and more specifically of this American Western mythos of masculinity: a masculinity of cowboys and guns and violence, a masculinity, as you say in the book, “back when men were men were men.”
In the book, this confrontation is twofold: there’s this larger cultural confrontation of the mythos and then there also seems to be this really introspective personal confrontation. You ask at one point
was I boy born sixshooters for fingers
born deputized …
…………………………
… practicing the die-slow
and later you quote bell hooks discussing the first violence that patriarchy asks of men, the “self-mutilation,” which seems to be what your “die-slow” was referring to in the previous lines. So, trying to get to the question behind this paragraph, obviously this question of masculinity is foundational to Reckon—and as another writer who is very interested in the questions of masculinity and of trying to write towards not necessarily an answer for that, because I don’t think it’s answerable, but towards something, some sort of alternative—so I am interested to know how you felt Reckon was maybe achieving that for you, what is it pursuing with that question of masculinity?
LP: Again, a question based in a really close read of the book, it’s a real pleasure and puzzle to try to answer, because I haven’t been asked at that level of depth about these things in the book. I guess I would say, part of it has to do with those parameters or lines, those generative constraints, I was setting for myself in writing this book which have to do with the amount of research I’m going to do. It would also have to do with not pretending… not pretending that I knew more than I knew at the time.
This is the reason that when writing about the past, I’m using the third person and the characters of KIDME, TEENME, etc, because it feels disingenuous to use the first person “I” when talking about that person who went to high school in the late 90s in Cochise County. Sure, that person led to the person I am now, but also the person I am now would never have done the things that that person did.
So that technique or approach gave me the freedom to be able to approach TEENME as a human, necessarily flawed, and recognize, to your question, that there were not a lot of models of masculinity at the time and place that I grew up. This was by and large pre-internet—definitely pre-internet as the way we know the internet now—and for that reason the… the myths of an individualistic, violent masculinity solving problems through physical force and emotional opaqueness, those kind of old archetypes held special weight, not just because of the gunfight industry, but also because there wasn’t a lot else to look to.
That’s why there is such a love-hate relationship with all of these things, because I can’t deny that they were my model growing up, and at the same time what is the point of learning of the violences of history if not to try to heal them, first in ourselves and later in the material world around us?
MJ: That’s a wonderful and really thought-provoking answer. Thank you.
Another thing that I was really impressed by in reading Reckon was… the reach that it has, not necessarily despite, but sort of in the face of the fact that it is a very location-based, regional book, particularly with this confrontation with patriarchy and masculinity. Like I said, I’m from southern Appalachia, so I grew up under a different, but still very regional, very strict ideal of masculinity. So while I wasn’t as familiar with this particular American Western mythos that Reckon is discussing, I noticed lots of similarities in the way these regional masculinities control and shape people and how they’re learned and passed down, particularly with the familial focus of the book.
With that, something particularly exciting about Reckon is the cross-regional reach because it is such a regional book. In writing, Reckon, was that something that you had in mind, was that a goal? Or were you just like “this is the place I’m writing about and if it is all that’s touched, then that’s something I’m okay with”?
LP: I thought a lot about this. There’s, as you know, really two phases of a writing project: there’s the writing like nobody’s looking… writing like no one’s ever going to read it or writing out of a personal necessity, and then at some point (and the line between the two is very blurry) you enter the other phase, which is knowing that this work is going to be out in the world and moving on its own.
My commitment to myself in writing the work was to only write very specifically from my lived experience and not try to write someone else’s view of my place, because that’s been done so much already. So when it came time to consider the book in the world, it was, and still is, my wish that Reckon is seen as a book about these larger themes, considered through the lens of Tombstone, Arizona and where I grew up, rather than a “Tombstone book” that touches on larger themes, if that makes sense?
MJ: Absolutely.
LP: For me, I’m not interested in writing a “Tombstone book.” I’m interested in writing a book that’s true to my life and Tombstone is a part of my story, and these larger themes are much more relevant to that ongoing healing and liberatory justice seeking work that is the larger project.
MJ: This next question is taking a turn towards another topic, but still with the connection to thinking about the complexities of identity. A really intriguing line of thought in the book is what seems to be the idea of a “right to” an identity.
LP: Mmhm.
MJ: Particularly in discussions of Queerness. The question of who has a right to identify as Queer? And also how does one’s Queerness affect one’s right to masculinity? At one point you say, “But look. My queerness is like my cowboyness. It’s just there. I don’t need to always wear my boots to have been born in Tombstone.” Yet, a paragraph down, on the same page you very plainly ask: “But do I get to call myself queer?” In a book so laden with identity and personal experience and history, I was wondering how these questions of “Who has a right to an identity?” “Who has a right to a story?” impacted your approach to the book, to telling the story.
LP: Well, I think that these questions form a dialectic, right? In which the push and pull of the contradiction generates the energy from which the writing happens, where the life is lived. It’s… it’s complex because identity is used as a divide and conquer tactic in our society by elites and the ruling class, the billionaires. I see in my community where human relationships are lost along culture war sort of topics in which identity is posited as an immutable category that is our primary allegiance and way of being in the world.
What’s important for me is the work that I do rather than some category that I am. So in considering a label like Queer, I personally, because of the way that I pass and the circumstances of the time and place I was raised, I have not had to deal as much with the violent, virulent homophobia that exists in this society. And therefore I don’t claim opportunities designed to help folks who have had to deal with that violence have some sort of recompense.
So, though I have a felt sense of my own sexuality, it doesn’t become as central to my expression in my community because that isn’t the way that I’ve authentically been in the world in my life. What I’m getting at comes back to that contradiction, which in many ways is the project of the book: the social categories put upon us by the larger system and how our humanity necessarily and always exceeds those categories. And that excess can be a way to push back against those very categories and the violences that they impose on us as a form of social control.
That’s the most I’ve ever tried to answer a question along those lines. Mostly I just say read the book!
MJ: Well I appreciate you humoring me then with an answer! A very eloquent answer at that, that was really lovely.
I don’t want to keep you much longer, so I’ll just finish by saying thank you so much again for chatting with me about this book and for creating such impactful, wonderful art and sharing it with the world.
LP: Thanks so much, McKinley. I really appreciate you being a friend of this book because, getting to what we were talking about earlier, it’s always been my hope that this book would find its people beyond those interested in our local history. It’s very encouraging to me to hear your perspectives on the book and your close read of it.
Interview by McKinley Johnson
McKinley Johnson is a Queer poet from the foothills of Appalachia. He is the Poetry Editor of phoebe, a Coordinator and Teaching Fellow for Poetry Alive!, and an editorial reader for Poetry Daily. His work is published or forthcoming in Cutleaf, South Carolina Review, The Shore, and elsewhere.
