Reckon

Logan Phillips

• Publisher: University of Arizona Press
• Year: 2026
• Print ISBN: 9780816555826
• eBook ISBN: 9780816555833
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies

What's it like to have been born in Tombstone, Arizona? 

In Reckon, artist Logan Phillips returns to the fabled town to face the history he was raised on as a boy—gunfights, outlaws, and Hollywood cowboys—for a new, personal confrontation with the West's foundational mythology. This hybrid memoir also explores sexuality, masculinity, parenting, and what it means to love a land rife with contradiction and "slathered in murder."

As innovative as it is moving, this memoir is constructed of essays, photography, poetry, newspaper clippings from the Tombstone Epitaph Local Edition, and of course, movie screenplays. As he writes the characters of his past––including Youngfather and Teenme––Phillips finds the real history to be much more complex than the stories he was told. This is Tombstone in the 1980s and 90s, a century after the West's most famous gunfight––a fifteen-second event still performed every day in historical reenactments––where Phillips's father works as a historical exhibit designer at the Courthouse Museum and his uncle as a stuntman at Old Tucson Studios. 

With an original, searing voice, Reckon is an essential answer to the tough questions of past and future, inheritance and reinvention, all from the perspective of a boy stuck in the middle.
 

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• GUNFIGHT : what we can all agree on
• The Epitaph : Born April 7
• I was Toddlerme
• Youngmother & Youngfather cashed out before the bust
• The Epitaph : Yesterday’s Discards, May Be Today’s Cash
• The Epitaph : Where the Cowboys Ate Breakfast
• a set of almost ruins
• was Youngfather an Earp
• mudhouse of the mouth / sun fingers beam
• GUNFIGHTs : first, second &third shows
• how to unbuckaroo el vaquero
• rusted safe / wealth strung out
• cowboys&               !
• GUNFIGHT : fourth show
• day of the first shooting
• The Epitaph : Hey There, Coyboy
• mirage drains / look how death
• laying on what’s left of the woodhouse
• GUNFIGHT : fifth show
• GUNFIGHT : as family
• The Epitaph : All-Arizona Horror-Westerns
• The Epitaph : An Aria at This Crisis Would Be Fatal
• Youngfather pistons pedals
• GUNFIGHT : welcome
• EXT. - SKELETON CANYON - NIGHT
• On LOCATION
• gambels from mesquital / gamblers fury
• The BELOWNOON SALOON : A Musical
• I’m remembered as the star of a saloon musical
• but a man interrupts the show
• The ACTSHUN ! Scenes
• Ringo looks like someone walked over his grave
• Teenme rents the VHS tape again
• Teenme thinks to himself
• Earp rides for vengeance
• Kidme watches the shooting
• Younguncle dies three times a day
• Younguncle is a reel cowboy
• Younguncle always gets in on the ACTION!
• Kidme pretends a stickup
• EXT. - ALLEN STREET - HIGHNOON
• the sunsets
• EXT. - COCHISE COUNTY - SUNSET
• GUNFIGHT : as career
• The COURTHOUSE MUSEUM : Historical Exhibits
• a campout scene
• a skull in the archives
• a replica desert evening
• a meaning of adobe
• a ruins of a good story
• a history eaten by cattle
• a history canceled by poetry
• a cowboy before the cowboy
• an index of killings in Arizona
• a roll of caps bought on Allen
• a quiet night hanging on the wall
• a set of directions to follow
• an olddad requests a family photo
• a youngfather photographs his work
• a kiddad shakes on it
• a portrait series for Kidme, I–IV
• born in the riddle of know-where
• what Youngfather said
• is this the man I was looking for
• pinkgold granite warm / amid ink dark
• Notes
• Acknowledgments