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Poetry by David Wagoner and Matthew Lippman. Interviews with Benjamin Percy and Eleanor Wilner. Fiction by Brock Clarke.
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REVIEWS
BY DALLAS WOODBURN
 Aimee Bender is the author of four books: The Girl in the Flammable Skirt (1998) which was a NY Times Notable Book, An Invisible Sign of My Own (2000) which was an L.A. Times pick of the year, Willful Creatures (2005) which was nominated by The Believer as one of the best books of the year, and The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake (2010). Her short fiction has been published in Granta, GQ, Harper’s, Tin House, McSweeney’s, and The Paris Review. She’s received two Pushcart prizes, and was nominated for the TipTree award in 2005, and the Shirley Jackson short story award in 2010. Her fiction has been translated into ten languages. She lives in Los Angeles, where she teaches creative writing at USC.
Check back in a few weeks for an interview with the author!
A …MORE
NEWS
By JOSH WILD, Poetry Editor
We here at SR would like to extend our congratulations to contributing poet Ryan Teitman for being awarded a Wallace Stegner Fellowship for the 2010-2012 school years. Ryan’s poem, “Ode to a Hawk with Wings Burning,” is featured in our current issue, as well as here online (to read the poem, just scroll about halfway down this page or click here).
The Stegner Fellowship, a two-year appointment out of Stanford University, allows the recipient time to write with no curricular or teaching responsibilities. With a $26,000 stipend, a tuition remission and health care provided, the Stegner is one of the most competitive fellowships in the nation; ten recipients (five poets and five fiction writers) were selected this year out of a pool of nearly 1800 applicants. Some past fellows include Raymond Carver, ZZ Packer, Lan Samantha Chang and Robert Pinsky.
Again, congratulations Ryan!
NEWS
BY KRISTIN GRIFFIN, Visiting Writers Series Coordinator
Purdue University is bringing a number of outstanding writers and illustrators to West Lafayette this fall, including TC Boyle, Jean Valentine, Joyce Brabner and Frank Stack. Sycamore Review will be sponsoring several of the events, including a debut writers day with poet Julia Story and novelist Jessica Anthony and our annual Writers Community Harvest event, which will bring in donations for local charities. Check out our Reading Series page for all the details, and stay tuned for news about our spring reading series!
FICTION
BY BROCK CLARKE
Rupert goes first. Rupert’s real name is Shamequa, but we call her Rupert because one of the things we do is give black women the names of white men. We also give white women the names of Asian men, and young Hispanic men the names of old white women. And so on. This is our way of helping promote better understanding of people who are not like us, which also happens to be the name of our city-mandated program: Helping Promote Better Understanding of People Who Are Not Like …MORE
NEWS
BY ANTHONY COOK, Editor-in-Chief
I’m excited to announce that donations to Sycamore Review can now be made online! Giving to SR not only helps keep a great journal in print–it also helps fund our literacy outreach efforts (check out our Looseleaf page for more information). Now, making a contribution is easier than ever. We’ll list you as a patron in upcoming issues of the journal and on our website, and if you give more than $50, you’ll also recieve a free one-year subscription. Click on the “Donate” section at the top of the page for more information. And thank you to all those individuals and organizations who help make Sycamore Review great!
POETRY
BY RYAN TEITMAN
When our eyes can’t adjust
to the fog of late light burning
off under a heat of darkness,
a black flower blooms
for a single minute,
and the bees waiting for its nectar
die of thirst. They drop one by one
into a furry pile around the stem,
not knowing that the scarcity
of its opening fails to make the juice
any sweeter. We lie when we think
that the rare and the sacred
are like twin, unborn colts—legs tangled
as they float in the barrel
of their mother’s belly. A girl keeps
a halved pear in a jar by her bedside
and says that it’s her dead puppy’s ear,
so everyone believes her
when she kisses the glass container
goodnight, and carries it on walks
around the neighborhood. You can learn
the most horrible things, if you listen
in the moment between night and day.
I would name that moment, but to name it
would make it grow, would give old women
the leisure to kneel at the altar and light
candle …MORE
NONFICTION
BY LISA LEE
I stopped writing to my pen pal, Mary Wang, of Anchorage, Alaska, the year I started high school. Partly because my mother told me she was too ugly for me to be friends with, but mostly because I was terrified of being ugly myself.
Beginning from when I was ten years old until I was fourteen, I wrote over eighty letters to Mary, who must have also written over eighty letters back to me in Napa, California. My parents had immigrated to San Francisco from Seoul, Korea during the sixties; in the early seventies my parents moved to Napa, fifty miles north of San Francisco, because they enjoyed nature, open space, clean air, camping, hiking, and outdoor sports. They wanted to start a family in the country. They bought a large ranch house with glass walls and a guest house on five acres of property. Standing in the …MORE
NEWS
Have you spent the summer polishing those manuscripts? We hope so. Sycamore Review’s reading period is now open!
After our summer hiatus, we are once again accepting submissions in poetry, fiction, and nonfiction for our next issue. With the opening of this reading session, we’re also rolling out our new online submission manager. Beginning August 15, 2010, we will ONLY accept submissions through the submission manager. We will no longer be accepting postal submissions, except for our annual Wabash Prizes in Poetry and Fiction, which must be submitted by mail.
To submit, read our submission guidelines, then follow the link to our submission manager to set up an account and submit your work. Our hope is that you’ll save money on printing and postage, and that in return we’ll be able to respond more quickly to your work.
NEWS
Big changes at Sycamore Review this year! We have a new fiction editor, Conor Broughan, a new non-fiction editor, Chidelia Edochie, and, when our reading period begins on August 1st, we will be accepting submissions via our new online submission manager.
Switching to online submissions will make us a much more efficient journal. It will help us read and respond faster to your work by eliminating some of the busy work necessary to process snail mail submissions, and allow us to devote more time and energy toward making sure each issue of Sycamore Review is better than the last.
We recognize that some or our submitters might have their manuscripts packed and ready to drop in the mail on August 1st, so we will still accept submissions via snail mail until August 15th. But afterward, all submissions should be made through the submission manager.
For more details on our new …MORE
NEWS
 I grew up in Alexandria, Virginia before moving to Providence, Rhode Island to pursue a BA in Literature at Providence College. Following graduation, I moved to New York where I worked in academic publishing for several years. I currently live in Lafayette, Indiana where I am pursuing an MFA in fiction at Purdue University.
I look forward to the upcoming reading period because I couldn’t be more excited to read your work. Last semester, I had the pleasure of serving as the Assistant Fiction Editor and I was impressed by the submissions I had the opportunity to read and eventually help edit. Over the next year, I plan to speed-up the response time for your submissions and also diversify the fiction that we publish in each issue.
Submit the story that you’ve surprised yourself with. Submit a story that took …MORE
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Aimee Bender is the author of four books: The Girl in the Flammable Skirt (1998) which was a NY Times Notable Book, An Invisible Sign of My Own (2000) which was an L.A. Times pick of the year, Willful Creatures (2005) which was nominated by The Believer as one of the best books of the year, and The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake (2010). Her short fiction has been published in Granta, GQ, Harper’s, Tin House, McSweeney’s, and The Paris Review. She’s received two Pushcart prizes, and was nominated for the TipTree award in 2005, and the Shirley Jackson short story award in 2010. Her fiction has been translated into ten languages. She lives in Los Angeles, where she teaches creative writing at USC. 
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