Poetry by Jeffrey Skinner and Julia Story. Interviews with T.C. Boyle, Bob Hicok, and Jean Valentine.
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Telling Stories Talking Craft
Sycamore Review's collection of interviews with contemporary fiction writers, including Michael Chabon, Richard Ford, Jane Hamilon, and many more, is now available from our publishing partner, Parlor Press.
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BLOG 
By David Blomenberg, Sycamore Review Contributor
J. A. Tyler has quite an astonishing number of works out recently, including INCONCEIVABLE WILSON, which was recently excerpted in PANK magazine, In Love with a Ghost, and, among other works, two chapbooks, and has no fewer than three books due out this year. What I’ve read of Wilson’s work focuses on the fragility of self, its parts, its dismantling. His most recent book A Man of Glass & The Ways We Have Failed shares this theme. “I remain, remainders,” the speaker in INCONCEIVABLE WILSON says, “the parts, pieces. I am dismantled. Tools and instruments and me taken apart.”
Even the genre Tyler writes in—he terms his longer works novel(la)s—dovetails with that sense of fractured identity. A Man of Glass… centers on one character’s point of view like a novella. It has stanzas instead of paragraphs, …MORE
FICTION by Conor Broughan, Fiction Editor
 It’s been exhausting trying to keep up with Edith Pearlman lately. She contributed a wonderful story, “Last Words,” in issue 23.1 before publishing her collection of new and selected stories Binocular Vision. After receiving the Pen/Malamud Prize for short fiction, she was nominated as a National Book Award finalist. The finalists for the National Book Critics Circle awards were announced this weekend and guess who is a finalist: Edith Pearlman. Pick up your copy of issue 23.1 today and read “Last Words” to see what all the fuss is about.
If you live within shouting distance of West Lafayette, be sure to join us on Tuesday, March 27th when we’ll be honored to have Edith Pearlman on campus for a reading and Q&A session. I have a feeling …MORE
BLOG by David Blomenberg, Sycamore Review Contributor
 My strange reading coincidences continue. Wayne Miller’s wonderful poetry collection The City, Our City (a review of which appears in our most recent print issue) was part of an uncanny string of books I was reading that had to do with the formation and destruction of cities. The very next two books I picked up after writing that review continued the trend. It was a bit spooky, to be honest.
With a title like Songs and Stories of the Ghouls, it might at first blush appear as if the release date (at the beginning of November) of Alice Notley’s latest book might be part of a Halloween-themed publicity campaign. But considering that few poetry books get a publicity campaign of any sort, and in spite of ghouls and blood-sacs (more on that anon) and scattered …MORE
NEWS by Jacob Sunderlin, Co-Editor of Poetry
Ron Padgett, poet, author of some twenty volumes, memoirist, collaborator, badass, septuagenarian, translator, Okie, grandfather, has earned himself the right to start a poem thusly:
There’s not a lot of time to think when one is assailed by activities and obligations and even less time to do it when one is free of them because then one spends one’s time thinking about how little time there is.
Sometimes, when talking about poems, poets, or recent collections with poet friends, I’ll try and distinguish between poets I like “as a writer of poems” (read: poets whose techniques I find “fresh,” whose “voice” I respect, whose “language” is “interesting”) and poets whose work I like “as a Jacob” (read: poets I want to drink for breakfast). This is sometimes an unpopular (read: schizophrenic) perspective, but—for me—is the …MORE
CONVERSATIONS  by Jacob Sunderlin, Co-Editor of Poetry
When I was seventeen, I ganked the Outlaw Bible of American Poetry from the public library and found three poems by David Trinidad anthologized between Bob Kaufman and Woody Guthrie. This was—to my mind—pretty much the coolest thing ever. In his newly-published and completely-addictive Dear Prudence: New and Selected Poems, Trinidad has given us a prismatic funhouse of contemporary poetry, full of Yardley Slicker lipgloss, NRFB (never removed from box) collectible Barbie outfits, and Sylvia Plath. In this cultural detritus, Trinidad finds something thrilling, something human, and a poetry as formally unexpected and inventive as its subjects. He was kind enough to speak with Sycamore Review recently and discuss some his most recent projects.
Sycamore Review: This was a big year for you—your selected poems were published, as well as the …MORE
FICTION by Conor Broughan, Fiction Editor
Thursday, December 1st, Shannon Cain will be taking part in the Purdue Visiting Writers Series on the Purdue campus in West Lafayette, Indiana. Please join us at the Krannert Auditorium, Room 140 at 7:30. Shannon Cain will be reading from her debut collection The Necessity of Certain Behaviors. The event is free and open to the public.
 Jane, the protagonist of “This is How it Starts,” the first story in Shannon Cain’s debut collection The Necessity of Certain Behaviors and winner of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize from University of Pittsburgh Press, is a girlfriend to both a married lawyer, who happens to be man, and a doctor, who happens to be a woman. She is also an artist living in her family’s rent-stabilized apartment in Manhattan who paints on panes of …MORE
CONVERSATIONS by Conor Broughan, Fiction Editor
 Bonnie Nadzam was born in Cleveland, went to high school in suburban Chicago, and has moved continually westward since then. She studied English literature and environmental studies at Carleton College, and earned an MA and PhD from the University of Southern California. Her fiction and poetry have been published in The Kenyon Review, The Mississippi Review, Story Quarterly, Callaloo, The Alaska Quarterly Review, and others. She taught at Colorado College, where she served for two years as the Daehler Fellowin Creative Writing. She is married to her childhood love and lives with him in the Rocky Mountains.
Be sure to read our review of Bonnie Nadzam’s debut novel Lamb here.
Sycamore Review: One of the most striking aspects of Lamb is the narrator who occasionally steps in to introduce Lamb as “our …MORE
FICTION by Conor Broughan
 When your kitchen is a mess—a plates-piled-high-in-the-sink, socks-getting-stuck-on-sticky-spots mess—how do you react? If you’re anything like me, a messy kitchen means that you clean up the coffee table in the living room or pick up clothes that have collected at the foot the bed. Rather than tackling dirty dishes, the grime on the sink, or whatever it is that has been growing behind the stove, I project the mess onto other portions of the apartment, allowing me to clean a minimal amount while still feeling accomplished for tackling a chore.
When we first meet David Lamb, the fifty-four year-old protagonist of Bonnie Nadzam’s beautiful, unsettling, and stunning debut novel Lamb, he has just buried his father, has recently divorced his wife, and has been forced to take a leave of absence from his job because of …MORE
NEWS  by Rob Davidson
Every good story collection has its governing metaphors, those common notes that blend the individual crooners into a concert of voices singing harmony. Restlessness defines the spirited characters in Patricia Henley’s fine new collection of short fiction, Other Heartbreaks. In these stories, people’s lives break down and are reassembled; there are changes of allegiance and sexual orientation; there are moments of great sweetness and moments of insufferable loss. As one narrator puts it, these are tales of “broken hearts, mended hearts, eternal stories of love lost and gained.”
Henley moves across the territories of her stories with deceptive ease, ranging back and forth in time, layering with moves both small and large, gradually filling in the context for a dramatic present that is always tied in interesting and complicated ways to the past. Henley’s stories require …MORE
NEWS By Jessica Jacobs, Editor-in-Chief
 After Sycamore editors carefully culled 20 finalists from a Wabash Contest record of nearly 600 entries, former U.S. Poet Laureate Louise Glück has selected Maya Jewell Zeller and her poem “Caterpillars” as the winner of this year’s Wabash Prize for Poetry. Glück also chose Carrie Causey and her poem “Woman in the Wall” as this year’s contest runner-up. Both of these poems will be showcased in Issue 24.1, Winter/Spring 2011, along with work from selected finalists.
Thanks to all who submitted. We hope you will continue to support and enjoy Sycamore and will consider submitting your work to the 2012 Wabash Prize for Poetry next year.
Complete Results: 2011 Wabash Poetry Prize
Winner:
Maya Jewell Zeller
First Runner-Up:
Carrie Causey
Second Runner-Up:
Michael Tyrell
Third Runner-Up:
Grace Marie Grafton
Finalists: Terry Blackhawk Sage Cohen …MORE
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