Benjamin Percy, author of forthcoming novel The Wilding, as well as two short story collections, sat down to talk with Sycamore Review’s James Xiao during a visit to Purdue University in March. You can click on the following links to listen to audio clips from the conversation.

Clip 1: Story Ideas and Constellations

Clip 2: The Epiphany and the Middle

Clip 3: Backyards and the Fog of the Slaughter House

Clip 4: Revision and Resurrection

Clip 5: Motifs and a Pack of Gum

BENJAMIN PERCY is the author of a novel, The Wilding (forthcoming in Fall 2010), and two books of short stories, Refresh, Refresh and The Language of Elk. His fiction and nonfiction have been read on National Public Radio, performed at Symphony Space, and published by Esquire, Men’s Journal, Paris Review, Chicago Tribune, Glimmer Train, and …MORE

This spring Sycamore Review will publish interviews with two poets, Eleanor Wilner and Ted Kooser, in addition to nonfiction writer and novelist Benjamin Percy. I, for one, am chomping at the bit.

Editing interviews is in some ways the most exhilarating part of my job as Nonfiction Editor at SR, because it means getting first glance at the raw thoughts of writing giants. I’ve just finished a first round of edits on the Kooser interview, with abundant help from Sycamore Review’s old Poetry Editor, David Blomenberg, who caught up with the former-Poet Laureate way out in Seward, Nebraska. (Dave would say, “it’s a long story, folks”).

Here’s a taste of their honest …MORE

KC TROMMER is a poet and collage artist based out of New York City. Her poetry has appeared in AGNI Online, Poetry East, MARGIE and The Antioch Review, among other journals, and more recently in Sycamore Review. KC was kind enough to answer a few questions about her poetry and work with other visual arts. — Mario Chard, Poetry Editor

SR: “The Mechanism of Pleasure” recently appeared in our Winter/Spring 2009 issue. Would you mind telling us a little more “about” the poem, something of its genesis perhaps?

I was visiting with my friend in her summer camp at the tip-top of New York State, near Plattsburgh, when she gave me the idea for the poem. I hadn’t seen her for a number of years and, in the intervening time, she had had to undergo brain surgery to remove a tumor. We were having an epic …MORE

CARL PHILLIPS is the author of ten books of poetry, most recently Speak Low, a new collection of work, and Quiver of Arrows, selected poems from 1986 to 2006. His many awards and honors include the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Male Poetry, the Theodore Roethke Memorial Foundation Poetry Prize, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Library of Congress, and the Academy of American Poets, to which he was elected a chancellor in 2006. Phillips currently teaches at Washington University in St. Louis. Below are a few exchanges from the much longer interview, which you can find in Issue 22.1–Winter/Spring 2010, due out next month. –Mario Chard, Poetry Editor

SR: You only write a few times a month—keeping away from distractions— and you write almost the entire day. My question is, then, do you …MORE

RITA DOVE served as the Poet Laureate of the United States and Consultant to the Library of Congress from 1993 to 1995 and has served as Poet Laureate to the Commonwealth of Virginia. From her first collection of poetry The Yellow House on the Corner in 1980, Dove has gone on to publish short stories, a novel, essays, and a number of poetry collections, the most recent of which is Sonata Mulattica, released only the week before this interview. She sat down to talk with David Blomenberg, Sycamore Review’s poetry editor at the time, in front of an audience at Purdue University. Below are a few exchanges from the much longer interview, which you can find in Issue 22.1–Winter/Spring 2010, due out next month.

DB: You return so often to musical themes in your work. Music seems to be a real constant, …MORE

Lauren Alwan’s short story, “Report from an Independent Chapter of the Embroiderers’ Guild of America,” appears in the current issue (Summer/Fall 2009) of Sycamore Review. In the story,  which is told from the perspective of a sharp 14-year-old narrator named Gillian, she and her grandmother attend the meetings of a local embroiderers’ guild. We’re big fans of the story, as evidenced by our nominating it for a Pushcart Prize last month. Sycamore’s Fiction Editor James Xiao recently interviewed Alwan, who lives in San Leandro, California, and teaches craft and fiction workshops in San Francisco. It was Sycamore’s first instant message interview.

SR: Let’s start with your story. I must say that as a guy in his twenties I did not expect to be as captivated as I was by a story featuring embroidery and physics.  But I once …MORE

Donald Ray Pollock, author of the linked short story collection, Knockemstiff, sat down to talk with Sycamore Review’s Christopher Feliciano Arnold during a visit to Purdue University in September. You can click on the following links to listen to audio clips from the conversation. A transcript of the interview follows.

Clip 1: On writing and working at a paper mill

Clip 2: On first lines

Clip 3: On the reputation of his hometown of Knockemstiff

Clip 4: On learning to sit

Clip 5: On hearing voices

DONALD RAY POLLOCK was born in 1954 and grew up in southern Ohio in a holler named Knockemstiff. He dropped out of high school at seventeen to work in a meatpacking plant, and then spent thirty-two years employed in a paper mill in Chillicothe, Ohio before leaving to enroll in the MFA program at Ohio …MORE

Seth Abramson is the author of The Suburban Ecstasies (Ghost Road Press, 2009) and co-author of The Creative Writing MFA Handbook (Continuum, 2008). He was awarded the J. Howard and Barbara M.J. Wood Prize by Poetry in 2008, and his poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in American Poetry Review, AGNI, New York Quarterly, and elsewhere. His poem “Angolans Approach United Nations Camp at Dukwi” recently appeared in Issue 21.1 of Sycamore Review. A graduate of Harvard Law School and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he is currently a doctoral student in English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. — Mario Chard, Poetry Editor

SR: “Angolans Approach United Nations Camp at Dukwi” recently appeared in our Winter/Spring issue of 2009. What strikes me as peculiar about this poem, as opposed to much of your other work, …MORE

Dean Young is the author of eight books of poetry, most recently Primitive Mentor and Embryoyo. His 2005 collection Elegy on Toy Piano was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.  Young has received numerous awards, including the Colorado Prize for Poetry, a Stegner Fellowship, as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation.  His work has been anthologized numerous times in The Best American Poetry.  Currently, he teaches at the University of Texas at Austin. –Josh Wild, Poetry Editor

SR: First of all, thank you very much for agreeing to this interview.  You recently became the William Livingston Chair of Poetry at the University of Texas after spending several years teaching at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop.  What has been the most surprising adjustment you’ve had to make between Iowa …MORE