Jessica Garratt’s first book, Fire Pond, won the 2008 Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry, selected by poet Medbh McGuckian, and was published by the University of Utah Press in April 2009. Individual poems from the collection have appeared in the North American Review, Shenandoah, Michigan Quarterly Review, Crab Orchard Review, The Missouri Review, and in the forthcoming Helen Burns Poetry Anthology: New Voices from the Academy of American Poets’ University and College Prizes, 1999-2008, edited by Mark Doty.  Currently, Garratt is a doctoral candidate at The University of Missouri, where she teaches literature and creative writing, and holds a Creative Writing Fellowship.  She has also received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, and from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of  Texas at Austin, where she earned her MFA.  — Ruth Joynton, Nonfiction Editor

SR: Order is an essential process in building any poetry collection, and you’ve done a fantastic job of arranging the poems in Fire Pond. How …MORE

Denise Duhamel is the author of seven books of poetry, the most recent of which are Two and Two, Queen for a Day: Selected and New Poems, The Star-Spangled Banner, and Kinky.  She is a recipient of a NEA in poetry and currently teaches in Florida International University’s MFA program. Denise was kind enough to agree to this interview in February of 2006 when she read at Purdue University.

 —Cody Lumpkin and Leslie St. John

Sycamore: What are you reading lately? What are you jazzed about?

Duhamel: I really like Beth Ann Fennelly. Both of her books, Open House and Tenderhooks, are very strong. I always look for her poems in magazines.  There’s another young poet, Deborah Landau, whose book Orchidelerium is really good.  I feel like whenever I make these lists I’m going to leave out someone really important…Major Jackson.  Leaving …MORE

BY JULIETTE LUDEKER

SR: You have a unique style that is reminiscent of early 20th century artists such as Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand. And much of your work is images made of contemporary objects but with a referencing of the past. Can you speak a little but about your influences and motivation in creating work? How did you come to work in a style that is far from the slick, hyper-real images many people associate with photography today? What ideas, reference, emotions, etc. are you hoping to trigger in those who view your images?

Hayman: Nostalgia has always affected me and influenced my work – I want to be careful and not fall into the trap of being nothing more then a copyist however, so I work in ways that my influences can be seen but that I can still maintain a contemporary footing. In terms of emotions triggered by viewers …MORE

Nick Hornby, a New York Times bestselling author, has written four novels: High Fidelity, About a Boy, How to Be Good, and most recently A Long Way Down. He also wrote the memoir Fever Pitch, and edited and contributed to the story collection Speaking With the Angel. Several of his New Yorker essays on pop music can be found in a collection titled Songbook. During a March visit to Indianapolis, he spoke with Non-Fiction Editor Sarah Layden about the literary, the popular, and the gray area in between.

SR: There seems to be a mutual obsession between U.S. and British culture. When were you first aware of it, and how does it affect your work?

Hornby: Which particular obsession? There’s music, cinema, books…Growing up, contemporary American writing struck me as fresher, more direct, demotic. There’s a spate of American writers I kind of …MORE

An honest writer will let you get close to him. He can’t help it. He’ll let you see his embarrassments, his poor choices, the ignorance of himself and those closest to him, and, if you read carefully enough, you’ll see yourself and feel the best of all feelings: hope. Nick Flynn is a great writer, an honest writer. His memoir, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (Norton, 2004), won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir, and has been translated into ten languages. He is also the author of two books of poetry, Some Ether (Graywolf, 2000), which won the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award, and Blind Huber (Graywolf, 2002). I met up with Nick on a surprisingly warm Spring night. He’d just given a reading to a group of undergrads at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana. A …MORE

Susannah Breslin is the author of You’re A Bad Man Aren’t You, a collection of short stories from Future tense Books. Her writing has appeared in Harper’s Bazaar, Salon, and L.A. Weekly, and she holds degrees from the University of California at Berkeley in Literature and the University of Illinois at Chicago. She was, until recently, a resident of New Orleans, Louisiana. Susannah was kind enough to agree to this interview in September of 2005.

Sycamore Review: It’s been a little over two years since the first printing of your story collection, YABMAY? How would you describe the overall reaction to it?

Susannah Breslin: The overall reaction to YABMAY was very positive. The book was seldom in bookstores, but it sold well on the web. It seemed to be able to find its niche audience through blogs and other websites. People seemed to enjoy the oddness of the collection, that it was …MORE

Charles Baxter is the author of four novels, most recently The Feast of Love and Saul and Patsy.  He is also the author of four collections of short stories, three collections of poems, and Burning Down the House, a series of essays on fiction.  He is a National Book Award finalist and has received the Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.  Charles Baxter was born in Minneapolis and teaches at the University of Minnesota.

Sycamore Review: I’ve heard you say that you prefer short stories to novels, and that you approach the novel with “great trepidation.”  Does working from short stories, as you did in Saul and Patsy, help with the trepidation?  

Charles Baxter: Oh, a little bit, because at least with Saul and Patsy, I had something to …MORE

It’s a chilly October night in Indianapolis, and Davy Rothbart and I are in a Fountain Square parking lot, sitting in a van. Not just any van. The official FoundMagazine and Lone Surfer Tour 2005 van, in which Rothbart is traveling the country (Michigan vanity plate: THG LFE.) He’s promoting his new book of short stories, The Lone Surfer of Montana, Kansas, along with the Found magazines that begat a book by the same name. The previous night, Rothbart and his singer/songwriter brother, Peter, performed for a standing-room crowd at the Wells Center in Lafayette, IN. Fifty-one scheduled stops in fifty-four days. Halfway done. Now, about twenty minutes before the Indy show at Big Car Gallery, he pops open a beer, settles back in his seat, and does what he loves to do: tell stories. –Sarah Layden

Sycamore Review: How did you come up with the idea for Found? I’ve heard …MORE