 Annie Proulx sat down to talk with James Xiao, Sycamore Review’s fiction editor at the time, before a live audience at Purdue University in April. You can click on the following links to listen to audio clips from the conversation.
Clip 1: Landscape is the Story
Clip 2: Omniscience: It’s Cool
Clip 3: Ah, Here’s a Pretty Good Sentence!
ANNIE PROULX is the author of eight books of fiction, including The Shipping News, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award; Postcards, for which she became the first woman to win the PEN/Faulkner Award in Fiction; Close Range: Wyoming Stories, which included the novella, “Brokeback Mountain”; and, most recently, Fine Just the Way it Is, the third installment in her Wyoming Stories series. Her work has been adapted for film, including …MORE
 by CONOR BROUGHAN Sycamore Review is honored to publish “Last Words,” a new story by Edith Pearlman, in our forthcoming Winter/Spring 2011 issue. On January 11th, Lookout Books published a volume of her new and selected stories which we review below. Be sure to read our online review. Edith Pearlman has published more than 250 works of short fiction and short non-fiction in national magazines, literary journals, anthologies, and on-line publications. Her work has been selected by Best American Short Stories, the O. Henry Prize Collection, Best Short Stories from the South, and The Pushcart Prize Collection. Her essays have appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, Smithsonian, Preservation, and Yankee. Her travel writing has been published in the New York Times, The Boston Globe, and salon.com. She is the author of four collections of stories: Vaquita (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997), Love Among The Greats (Eastern Washington University Press, 2002), and How To Fall (Sarabande Press, 2005), and Binocular Vision, published by Lookout Books in January 2011. Sycamore Review: Your new book Binocular Vision: …MORE
BY KENNY TANEMURA  Melody S. Gee’s first poetry collection Each Crumbling House (a review of which can be found here) won the 2010 Perugia Press Book Prize. Her poems and essays are published or forthcoming in Blackbird, Copper Nickel, Southern California Review, Dogwood, Packingtown Review, Alligator Juniper, The Greensboro Review, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, The Spoon River Poetry Review, Washington Square Review, and Crab Orchard Review, among others. A Pushcart Prize nominee, winner of the Robert Watson Literary Prize for poetry, and a 2008 Kundiman Asian American Poetry Retreat fellow, she currently teaches writing at Southwestern Illinois College and lives with her husband in St. Louis. Sycamore: Were you wary about approaching first generation Asian American experiences in your poetry, since so much has been made about Asian American poetry moving away from those themes? Gee: Once I thought …MORE
Adam Prince, the 2010 Wabash Fiction Prize winner, has been on quite a roll recently. Besides winning the 2010 Wabash Prize for his story “Island of the Lost Boys” which Peter Ho Davies noted for its “acute observations, wry wit, and delicate characterization.…The result is a quietly, almost furtively, heartbreaking story.” Beyond winning the Wabash Prize, Prince also won the 2010 Narrative Magazine Winter Contest, and his stories have appeared in many journals including The Southern Review, The Missouri Review, Black Warrior Review, Mid-American Review and LIT among others. Sycamore Review’s Fiction Editor Conor Broughan wanted to check in with Adam to find out the secret of his recent success and to ask a few questions about “Island of the Lost Boys,” a story that we here at Sycamore Review are proud to have published. Find an excerpt of the story …MORE
BY DANA BISIGNANI, Publicist
In a review of The Penultimate Suitor, Arielle Greenberg noted that Mary Leader’s work “generally gives the impression that the poet is having a really good time.” A lawyer and poet with an insatiable curiosity, Leader is simultaneously formal and wide-leaping, playful and experimental. She has published two books of poetry, Red Signature, which won the 1996 National Poetry Series, and The Penultimate Suitor, which won the 2000 Iowa Poetry Prize. She currently teaches in the MFA program at Purdue University and in the low-residency MFA program at Warren Wilson College. Her newest book, Beyond the Fire, has just been released by Shearsman Books.
DB: Your first book Red Signature was published by Graywolf, and your second book, The Penultimate Suitor, was put out by University of Iowa Press. What …MORE
 Sycamore recently ran a review of Aimee Bender’s The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake. Now, Dallas Woodburn–current editorial assistant at Sycamore, and Bender’s former student–presents an intriguing interview with Aimee Bender on Lemon Cake, the practice and craft of writing, and the difficulties of being sensitive to the world.
Sycamore: As a professor of creative writing, how does teaching writing influence your own relationship to writing?
Bender: Teaching writing is a whole different animal, and it suits me because it supplies the more social aspect of work, whereas writing is so solitary. I can’t write all day—my concentration flags. I love talking with students about their writing, and workshopping, and talking about fiction in general, but it all feels to me very different than the act of writing itself. So they work as a nice pair. I …MORE
BY CHIDELIA EDOCHIE, NONFICTION EDITOR
 Sefi Atta was born in Lagos, Nigeria, and is a novelist, playwright, and short story writer. She is the winner of the PEN International’s 2004/2005 David TK Wong Prize, and in 2006 her debut novel Everything Good Will Come was awarded the inaugural Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature in Africa. Her short story collection, Lawless, received the 2009 Noma Award For Publishing in Africa. Lawless is published in the US and UK as News From Home.She lives in Mississippi with her husband Gboyega Ransome-Kuti, a medical doctor, and their daughter, Temi. The author was good enough to answer a few questions about her recent work for Sycamore. Click here for a review of her most recent collection, News from Home.
SR: You’ve written a novel and a number of …MORE
 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 others. …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 chat: …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 …MORE
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