By Shavonne Clarke, Nonfiction Co-Editor
Hi all. I’m Shavonne Clarke, now working with Josh Diamond as one half of the nonfiction contingent here. I grew up in Great Falls, Virginia and received a BA from Sweet Briar College and an MA from Texas A&M University, both in English. Currently I live in Lafayette, Indiana as an MFA student in fiction at Purdue University.
I’m very excited to be reading and helping to select this year’s nonfiction pieces. As a fiction reader, I was frequently impressed by the caliber of writing submitted to Sycamore. In this case, I also have the honor of “induction,” in some sense, into other lives and experiences. Because creative nonfiction seems such an expansive genre, I look forward to seeing how those truths find their own expression.
If you’d like to read more on the preferred aesthetics of each submission, …MORE
by Joshua Diamond, Nonfiction Co-Editor
Hello Sycamore fans. My Name is (what?) Josh Diamond. I was born in Akron, Ohio. My Akron stays home on the weekends. Rubber Capitol of the world, but she don’t make tires no more. The Goodyear Blimp used to live here. So did I. I studied English, Sociology, and Writing at nearby Kent State University, and edited the Stark Campus literary journal Canto. While at Kent I met Cindy Kelly, Editor and founder of Amsterdam Press, and worked as her Fiction Editor at Plain Spoke, a quarterly literary magazine project. I also repaired guitars for a living. Now I live in Lafayette, Indiana and am pursuing an MFA in Poetry at Purdue University.
Nonfiction is sort of the red-headed stepchild genre. Instead of trying to change that, I embrace it. Sycamore only has room for one or two pieces of creative nonfiction per …MORE
BY AMY HOLWERDA
When the doctor told me, days after I had been spread eagle in his stirrups feeling him scrape, scrape, scrape inside me, that it was the early stages of cancer, he was full of questions. “Does cancer run in your family?”
“Yes, I think so,” I said, telling him about Grandpa.
“I see,” was the ready response. “And what about your mother’s side?”
My grandmother falls, I wanted to say. She has had every kind of cancer, parts of her body have been hacked away leaving gaping holes, scars. But these things do not matter, not when someone else’s blood is pulsing through my veins.
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When my mother went searching for the family that abandoned her, her birth mother told her to stop looking. I never want to meet you, she said. My mother gave her plenty of opportunities, told her she wanted nothing …MORE
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 …MORE
 Chidelia Edochie lived and wrote in the southern Chinese city of Guǎngzhōu for almost 2 years before making the move to West Lafayette, Indiana, where Sycamore Review is headquartered. She originally hails from Stone Mountain, Georgia, then lived in New York City during her undergraduate years, and ultimately settled in China, making her a rather rootless woman. That’s probably why it is the fiction and nonfiction in which humans have been uprooted, whether voluntarily or involuntarily, whether physically or emotionally, that speaks to her so.
Chidelia’s fiction has won numerous awards, including the Joan Jakobson Award “given to writers of unusual promise,” and a scholarship granted by AWP. Recently, her writing and reading efforts have shifted toward creative nonfiction. As Nonfiction Editor for Sycamore Review, she is looking for memoir, personal essays, experiential journalism/personal reportage, and …MORE
BY CHARLES WAUGH
Two Vietnamese girls, maybe 7 and 10, on a well-lit Hoi An sidewalk after dark, wearing tee shirts, shorts, and flip-flops, stood frozen, their hands dangling uselessly, their mouths open. In the middle of the street, one of the ubiquitous mid-sized Vietnamese dogs, muscular and square headed, was rapping the death snap on a skinny orange cat. Blood on the pavement, dark red and clotted with dust, had been sprayed as if the cat’s plight began with a motorbike that didn’t stop. Two women, possibly the girls’ mothers, stepped into the street, giving the Vietnamese equivalent of “scat!” and waving their hands, forcing the dog to back off. The cat writhed left and right, wailing, its whole body shuddering, then suddenly sprang three or four feet into the air. Charged by the spastic motion, the dog darted in again, worrying the cat by its throat. Now …MORE
BY REBECCA EPSTEIN
The house where I grow up is an expansive split-level with slippery wooden staircases and rooms that seem too large and too chilly. The house is built on what was once the inner slope of a ravine, now a steep street that winds back and forth and downwards in the same places that a stream once did, a long time ago.
I have both of my parents—although in ten years’ time they will live apart, separated across the country in New York and Arizona—and I have a younger sister, a soft, pale-skinned visionary named Emily. This is her religion, the desire to create things from nothing, to create beauty from what is insubstantial but becomes real under her myopic green gaze.
She paints pictures, she invents jokes, she starts questionable fashion trends among her peers, she makes her own peanut butter from scratch, she borrows our Mother’s …MORE
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