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 in the …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 the …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 long red nightgown …MORE
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