SYCAMORE REVIEW

A review of Aimee Bender’s “The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake”

Sycamore — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 17:49:53 +0000

BY DALLAS WOODBURN

Aimee Bender is the author of four books: The Girl in the Flammable Skirt (1998) which was a NY Times Notable Book, An Invisible Sign of My Own (2000) which was an L.A. Times pick of the year, Willful Creatures (2005) which was nominated by The Believer as one of the best books of the year, and The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake (2010). Her short fiction has been published in Granta, GQ, Harper’s, Tin House, McSweeney’s, and The Paris Review. She’s received two Pushcart prizes, and was nominated for the TipTree award in 2005, and the Shirley Jackson short story award in 2010. Her fiction has been translated into ten languages. She lives in Los Angeles, where she teaches creative writing at USC.

Check back in a few weeks for an interview with the author!

A truly “great” book is that which lingers with me long after the cover has been closed and the book has been put back on the shelf. For me, Aimee Bender’s latest novel, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, was one of those books.

If you haven’t read any of Bender’s work before, you are especially in for a treat. She seamlessly weaves magical elements into everyday life, bringing out the extraordinary in the ordinary world. The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake centers on Rose Edelstein, who, on the eve of her ninth birthday, eats a slice of homemade lemon cake and tastes the profound despair of her outwardly cheerful, can-do mother. Rose discovers she has the gift – or curse – of tasting emotions in food: weary milk, angry cookies, resentful grape jelly. Eating her mother’s chicken and rice makes Rose weep at the dinner table, and she can hardly swallow a bite of her older brother Joseph’s toast.

Although the book is written in first person from Rose’s perspective, at times Rose possesses an omniscient wisdom because of her ability to taste the emotions of other people through food. Bender expertly juggles this unique narrative situation. Rose (and the reader) are privy to the inner feelings, desires, and secrets of the other characters, yet often this knowledge only raises more questions. Through the circumstances of Rose’s gift/curse, Bender explores the relationship between knowledge and love, and how well we can ever really know even those people closest to us.

When it comes to writing from a child’s perspective, Bender is one of the best. As I sank into the voice of nine-year-old Rose, I simultaneously reconnected with my own child-self, remembering the details I had long forgotten: the school drinking fountain “half stopped up with pink gum” and the “warm metallic” taste of the water; the “moth-encrusted” windows of the school bus; the “flat hard green carpet” of the classroom library, with the books “about animals getting into fixes.” The specificity of Bender’s prose is what keeps the reader grounded in the story, even as Rose grows older and the strangeness of her world spirals outward.

I highly recommend The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake to anyone who is looking for an imaginative, entrancing read that delves into the bittersweet complexities of family, love, and growing up.

The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender

Doubleday (June 1, 2010)

304 pages, $25.95 Hardcover

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Dallas Woodburn is pursuing her M.F.A. in Fiction at Purdue University. Her
short fiction has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and the Dzanc Books “Best
of the Web” anthology and has appeared in Monkeybicycle, Arcadia Journal, and
The Newport Review, among others. Learn more about her nonprofit youth literacy
organization “Write On!” at http://www.writeonbooks.org.

Congratulations to Ryan Teitman

Sycamore — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 22:52:38 +0000

By JOSH WILD, Poetry Editor

We here at SR would like to extend our congratulations to contributing poet Ryan Teitman for being awarded a Wallace Stegner Fellowship for the 2010-2012 school years. Ryan’s poem, “Ode to a Hawk with Wings Burning,” is featured in our current issue, as well as here online (to read the poem, just scroll about halfway down this page or click here).

The Stegner Fellowship, a two-year appointment out of Stanford University, allows the recipient time to write with no curricular or teaching responsibilities. With a $26,000 stipend, a tuition remission and health care provided, the Stegner is one of the most competitive fellowships in the nation; ten recipients (five poets and five fiction writers) were selected this year out of a pool of nearly 1800 applicants. Some past fellows include Raymond Carver, ZZ Packer, Lan Samantha Chang and Robert Pinsky.

Again, congratulations Ryan!

Reading Series: TC Boyle, Jean Valentine, and more!

Sycamore — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 16:15:06 +0000

BY KRISTIN GRIFFIN, Visiting Writers Series Coordinator

Purdue University is bringing a number of outstanding writers and illustrators to West Lafayette this fall, including TC Boyle, Jean Valentine, Joyce Brabner and Frank Stack. Sycamore Review will be sponsoring several of the events, including a debut writers day with poet Julia Story and novelist Jessica Anthony and our annual Writers Community Harvest event, which will bring in donations for local charities. Check out our Reading Series page for all the details, and stay tuned for news about our spring reading series!

PEOPLE WHO ARE NOT LIKE US (an excerpt)

Sycamore — Sat, 21 Aug 2010 16:27:53 +0000

BY BROCK CLARKE

Rupert goes first. Rupert’s real name is Shamequa, but we call her Rupert because one of the things we do is give black women the names of white men. We also give white women the names of Asian men, and young Hispanic men the names of old white women. And so on. This is our way of helping promote better understanding of people who are not like us, which also happens to be the name of our city-mandated program: Helping Promote Better Understanding of People Who Are Not Like Us.

“Why do I have to go first?” Rupert wants to know.

“Someone has to go first,” I say, and look around, nervously, at Ashley who we call Johnny Cho; at Juan who we call Ida; at little Sun who we call Big Raeshaun; at Schlomo who we call Hussein. At Simon whose name actually is Simon and who is not on my roster. He insists he’s in the right room, but I don’t want to name him until I find out for sure whether he’s supposed to be in this group; or in the group in the classroom next to ours, who suffer from Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome; or the group in the classroom next to the bathroom, who suffer from Substance Abuse; or in the group in the classroom across the hall from ours, who suffer from Sexual Dysfunction. Everyone looks nervously backat me. It’s our first day; no one wants to be here, including me; no one knows how this is supposed to go, including me. All I know for sure are these five things: that I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for Christina; that everyone on my roster is a city employee who has said or done something racist while at work; that each of them is supposed to have a file documenting what they’ve done; that the files were supposed to be sent to me so that I could read them before this mandatory oneday class; and that Rupert has to be the first one to tell us about why she’s here, because I wasn’t sent anyone else’s files but hers. I’m holding the file open in my lap right now.

Finally, I say, “Please go ahead, Rupert,” and she does. She tells us she is a second grade teacher, or was one until she got suspended. This happened last month. Rupert was teaching a unit called “What if There Were No Black People?” As part of the unit her students were to learn the names of twenty black inventors, and then to try to imagine the world without the things they’d invented: the pacemaker, the trolley, the pencil sharpener, the wrench, the potato chip.

“Also the peanut,” Big Raeshaun says. She’s a Chinese woman with long gray-streaked black hair, a gum chewer who blows and snaps a bubble, blows and snaps it again.Sometimes, when it doesn’t snap properly, she takes the gum out and looks at it as though the gum has betrayed her. “A black man invented the peanut, also.”

“Everyone knows about Mr. Carver,” Rupert says, raising her voice. Rupert teaches second grade. When my second grade teacher raised her voice, it got higher. She sounded like a pissed-off bird. But Rupert’s voice gets deeper, like we’re at the bottom of a deep hole and she’s at the mouth of the hole, talking down to us. “Everybody wants to raise their hand and tell me about Mr. Carver. But what about Charles Drew?” She looks at us, daring us to tell her that we don’t know about Charles Drew. We don’t tell her anything, which is just the same as telling her we don’t know. “Oh lord,” she mutters, looks at the ceiling for a second, then back at us. “Mr. Charles Drew is the father of the modern blood bank. Anyone ever get blood in the hospital?” Our chairs are arranged in circle; Rupert’s head rotates slowly from left to right, her eyes stopping on each of us, briefly, until she comes to Ida, who looks away and mutters, “My dad got some blood once.”

“Well,” Rupert says. “Without Charles Drew, your dad would be dead.” She folds her arms over her chest, then stretches her legs out and crosses them at the ankles. “Any of you have anything to say about that?”

None of us has anything to say about that. Rupert is wearing a long, loose black and red flowered skirt and a long, thick buttoned down red sweater over that and bright white running sneakers. She is dressed like most any second grade teacher. Except she is over six feet tall and over two hundred pounds. But Rupert isn’t fat: it looks like she has shoulder pads underneath her cardigan. I mean, the kind of shoulder pads that go under your football jersey, not in your blazer. Her legs look like pieces of sewer pipe in black stockings; her feet look like loaves of bread wrapped in Reebok. If she had been my teacher, I know I would have done exactly what she told me to do. I can’t imagine any second grader messing with her. Except I’ve read her file, and know at least one has.

“Go ahead, Rupert,” I say. Because this is one of the things my Helping Promote Better Understanding of People Who Are Not Like Us teacher’s manual tells me to do: to make sure to tell people to “go ahead” if I have nothing else to tell them.

Rupert uncrosses her legs and leans forward, hands on her knees, her face level with mine. We’re across the circle from each other, and I’m already sitting back in my chair, but I try to lean back even further. “Don’t…” she starts to say, but then stops. I know that she was about to tell me to not call her Rupert, and I also know why she doesn’t: because if she doesn’t successfully complete this course, she’ll be fired by the city school district. And then she’ll end up on the floor above us, in all the classrooms with the groups who are suffering from Unemployment.

“Please go ahead,” I tell her, careful not to call her Rupert this time. She nods, leans back in her chair, looks down at her lap and says, “The lesson was almost over, and we were talking about Benjamin Banneker.” She pauses, but doesn’t look up at us, like she can’t stand to see what else we don’t know. “The man who invented the first American clock. And I was telling my kids that if it weren’t for Mr. Banneker, we wouldn’t have clocks. No clocks!” Rupert looks up: her eyes get really wide and she smiles at us, a toothy surprised smile, as if to say, “No clocks! Can you believe it?” Seeing Rupert like this makes me sad. Because I can tell what a good teacher she was, and might never be allowed to be again, unless she finishes the course.

“What happened then?” I ask her, even though I know.

“Schuyler happened.” Rupert doesn’t saythis so much as hiss it, but deeply, like a baritone snake.

“Who’s Schuyler?” Hussein asks. He rubs his bald head, which glistens in the flickering overhead lights. He’s wearing a blue pinstriped suit and brown loafers with tassels, which swing clockwise as he bounces his legs.

I look down at the folder open in my lap, at a picture of Schuyler. It’s clearly a class picture. Someone has dressed him up. He’s wearing a dark blue sweater with a lighter blue collared shirt underneath it. He has blond hair combed to the side, except at the part, where it’s sticking straight up. His eyes are so blue, maybe bluer than they would be if he weren’t wearing the sweater and the shirt. He’s missing a couple of front teeth, and the ones that aren’t missing look huge and rabbit-like. He’s smiling and glancing at something off to the right. Schuyler looks like a cute kid, although I would never say that to Rupert.

“Schuyler is one of my kids,” Rupert says. Her voice is even now. I can tell she’s trying to calm herself down. She even smiles, like everything is going to be all right. But then she looks at me and knows that that’s not true, not necessarily. She nods again, and then, still looking at me, says, “After I was done talking about Mr. Banneker, I asked the kids what they learned. And they said what they always said after talking about the inventor and their invention: ‘If there were no black people, there’d be no clocks!’ I was about to move on to Daniel Wilson, the inventor of Open Heart Surgery, when Schuyler said, ‘If there were no white people, there would be no time.’” Rupert leans over, her elbows on her knees, her head down, and whispers, “He didn’t even raise his hand before he said it, either. That Schuyler never raises his hand. ”

Johnny Cho laughs, then clamps her hand over her mouth. Johnny Cho is a tiny white woman dressed in workout clothes: black spandex pants that go to mid-calf, a tight blue and black fleece jacket, and white running sneakers that are exactly the same as Rupert’s except much smaller. The hand that isn’t over Johnny Cho’s mouth is holding a green Nalgene bottle, which is almost as big as her little head. Johnny Cho’s hair is white blonde and her eyes are a sparkly, oceanic blue. Her face looks like she could be twenty-five, but the veins in her hands tell me she’s not. Johnny Cho is old enough to be Schuyler’s mother. Rupert glares at her like she is Schuyler’s mother. My manual says that I have to make my cohort—the manual says to call them a “cohort”—admit that “We have more in common than we think!” I almost point out that Rupert and Johnny Cho are wearing the same sneakers. Instead, I tell Rupert to go ahead, to finish her story. She doesn’t look at me when I say this. She just shakes her head and keeps staring at the floor. My teacher’s manual says that “We must respect each other’s voices” and “It’s important not to speak for people who are not like us!” But the manual also says, “Your cohort might need some help finding just the right words!” Still, I don’t say anything, not for a long time. I stare and stare at Rupert, willing her to look at me, so I can tell her with my eyes, “I don’t want to do this; I’m just doing my job;” so I can ask her with my eyes, “What you said to Schuyler: is it true? Did you really mean it?” But Rupert doesn’t look at me, and finally I just go ahead and ask, “Is that when you told Schuyler that, ‘If white people weren’t alive, then black people would be happy’?”

After I say this, Rupert closes her eyes, tilts her head back, and faces the drop ceiling. Johnny Cho gasps through her hand, then removes her hand from her mouth, furiously unscrews the top to her Nalgene bottle and starts hydrating. I get the feeling that Hussein and Ida want to laugh their eyes are crinkled in an amused way—but they don’t, maybe because they’re afraid I won’t pass them if they do. Big Raeshaun, who is sitting next to Rupert, pats Rupert on the back and says, “I know. I’m black, too,” which I’m guessing is something she’s said before, and part of the reason she’s here.

“Oh Jesus,” Rupert says, and I can tell by her voice that she’s crying a little. I want to tell her I’m sorry. The manual warned me to never give an apology and never to accept one. “No apologies necessary,” the manual says. “Only understanding required.” But before I can apologize anyway, Simon says, “That was powerful.” And then: “Is it my turn?”

“Who are you?” I say.

“I’m Simon,” he says. He’s white, like me; but I have curly brown hair and a salt and pepper goatee, and Simon is blonde and blue eyed, just like Johnny Cho and Schuyler; everything about him looks sun faded, like he’s a surfer, even though we don’t live anywhere near the ocean. The stubble on his face looks like yellow dirt. He’s wearing a rope necklace with big green chunky beads; he fiddles with the beads while he waits to see what I’ll say. Simon looks nervous, like he doesn’t know whose side I’m on. Clearly he hasn’t read the manual like I’ve read the manual. “There are no sides,” the manual says. “We are not a square. We are a circle.”

“I know your name is Simon,” I say. “But what are you doing here?”

“The quality of my erections,” Simon says, without hesitation or shame, “is affected by the hardness or softness of the water.”

“The water?” Hussein asks. His black eyebrows rise all the way up to where his hair would be if he had any.

“You know, the water in your house. In the shower. The stuff you drink. It affects my erections. Except it’s an inverse relationship.”

“A what?” Ida wants to know.

“It’s the opposite of what you think,” Simon says.

“I don’t think about that shit at all,” Ida says.

“Please,” Simon says, and he seems the only one who really wants to be here. “I can’t go back there.” He nods his head in the direction of the classroom across the hall. “They just laugh at me. And my girlfriend’s apartment has such hard water. You wouldn’t believe it.” He looks at me, and I see that he’s crying, too. The manual did warn me that “There will be tears.”

“You’re in the wrong room,” I tell him.

“Every room is the wrong room,” Simon says, choking back a sob. “Please help me.”

To read the rest of the story, order your copy of Issue 22.2-Summer/Fall 2010 today.

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BROCK CLARKE is the author of four books of fiction, most recently the novel An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England. His fifth book—the novel Exley—will be published in September 2010. He teaches at Bowdoin College and lives with his family in Portland, Maine.

Donate to Sycamore Review Online!

Sycamore — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 03:03:58 +0000

BY ANTHONY COOK, Editor-in-Chief

I’m excited to announce that donations to Sycamore Review can now be made online! Giving to SR not only helps keep a great journal in print–it also helps fund our literacy outreach efforts (check out our Looseleaf page for more information). Now, making a contribution is easier than ever. We’ll list you as a patron in upcoming issues of the journal and on our website, and if you give more than $50, you’ll also recieve a free one-year subscription. Click on the “Donate” section at the top of the page for more information. And thank you to all those individuals and organizations who help make Sycamore Review great!

ODE TO A HAWK WITH WINGS BURNING

Sycamore — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 03:44:25 +0000

BY RYAN TEITMAN

When our eyes can’t adjust
to the fog of late light burning

off under a heat of darkness,
a black flower blooms

for a single minute,
and the bees waiting for its nectar

die of thirst. They drop one by one
into a furry pile around the stem,

not knowing that the scarcity
of its opening fails to make the juice

any sweeter. We lie when we think
that the rare and the sacred

are like twin, unborn colts—legs tangled
as they float in the barrel

of their mother’s belly. A girl keeps
a halved pear in a jar by her bedside

and says that it’s her dead puppy’s ear,
so everyone believes her

when she kisses the glass container
goodnight, and carries it on walks

around the neighborhood. You can learn
the most horrible things, if you listen

in the moment between night and day.
I would name that moment, but to name it

would make it grow, would give old women
the leisure to kneel at the altar and light

candle after candle to ward it all away.
I won’t let it have a cadence

of the commonplace. I won’t let
my mother’s botany book grow any bigger.

I won’t let the neighborhood kids catch
another creature from my dreams,

like the day two boys
dipped a hawk in gasoline,

and tossed it into the night
with its wings still burning.

We didn’t know what to do when the deer
tangled his antlers in the rusty spokes

of the landfill bicycle at the edge
of town, so we rode

from street to street, leaving
baskets of baby fish

at the doors of every church
we could find. Pray for the filly

with the lame leg. Pray for the father
with the iron burn on his thigh.

Pray for the moon to float down
like a lost paper lantern

that finds a midnight funeral
and settles—still smoldering—

on the bare, burning branches
that cradle the ashes of a hawk.

_____________________________________________________________________________________

RYAN TEITMAN is currently an MFA student in creative writing at Indiana University. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Copper Nickel, Crab Orchard Review, The Pinch, Puerto del Sol, Third Coast, and other journals. “Ode to a Hawk with Wings Burning” appeared in Issue 22.2-Summer/Fall 2010.

Dear Mary Wang (an essay excerpt)

Sycamore — Sun, 08 Aug 2010 23:32:39 +0000

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 yard you could see mountains, sometimes deer, a coyote or fox.

I know that my pen pal Mary and I wrote over eighty letters to each other because I have a letter postmarked January 28, 1991, on which Mary wrote on the outside flap of the envelope in purple ink: Fact: To date, I have received 79 letters from you from Nov 1987 to Dec 1990. I’m waiting for your 80th letter!! The five-page, double-sided letter is covered in words and pictures drawn in purple, pink, and green ink. One page is written in a spiral pattern, maddening as you have to turn the page slowly and continuously in a circle to read it. Some of the pages have drawings of bunnies and little faces, other unidentifiable doodles and scribbles. The letter is folded into a complicated, origami-like square with an arrow on a tab you pull in order to open it. There’s another letter postmarked February 16, 1991 that says on the outside of the envelope: Ur last letter was the 80th letter I received. I would have been thirteen going on fourteen that year, finishing up the eighth grade at Silverado Middle School in the Spring and entering Vintage High School in the Fall. I stopped writing Mary letters the first semester of my freshman year.

Mary sent me a picture of herself, triggering the change. It’s a wallet-sized photo, the kind you pose for at school, order in different sizes and cut with scissors into individual single pictures. On the back of the photo she sent me, she wrote the following four lines in black ink:

8th grade 90-91

Mary Wang

To: Lisa

Couldn’t say I didn’t warn ya!

I saved fifteen of Mary’s letters (plus a Christmas card). I can deduce from those letters that I had been asking Mary for a picture for a while and had recently sent one of myself. Mary nervously mentions that she’ll send me one when the school pictures get developed. On the outside of an envelope she writes: Bracelet? Maybe. Picture? No way. (The “bracelet” refers to a friendship bracelet. Apparently I made one and sent it to her.) In another letter she says that she’s worried about her new haircut, which makes her look like a boy, and wonders whether she should wear her glasses in the school photo.

In the picture Mary sent me, there’s a cute Asian girl who looks more like a child than an adult. She has a short bowl haircut, braces on her teeth, giant glasses, and wears a shirt decorated with little pink rosebud appliqué, the kind of top you can find in the children’s section. By the time Mary sent me the photo I had already started freshman year of high school. At school, I noticed that some kids still wore children’s clothes, but that made them automatically “uncool.” Meanwhile, my friends and I had been dressing up as tiny adults, smaller versions of our mothers.

By seventh grade I had already begun wearing some of my mother’s clothing—too large and loose, of course, but I still wore them. My hair was long and permed. I curled my lashes and wore mascara, a sheer lipstick sometimes. All of my friends did the same. In Mary’s picture, Mary is a child, which technically at thirteen and fourteen, she still was, as was I. But Mary looks much younger than my friends and I did at the same age— less sophisticated, less mature.

I did not notice this at first. I was excited to have finally received a picture from her. I ran over to the kitchen to show my mother. She was chopping carrots and onions. A tall pot of beef stew simmered on the stovetop. She paused, knife hovering over the vegetables, leaned in to look at the picture and said, “She’s ugly. You don’t need to be friends with her. You have lots of friends. All of your friends are pretty, Lisa, you stop writing to her.”

A few things of note: (1) my mother never told me I was pretty. Normally she pointed out the unattractive parts of my face and body, suggested that I should get plastic surgery when I got a little older, made sure that I knew that she (my mother) was prettier than me, that all my friends and pictures of women in magazines were prettier than me, and (2) I did not know I was prettier than Mary.

I looked at the picture more closely, realizing that Mary was ugly, that if she went to my high school I would not be friends with her. If my friends saw her picture, they would make fun of her. If they knew she was my pen pal, they would make fun of me for even having a pen pal in the first place. I was afraid of being the girl in the picture, someone who people saw and remarked out loud, how ugly. I didn’t want to be Mary Wang. I stopped writing.

But Mary kept writing. She sent several letters asking why I hadn’t written. She said her mother told her it was because I was pretty and she was not, and probably after I got her picture I decided she was not good enough to be friends with. Mary wrote that she hoped this wasn’t true, that she didn’t want to believe her mother, that there must be another reason why I’d stopped writing. She said she was sad and asked me to please write her back. I am repeating this from memory. I don’t have those letters anymore. I threw them away after I read what her mother said about me, wanting to forget I had made Mary feel bad about herself. I couldn’t believe her mother had figured out the truth. She had never even met me. How could she know? I thought. How can someone figure out what I’m thinking when I haven’t said anything? Mary eventually stopped writing.

Pretty soon I regretted ending our correspondence. During high school I guarded a secret. My father had beaten me with a golf club one day after school. It was an isolated incident but the welts on my arms and my sides from trying to protect myself remained for weeks. I remember thinking that I wished I could write Mary. But I had already betrayed her and I didn’t think I could go back.

To read the rest of this essay, order your copy of Issue 22.2-Summer/Fall 2010 today.

_____________________________________________________________________________________

Lisa Lee is a Kundiman fellow and received an MFA from the University of Houston. She received a B.A. from U.C. Berkeley and J.D. from Santa Clara University. Her work has appeared in North American Review, Gulf Coast, The Tusculum Review, Pebble Lake Review, and Reed Magazine. She lives in Brooklyn.

Reading Session Now Open

Sycamore — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 17:55:32 +0000

Have you spent the summer polishing those manuscripts? We hope so. Sycamore Review’s reading period is now open!

After our summer hiatus, we are once again accepting submissions in poetry, fiction, and nonfiction for our next issue. With the opening of this reading session, we’re also rolling out our new online submission manager. Beginning August 15, 2010, we will ONLY accept submissions through the submission manager. We will no longer be accepting postal submissions, except for our annual Wabash Prizes in Poetry and Fiction, which must be submitted by mail.

To submit, read our submission guidelines, then follow the link to our submission manager to set up an account and submit your work. Our hope is that you’ll save money on printing and postage, and that in return we’ll be able to respond more quickly to your work.

Online Submissions!

Sycamore — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 21:30:11 +0000

Big changes at Sycamore Review this year! We have a new fiction editor, Conor Broughan, a new non-fiction editor, Chidelia Edochie, and, when our reading period begins on August 1st, we will be accepting submissions via our new online submission manager.

Switching to online submissions will make us a much more efficient journal. It will help us read and respond faster to your work by eliminating some of the busy work necessary to process snail mail submissions, and allow us to devote more time and energy toward making sure each issue of Sycamore Review is better than the last.

We recognize that some or our submitters might have their manuscripts packed and ready to drop in the mail on August 1st, so we will still accept submissions via snail mail until August 15th. But afterward, all submissions should be made through the submission manager.

For more details on our new submission guidelines and instructions on how to use the system, visit our submissions page.

We look forward to receiving your work!

Introducing Fiction Editor Conor Broughan

Sycamore — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 01:32:28 +0000

I grew up in Alexandria, Virginia before moving to Providence, Rhode Island to pursue a BA in Literature at Providence College. Following graduation, I moved to New York where I worked in academic publishing for several years. I currently live in Lafayette, Indiana where I am pursuing an MFA in fiction at Purdue University.

I look forward to the upcoming reading period because I couldn’t be more excited to read your work. Last semester, I had the pleasure of serving as the Assistant Fiction Editor and I was impressed by the submissions I had the opportunity to read and eventually help edit. Over the next year, I plan to speed-up the response time for your submissions and also diversify the fiction that we publish in each issue.

Submit the story that you’ve surprised yourself with. Submit a story that took you, the writer, out of the your own self-contained world and made you reconsider your place in that very world. As a reader, I want to be surprised by what is on the page. When I finish a story, I want to look at the world anew and from a slightly different angle. Please consult the Submissions page for my full aesthetic statement and submission guidelines.

It’s great to meet you all and I can’t wait to read your work.