Guidelines
PLEASE NOTE: As of August 15, Sycamore Review will accept ONLY online submissions. Mailed submissions will be discarded.
Reading Period: August 1 – March 31. Submissions sent at other times will go unread.
Sycamore Review is looking for quality, original poetry, fiction, non-fiction and art. The most successful work is exciting, new, fresh, creative, carefully-wrought. We accept unsolicited submissions of fiction, poetry, personal essays and art. Please query for other nonfiction, including book reviews, brief critical essays, etc. as well as all art. We are interested in expanding our nonfiction content. At this time we are not able to accept outside interviews, previously published works (except for translations) or genre pieces (conventional science fiction, romance, horror, etc.).
As of August 15, 2010, we will only accept submissions online. To use our online submission manager, click on this link, follow the instructions for creating an account (if you haven’t done so already), and upload your piece. Submissions are limited to one work at a time for fiction and non-fiction, and no more than five poems, which should be included in a single document. Please submit a .doc or .rtf file only and include a cover letter in the comments section. We’d like to know a little bit about you and your work.
We do accept simultaneous submissions, but request prompt notification if the work is accepted elsewhere. Please note simultaneous submissions in your cover letter.
Submissions for the annual Wabash Prize in poetry or fiction are currently only accepted by mail. If you would like to submit for the prize, please see the separate guidelines on our contest page.
POETRY manuscripts should be typed single-spaced, one poem to a page. Please submit no more than twice per reading period.
PROSE should be typed double-spaced, with numbered pages and the author’s name and title of the work easily visible on each page. Wait until you have received a response to submit again.
NONFICTION Sycamore Review does not publish scholarly articles or journalistic pieces, though we do publish experiential journalism with a memoir bent. Most of our nonfiction content could be classified as literary memoir or personal essay. We are interested in originality, brevity, significance, strong dialogue, and vivid detail. There is no maximum page count, but remember that the longer the piece is, the more compelling each page must be. Wait until you have received a response to submit again.
Art: If you are interested in submitting art for either our print issue or online art gallery, please send a query email describing your work (Is it black and white? Photos of installations?) and introducing yourself to sycamore@purdue.edu. Do NOT send unsolicited images attached to emails. Your email will be deleted without being opened (we fear viruses). To submit work, please send via snail-mail as slides or CD-ROM (no prints!) or note in your emailed query a web address where your work can be viewed. For web pages, please indicate which pieces you would like considered. We are interested in serious, original work.
Purdue University acquires first-time North American rights, including electronic rights, for work published in Sycamore Review. After publication, all rights revert to the author.
Sycamore Review does not publish creative work by any student currently attending Purdue University. Former students should wait one calendar year before submitting.
Sycamore Review pays two contributor’s copies for printed work.
Aesthetic Statements
Sycamore Review does not have a permanent aesthetic statement because of the nature of our editorship. That said, our genre editors do have preferences that you, as a potential submitter, might be curious about. Please remember, however, that we are constantly surprised by the pieces we end up liking the most. This, we believe, is one of the great pleasures of literature — its ability to undermine our presuppositions, to open our eyes, to stretch our hearts and minds
Poetry
As editors and also as poets, one of our primary aesthetic goals is to be inclusive, to consider the work of poets from and of all walks, factions and stripes. (We are fairly certain that good poetry is not restrained to any particular school of thought.) However, an aim toward inclusiveness remains feeble at best unless we recognize in addition our own individual patterns of occlusion, the ways in which our sometimes unconscious, sometimes political (in the broader sense) predilections literally close our eyes and ears to good and interesting work possibly deserving of publication. So, while we supply you with an outline of our vision for Sycamore, we encourage you to submit the work that interests you, but that may initially seem to fall outside of that vision. Taking that preamble into account, we are essentially looking for poetry that is moving, troubling, and ambitious, poetry that respects the power in metaphor and perhaps the value of restraint. We are looking for poetry that suggests urgency, poems that were necessary to write because of some situation, even if that situation is the poem itself, the need for some encumbered imagination to expel itself and to create. –Josh Wild and Mario Chard, Poetry Editors
Fiction
I love stories that take chances and aren’t afraid to get more than a little dirty. Even more, I love characters that take chances and aren’t afraid to get dirty. I am looking for stories that have the characters in the foreground and that have ideas, conceits, structure and plot that contribute to the story of those characters. David Foster Wallace once said that “fiction that isn’t exploring what it is to be human today isn’t good art” and I agree with that. Stories that mix genres, bend genres, or that are driven by ideas are all encouraged as long as the heart of the story remains human. 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. There is no length limit, but due to space concerns, it is difficult for the journal to publish stories that are longer than twenty-five pages. Please do not send novel excerpts. — Conor Broughan, Fiction Editor
Nonfiction
I like a little blood on the page. I want an essay that manages to delve into the emotional depths of an experience, as well as to access a certain wisdom about the circumstances of the experience. Intellectual observations about human nature are all well and good, but what I want most to know is how the writer fits, emotionally, into the world s/he is recording.
Following are a short list of essays that I love, and that I think manage to accomplish what I discuss above:
“Stain you red” by Nicole Helget
“Burl’s” by Bernard Cooper
“The Love of my Life” by Cheryl Strayed
and
“The Undertaking” by Thomas Lynch
Send me your work. I’m a generous reader. –Chidelia Edochie, Nonfiction Editor
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