Sybelia Drive & how to spend Christmas in Florida without ever leaving your living room

In these December days of deciding to stay home & stay safe, there are still ways to transport ourselves. Sure, there’s The Crown and Borgen and other series to stream our nights away. But there is also the opportunity to read all those books published in 2020 in the midst of this crazy pandemic. Books you’ve never even heard of because they were, yeah, published inside of this insanity.

Recently, Emma Straub of Brooklyn’s Books Are Magic compiled a booklist called “2020 Sucked, but These Books Don’t” where you can find—at this point—167 titles, including a good handful of small press titles like SYBELIA DRIVE. From just this list, you can travel to Vietnam, Appalachia, Sweden, Southern California, or even small-town Florida without ever leaving your living room sofa. I myself would encourage life under the Travelers Palm, lakeside, with a tall glass of tangerine juice, spiked if you like. And so, if you’re looking for a gift for others, a good read for yourself, give Sybelia Drive a chance. A multi-voiced novel that explores the lives of those on the homefront during the war in Vietnam, she won’t disappoint you. Give her a place on your bedside table, a long luxurious read, and a rating on Goodreads so others will know she’s out in the world, ready to transport anyone who will turn her pages.

Purchase Link for Sybelia Drive 🌴

In Columbus, Ohio, there are a few signed copies at Prologue & Bookspace! & if you’re in Brooklyn, definitely give Books Are Magic some love.

If you’d like to know more about the novel, check out the latest press and December & January readings below!

PRESS

Goodreads Booklist: 33 Reader-Approved, Highly Rated Works of Fiction to Discover Now - Sybelia Drive lands on a booklist among the gorgeous works of Alice Randall, Taylor Brown, Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi, Randall Kenan, & so many more

LitReactor Column - my crazy craft essay on 20 years of wandering toward an understanding of narrative structure

Authorlink Interview with Ellen Birkett Morris - lessons learned, decisions on form, the power of objects

Book Q&A’s with Deborah Kalb - the voices, places, & hopes of Sybelia Drive

LitHub’s “5 Writers, 7 Questions, No Wrong Answers” - KCD & Sybelia Drive among stellar writers and their books

Women Writers, Women’s Books - “The Men and Boys of Sybelia Drive” - the novel’s treatment of masculinity

Largehearted Boy - “Book Notes” - Karin Cecile Davidson’s Playlist for Sybelia Drive

Debutiful - “Recommendations” - Sybelia Drive lands on a shortlist of recommended October 2020 debut novels

EVENTS

December 2020

December 10: Readings on the Pike - hosted by Hannah Grieco - 7 pm EST - Zoom link available the week of the event on “Readings on the Pike” Facebook page

December 20: Hidden Timber Reading Series - 3 pm EST - Zoom Event - in conversation with Christi Craig - Advance Registration

January 2021

January 14: Buffalo Street Books, Ithaca, NY - in conversation with Lori Ostlund - Zoom Event - more details to come

Halfway through winter and thinking of...

Heat, sand, salt.

Wearing next to nothing.

Drinking iced gin laced with lime and tonic from tall sweating glasses.

In the meantime, nearly a winter's worth of work!

A brand-new website: karinceciledavidson.com. Right here! The old one vanished, and this one is not only pretty, but powerful. THUNDER ON A THURSDAY, my blog, is still ready and willing. The STORIES page lists my publications and awards, and the INTERVIEWS page lists all Newfound Journal interviews, as well as an archive of all the Hothouse interviews from the Poppy Series. Under the GALLERY page, I've added story snippets with photos and links, along with images that inspire me. Plus the typical things: my bio is found in ABOUT and you can get in touch via CONTACT. Very soon, I'll add an EDITING page which will offer manuscript consultation and editing services for short stories, chapbooks, story collections, and novels. Many winter hours were spent building this author website, with special thanks to Nicolette Swift for guiding me, redirecting the old domain to the new one, and designing the sweet little moon snail favicon that sits aside the web address. A round of applause to F. Anne Michel for the cover photo as well! I'm happy to have this work behind me, so I can get back to another kind of creating!

And that would be THE NOVEL. In the final stretch of revisions. Certainly and thankfully, the snow and ice will keep me inside and at the desk. And my reward for reaching the last chapter, the last page, the last word? Summer! Heat, sand, and salt, especially the brine of the ocean. Until then, head down, inside the writing, coming up for air only to catch my breath and dive in again. Until the work is finally done.

late at night, a message to my cousin

Now,

my intention was to write a nice letter and then send it with a stamp and all

Not happening.

And so

you get this email instead.

Well.

I did love your note about the shiny pine cone ornament 
and things being tricky
and having a family skate.

Now a skate with my cousin would indeed be a thing.
Can we please plan that please for the please future.

Please?

In skates we can write letters and notes
and stop on a stamp
and do tricky things
and hear the ice saying, between sighs,
oh, cousin this and cousin that,
how about a little figure 8?
a little spin
arm in arm
and laughing
and not even cold

especially because
you are laughing so much that I am, too.

haha ha ha haha  


- xox, K

Scents of the year, of the past – Reverie 2011 – Day 13

In winter.  Peppermint, balsam and pine, cypress, smoke, soot, dust, litter.  Coffee, cocoa, beef stew, burgundy, anisette.  Citrus – bitter like grapefruit, sweet and rich like blood oranges, green and trimmed with tang like limes. 

Once a boy kept whispering to me in a college class on southern literature.  No matter how I ignored him, he kept on.  In the ground floor classroom, where mildew swelled in the folds of linoleum, I glared, and still, he kept on.  Finally, the class ended and he followed me, walking backwards before me, bowing and eventually saying that I smelled of snow.  Even in a city below sea level where snow rarely flew, I couldn’t shake him off. 

When he took me dancing, the bar smelled of hot bodies, rum, tobacco, and the sulfured remains of poppers. Midnight meals of buttery omelettes, thick-cut fries, and creamy orange freezes.  In the morning the thin papery odor of exhaustion.

In spring.  Wet grass, sage leaves, mint in time for juleps in early May.  Double-barreled bourbon, wood smoke, charcoal and steaks on the grill.  Wet dog, morning breath, cloves, patchouli, and ashes.  Pears poached in pale wine and sugar and vanilla, star anise and cinnamon sticks floating atop the syrup as it turns darker and thicker.  There was a chicken in the oven, doused in sherry.  There were potatoes au gratin, turning velvety and coppery, begging forgiveness.  There was a salad of endive with a lemon vinaigrette, croutons, anchovy dares and salted secrets.

On the last morning of the year, we crush mint into the fresh tangerine juice, and we don’t even bother to add the dry and silky Prosecco bought especially, especially, especially to accompany the Benedict, Hussarde, Sardou.

Snow Day - Reverie 2011 - Day 1

February 14, 1972.  Valentine’s Day.  New Orleans.  Seventh Grade. 

The day started out with rain, like so many days in New Orleans.  Cold, consistent, and coming down.  That was the bus ride to school.  Later it turned to sleet.  That was in history class.  I think we were studying the Civil War.  Before lunch the sleet turned to wet, heavy dollops of snow.  No one paid attention in math class. We gathered around the one window, a tall thin affair in our modern new 1970’s building, and shouted about the white stuff.  Some of us had never seen snow.

The first snowfall I’d ever seen was on New Year’s Day, 1968.  I was eight years old, staring out the window of our Volkswagen Beetle at the snow-dusted fields and woodlands outside Tallahassee, Florida.  I remember how cold it looked, how distant, and how I didn’t want to get out of the car.

By the end of lunch period, my best friend, Amelie, and I figured out a way (how I have no recollection) for our parents to break through the already jammed office phone lines and give us permission to leave school early. Meanwhile, the headmaster announced over the intercom that what we were seeing outside wasn’t really snow.  I thought of how distressed he would be to walk the ten steps to his car, his fancy leather shoes covered in the unmistakable frozen white snow.

Waiting for the streetcar, jumping in the small white mounds, catching snowflakes on our tongues and in our eyelashes, our corduroy jumpers and thin tights barely keeping us warm.  Amelie and me.  All smiles.  The streetcar driver.  All smiles.  Slipping along the icy tracks for miles, all the way from Carrollton and St. Charles to Washington Avenue.  Running upstairs, yelling for my mother to find us the ice bucket, throwing off our jumpers and throwing on jeans, flying out the door to the little yard.  Nearly three in the afternoon, the daylight already diminishing.  At twilight, our first snowman ever.

The distant feeling I’d had in Tallahassee was cancelled out by the wild banshee yells that Amelie and I threw around the neighborhood.  We’d made a snowman no bigger than a baby, then torn it apart and reconstructed it on the hood of a neighbor’s car.  Short and round and full of dead oak leaves, our snow baby wore a smile of red string, Amelie’s pink scarf, and my striped mittens.  Its unmatched pebble eyes seemed to stare in wonder at the passing traffic on St. Charles Avenue.  Eventually, the streetlights came on and the neighbor drove off with the snow baby hood ornament.

If ever I had another snow day, I’d wish for this same one, with all the exuberance of still being a kid, yelling and freezing, and then realizing the next morning that the frozen snow in the ice bucket had melted.  The joy of all that comes down and then disappears.