Sybelia Drive has arrived with LuLu, Saul, Rainey, and so many others ready to tell their stories, each distinct and yet merging, inside a kaleidoscopic world and under the weight of war, love and loss, friendship and the fever pitch of the 1960s and 70s.
Over the past weeks and months, I’ve hinted at these characters’ stories with excerpts in Hypertext, where I also answered One Question about fierce friendship, and in The Coil, and I’ve spoken of setting in Big Indie Books and of research for Necessary Fiction’s Research Notes. Sybelia Drive has been featured on Entropy’s Autumn Booklist and in the New Titles section of the September/October issue of Poets and Writers.
I’ve been thrilled by the interview with Nancy Zafris for Streetlight Magazine, where we talked of turmoil and languor, messing up the quiet, the music of the late 1960s and early 1970s, the immense silence of men returning home from war, and so many other things. This interview still sends me, as Nancy’s questions required deep thought and the back-and-forth we had was incredibly genuine.
I’ve also spoken to Steph Post for her Writer Bites Series and admitted to books I love, procrastination, and how I come up with characters’ names. And when the interviews keep coming and I continue to hope for readers to connect and love and review this novel, Sybelia Drive shows up at Monkeybicycle, imagining herself a dance, a joke, a drop of dew, a grove full of citrus, a stranger who just might take your hand and then your world.
Thanks, appreciation, and love to all those who have guided this novel to publication: Valerie Borchardt at Georges Borchardt Agency; Jeffrey Condran and Robert Peluso at Braddock Avenue Books; Lori Hettler at TNBBC Publicity; Annie Russell for the beautiful cover art; Savannah Adams for the book design; all my teachers over the years, including Laurie Foos, Nancy Zafris, Margot Livesey, and the late Wayne Brown and Lee K. Abbott; friends and fellow writers, Elizabeth Graver, Brad Richard, Seth Borgen, Fritz McDonald, Mark Fabiano, and so many more; the literary review editors who published several of the chapters as stories; the Ohio Arts Council, The Studios of Key West, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, Vermont College of Fine Arts, and the Lesley University MFA Program in Creative Writing; and of course, my closest friends and family.
There is more to come in the exploration and discussion of this novel. I hope, in the meantime, she makes it into the hands of readers as a kind of respite from a dizzying world. Here’s the first paragraph of the first chapter of Sybelia Drive, titled “Girl - October 1967”. Consider this an invitation to read the rest!
Rainey paraded down on us the year my daddy left. It was the year when Daddy traded in our family car for the red-and-white VW bus, Mama took to watching Peyton Place on Tuesday evenings, and I attached the gold stars for spelling around my dresser mirror. The Beatles asked us to sit back and enjoy the show from the stereo speakers in Saul’s room, and the central Florida sun lit up the house like it was on fire. It wasn’t like we didn’t all know change was coming, what with Vietnam breathing down my daddy’s neck.
