Eva's Christmas Eve

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A balmy 85 degrees in West Palm Beach. A sultry kind of Christmas Eve, not typical of winter in Florida, even this far south, even in 1973. Tonight dinner and dancing, but for now, for Eva, a moment in the sun, in that white bikini she’d worn back when she met Will, her eventual husband; back before she’d any thoughts of having children, Rainey, a daughter as beautiful as she; back before she became a war widow.

Figures we picture when writing characters: for Eva, it was Grace Kelly, Faye Dunaway, Bridget Bardot. Look and Life magazine covers. Eventually, though, characters become themselves, more than the reflections that inspired them. They take on lives, which deepen and color and align with surrounding characters, reliable or unreliable in the way they navigate their fictional paths.

As a group they take on meaning, create a reason for being on the page, inform us of what was going on back in the late 60s and early 70s. And in the end, their individuality and relationships to each other stir the moment they were caught up in. In Sybelia Drive, for the women, it was the first glimmer and glance of feminism. One might not see this at first, but within the pages, there it is, billowing, slowly, and in its own way.

Back in October, Women Writers, Women’s Books featured an essay on the men and boys of Sybelia Drive. This December Sybelia Drive’s women and girls are up in lights: Minnie, Eva, Lillian, LuLu, Rainey, Hélène, Vita, An, and Esther. Inspired by a reflection on hope from writer Rebecca Solnit in her book of essays, Hope in the Dark, “The Women and Girls of Sybelia Drive” explores the characters in a way that, even after writing the novel, surprised me. Each of these women is strengthened by each other and by a deep thread of hope which they know won’t allow life to return to the way it was, but allows them to move forward into the kind of lives they’ve created themselves. Eva may be the one who has moved the farthest toward a self-fulfilled life, and so, she sits on the beach, awaiting and aware of the next adventure.

Sybelia Drive! Publication day!

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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.