British Reviewer Ellie Hawkes writes about The Geography of First Kisses

Feeling fortunate and blessed to have received a review as stunning as this one by British reviewer Ellie Hawkes. Back in 2021 she reviewed my novel Sybelia Drive in such a clear and beautiful way, and now she’s written a truly gorgeous and comprehensive review of my story collection The Geography of First Kisses. I’m beyond grateful for this gift of a reader and reviewer who understands and connects with my books.

A few of her thoughts on TGFK:

“The fourteen stories that make up The Geography of First Kisses hit the short story collection sweet spot of being tonally similar enough to form a cohesive whole, but individually full of variation and surprises. Like an album, there are repeated themes and strands, refrains that run throughout the book, but each story is its own song.

… she presents moments that contain within them hundreds of other moments. The prose flicks seamlessly between present and past, and there’s such wisdom in the understanding of how time works, how those defining moments of our childhood live with us and yet are so hard to recapture …

It is hard to describe Karin Cecile Davidson’s style, except by saying that her stories remind me of almost all of my favourite short story writers, from classics such as Raymond Carver, Angela Carter and Alice Munro to contemporary favourites of mine like Lauren Groff and Carmen Maria Machado. These stories are at that level – they’re so layered and intricate, and just beautiful to read. I honestly feel quite evangelical about this writer – with her first novel and now this collection of stories, her talent is so awe-inspiring, and her words are such a rich pleasure to read.”

UNLEASH LIT Review/Interview of THE GEOGRAPHY OF FIRST KISSES

Many thanks to Ashley Holloway of Unleash Lit for her beautiful review of The Geography of First Kisses and for the chance to think and write about this collection in our interview.

She writes in her review:
”Each of the fourteen stories is uniquely tethered to the geography in such a way the characters almost become an extension of place, taking the reader on a journey through the vast landscapes that make up the United States. Not only does the reader travel through the mind’s eye with each page turned, but this also illustrates the depth, skill, and creativity of the author, highlighting their talent for rich descriptions and evocative language.”

Stunning Book Review of SYBELIA DRIVE

Gratitude and so much more to Chris Harding Thornton for her phenomenal review of Sybelia Drive! Featured in Center for Literary Publishing’s April 2021 Book Reviews, the review shares a beautifully written and thoughtful account of what lies within the novel’s pages. CLP is home to Colorado Review, where Sybelia Drive’s chapter, “Rock Salt and Rabbit,” was published in their 2016 Fall/Winter Issue, featured on their website, and read aloud on the CR Podcast. Beyond thankful for everyone at CLP and Colorado Review for all their contributions to the literary world and in support of Sybelia Drive.

Two Interviews on the Landscapes of Love & Loss

Newfound Interviews, Spring 2021

Gwen Goodkin

Love and Loss Intertwined: An Interview with Gwen Goodkin

Gwen Goodkin is the author of the short story collection, “A Place Remote” (West Virginia University Press, 2020), a breathtaking and candid glimpse into the lives of those in small Ohio towns, from the university town of southeastern Oxford farther north to Mansfield and on up to the northeastern towns and farms along Highway 18. The stories appraise and illuminate the attitudes, desires, pursuits, misunderstandings, demands, and caring of their characters, who reach for more, not always finding truth nor satisfaction inside their wishes. In prose that is reflective and thoughtful, Goodkin leads us to places she knows well, to people she understands, with an awareness of and respect for their lives, whether rich with friends, complicated by struggles, or brightened by hope.

Sara Schaff

Love, Love, Love: An Interview with Sara Schaff

Sara Schaff’s story collections “The Invention of Love” (Split/Lip Press, 2020) and “Say Something Nice About Me” (Augury Books, 2016) share a language that is at once straightforward and deeply considered, as well as a landscape that reveals as much about character as it does about geography. Generations of characters are examined, many balanced on the precipice where middle-class meets poverty, from youthful, wishing children to mature, meandering adults, and their stories are threaded with themes of hope, disquiet, friendship, envy, solitude, and community. With great care and understanding, Schaff explores childhood loneliness, teenage rebellion, young adult aspirations, adult anxiety—the kind that occurs between having children and peering forward to old age—all within the boundless and hopeful measures of love. In prose that is direct and honest, the stories reach toward strands of emotion buried within or tightly encircling the characters, breathing them alive.

Sybelia Drive! Publication day!

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.