On the podcast, Diverse Voices Book Review, host Hopeton Hay interviews me about The Geography of First Kisses. Our conversation touched on the stories’ themes of love and belonging, fabulist whispers, fact infused into fiction, and how long certain stories take to write. Hopeton and I have known each other since high school in New Orleans, and it’s clear that we both still have a great appreciation for literature. I always love speaking with Hopeton, and I loved this interview! Listen here!
Summer Reviews of The Geography of First Kisses
Beautiful reviews of The Geography of First Kisses to share!
With thanks to Chris Harding Thornton for her review in The Colorado Review/Center for Literary Publishing, in which she writes: “Absence, loss, disappearance—these things haunt us, and the stories in The Geography of First Kisses do, too. But even when they’re heart-wrenching, they’re never maudlin. The stories are filled with delight, beauty, and amazement.”
Gratitude as well to BettyJoyce Nash for her review in the Southern Review of Books. “In the title story Davidson poses the question: ‘Why is there no such thing as north by south or east by west? Why does direction turn only slightly, instead of leaning full tilt into another place, another time, another anything?’ These stories do lean, full-tilt, into time and space, excavating complex forms of love, loss, and longing, starting with the title story’s unnamed narrator, who is ‘sweet sixteen and never been,’ covering compass points, longing for a North Star or a magnetic pole, ‘to show me where I’d landed.’”
MER Literary Journal - Book Review of The Geography of First Kisses - by Teresa Tumminello Brader
Beyond grateful for this beautiful review by Teresa Tumminello Brader in MER Literary Journal of The Geography of First Kisses, in which the stories feel truly seen and are called “an exquisitely rendered collection.” The review begins:
“The Geography of First Kisses, winner of Kallisto Gaia Press’s Acacia Prize, is a collection of fourteen short stories by Karin Cecile Davidson, author of the novel Sybelia Drive. The stories vary in that they are told from different perspectives, span the mid-fifties to today, and are set in locales ranging from Gulf Coast states to Midwest prairies, with a couple of stops outside U.S. borders. The constants are the lyrical and layered prose, and the focus on girls and young women. Whether these characters come down Lucinda Williams’s gravel road of the epigraph or visit the outskirts of Tallahassee, they are attuned to and act in response to the inherent dangers and beauties of their environments, whether to their benefit or detriment.”
To read more, follow this link to the review at MER: Motherhood, Literature, & Art.
"First Kisses, Real & Imagined"
“In the past few months, my story collection The Geography of First Kisses has allowed a way in for prospective readers to speak of their own first kisses. A First Lady’s first kiss as a young girl under a front porch light. An elderly gentleman’s remembrance of full lips under a full moon. A girl’s memory of butterfly kisses from when she was much younger with her grandmother, their eyelashes fluttering together, and her grandmother laughing and saying,“Honestly? The first one? No idea,” her voice trailing behind her, the memory gone. And while these stories are lovely and spontaneous, it’s the first kisses in literature, rather than in real life, that draw me in.”
- from “First Kisses, Real & Imagined,” a little essay I wrote on first kisses, mostly literary ones, inspired by readers, novels, and the stories of The Geography of First Kisses & featured in the Women’s Writers, Women’s Books’ ON WRITING column
