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

An Artist, A Poet, Two Novelists: Four Interviews on Women, Race, Diaspora, Identity, Language, Sexual Violence, Friendship, Fragility, Beauty

Newfound Interviews, Autumn 2020

April Sunami

Black Women, Front and Center: An Interview with April Sunami

April Sunami conveys a warmth and generosity, a depth and brilliance that carry into her art. A visual artist, focused on mixed-media painting and installation, she is attentive to the world around her and to the world within. The palette she draws from is ever-expanding, whether in response to those nearest to her, the art community, or the greater Black Lives Matter movement. Her attention to black femininity and strength, and her use of oil and acrylic paints, textiles, maps, seashells, and shattered auto glass, create powerful and majestic works of art. From life-size canvases to diminutive studies, her paintings have a presence that calls forth, that summons and then demands consideration, reflection, and awe.

Eloisa Amezcua

How I Was Taught to Love: An Interview with Eloisa Amezcua 

Eloisa Amezcua’s debut poetry collection, “From The Inside Quietly” (Shelterbelt Press, 2018), the inaugural winner of the Shelterbelt Poetry Prize selected by Ada Limón, cracks open the concepts of identity, language, perspective, persona, and voice with a blend of observation, confession, reflection, and a fierce gaze on the world. There is a curious lens in these poems that creates distance and, simultaneously, invitation. Observe, but don’t touch. Get closer, but understand, the universal leans toward what is specific, private, cautious.

Hayley Krischer

Somehow We Control the Narrative: An Interview with Hayley Krischer

Hayley Krischer’s debut novel, “Something Happened to Ali Greenleaf” (Razorbill, October 2020), is a phenomenal look inside the minds of two high school girls—Ali, who has been sexually assaulted, and Blythe, who makes her way into Ali’s world with the intent of protecting the assailant. Straightforward and unflinching, the story leaps into emotional territory, traversing a landscape of best friends, high school cliques, crushes, drugs, parties, bullying, and outright sexual violence against young girls. In a voice that is searing, honest, and original, Krischer has arrived inside the world of YA novels with a topic that deserves serious attention.

Leslie Hooton

Finding Beauty and Happiness: An Interview with Leslie Hooton

Leslie Hooton’s debut novel, “Before Anyone Else” (Turner Publishing, 2020) is a story of hope and vision, reimagining spaces where we come together to celebrate meals and each other. At the same time, it is a story of restoring more intimate, fragile worlds where misfortune and happiness exchange places. Surrounded by loving, dynamic, southern men—her father Hank, brother Henry, and “best friend” Griffin—Bailey Ann Edgeworth grows into a young woman able to visualize and transform unrealized spaces into beautiful upscale restaurants, which reveal the owners’ and chefs’ individual stories. Ambition and imagination lead the Atlanta native to New York City, where success and the idea of love lead to trouble. True friends and family help Bailey find her way home, a path that reminds, as well as restores.

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.

Sweet Iowa

“Sweet Iowa” is out in the brilliant 2020 summer issue of STORY Magazine. It’s kind of a windswept midwestern story with love and foolishness thrown in. If you love preview below, think about purchasing the entire issue. The stories of Cara Blue Adams, Chad Simpson, Ann Lightcap Bruno, and others fill the volume with amazing voices. And in the meantime, here are Howdy and Morgan:

The first time Howdy Miller saw Morgan Loving she was walking across the barroom, her legs like scissors cutting up the room, slicing through the stares that followed her. She had the kind of walk that would take her somewhere. Howdy didn’t wonder where she’d been, just where she was going, as if the future might lengthen her stride. Her blouse fit close to her waist and was detailed with some sort of blue flowers. Bachelor buttons? Prairie asters? She wore it tucked into her jeans. Dark, new, slightly stiff—they whispered when she walked.

The fellows at the pool table stopped their game, looking up to watch her, and then someone made a shot, the white cue ball cracking a bright red into the side pocket. Men’s laughter, a sportscast droning from the television above the bar, Merle Haggard singing from the jukebox. Here and around town, Howdy had heard Morgan Loving was a west Texas girl. Young, lean, strong, blown in from the mile-high desert between Marfa and Odessa.

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Photo Credit: Sawyer Morris

SYBELIA DRIVE - ARCs, Pre-Order Links, & Two Months to Go

SYBELIA DRIVE ARCs have arrived, pre-order links are up, & only two months to go until the novel’s release date of October 6th! Artist & true friend, Annie Russell, created the most beautiful cover I could ever imagine, & the Braddock Avenue Books creative team coordinated design, edits, & all the rest. When I started writing this novel, I wrote on a dare, I wrote to answer questions I’d had for decades. LuLu showed up, then Rainey, & of course, Saul. I wandered after them into the citrus groves of childhood, trying to know the bitter scents of fallen fruit, of fathers & sons sent away to war, of mothers trying to make ends meet. I’d love to share their story, so here is the PRE-ORDER LINK. Braddock Avenue Books, the small press that gave this book a home, will benefit the most from pre-order purchases. From now until the beginning of October, they’ll earn 50% of the sales price, but once Amazon takes over, the press will earn a little less than a dollar. Pretty sobering. Is it a leap of faith to ignore discounts & convenience? I hope so. Braddock Avenue Books will thank you, and so will I! Plus you’ll get a memorable read, or the most gorgeous doorstop you’ve ever seen, and my ever-loving gratitude. 💕🌸