Interviews, an Excerpt, & If My Book!

THE GEOGRAPHY OF FIRST KISSES had a wild arrival into the world on Tuesday, April 11th. Twice-times interviews—one with Deborah Kalb in her Q&A series and another with Ramona Reeves in Bloom—plus an excerpt from the collection’s story “We Are Here Because of A Horse” featured in Vol. 1 Brooklyn, and an appearance in the Monkeybicycle series “If My Book.”

Find out more about the collection from these conversations and celebrations. Links follow to each and every one!

Deborah Kalb’s Q&A with Karin Cecile Davidson

Ramona Reeves’s Bloom Interview: “Memories Called Me to Write” - with Karin Cecile Davidson

Vol.1 Brooklyn feature: An excerpt of The Geography of First Kisses

Monkeybicycle’s “If My Book” Series: TGFK as a lie, a sweater, a field, a fish!

Hypertext Magazine celebrates THE GEOGRAPHY OF FIRST KISSES

Cheers to Hypertext Magazine for celebrating The Geography of First Kisses in their One Question Series and sharing an excerpt from the book’s beginning passages!

Here’s the question!

“Of all the stories in The Geography of First Kisses, the title story throws the reader headlong into location, geography, and the compass points that lead to love, or perhaps the idea of love. In choosing an unnamed teenage girl to narrate this story, what was the objective?”

Follow here to find the answer!

The excerpt is tied to this question as well as the answer. Here are the beginning passages of the title story from first section, Compass Points.

The first was Leon. A small, muscular boy. A midshipman at the academy. He knew about compasses, easterly winds, how to bring the boat about on white-capped seas. I went for his blond hair and his deep voice, both like honeycomb, thick and golden and crowded, the waxen chambers, the echo in my chest.

Summer grew brighter, and I refused to go back home to New Orleans, nearly sixteen, without that first kiss. Sweet sixteen and never been. We never said it aloud. Those of us who stayed in the corners at dances, at our own tables. All girls, all the time, not too shy, but not quite pretty enough.

For the entire excerpt, READ ON.

Fierce, Funny, Beautiful Debuts: My Two Final Interviews at Newfound

Newfound Interviews, Autumn 2021

Chaney Kwak

The Surprise of Survival: An Interview with Chaney Kwak

Chaney Kwak’s compelling and beautiful debut book, The Passenger, (Godine, 2021), flies beyond the classifications of memoir, travel reportage, and marine history to something more intense, wry, and personal. Even the book’s subtitle, “How a Travel Writer Learned to Love Cruises & Other Lies from a Sinking Ship,” might lead one to place the story within a category, but seriously, it’s just not that simple. Kwak’s story of surviving an intense storm at sea off one of Norway’s rockiest coastlines aboard the Viking Sky, a cruise liner carrying nearly 1400 passengers, is one that reaches beyond the fury of 65-meter swells and 75-km winds into the calm, genuine understanding of what is worth living for. “The Passenger” uncovers the surprise of survival and the realization of how life might truly be lived.

Arden Levine

Her Portrait in the Poem: An Interview with Arden Levine 

Arden Levine’s debut poetry collection, Ladies’ Abecedary (Small Harbor Publishing, 2021), reveals a stunning and surprising alphabet of women. From A to Z, these are women and girls who walk with wide steps through the world; who descend and ascend mountains thick with snow, stepping-stones and stories in each stride; who sit alone in rooms, reading, ready to be transformed; who swim through a slipstream of unforgettable language. This chapbook may appear a slim volume, its cover curious, beautiful, unsettling, but the pages within reveal a population that is as feminine as it is fierce. To read these poems is to be unearthed from the typical landscapes where women have been placed, to be spun around and sent toward “unruly asphalt gardens” and into the sleep of “a chrysalis curve.”

Springtime is blooming with Sybelia Drive Book Reviews

From Emily Webber’s book review of Sybelia Drive in Mom Egg Review:

“The effect of the multiple voices in Sybelia Drive is like being in a big shifting ocean, and you never know what or who is going to be churned up and if the waters will be rough or calm. We aren’t promised complete pictures of these lives, which is clear early on. Characters come and go, some getting only a chapter or two and fleeting mentions in other parts of the novel, but every character is deeply felt. Davidson weaves a complex and rich tapestry of each of these lives regardless of how much space they take up in the novel.”

Gratitude for another beautiful Sybelia Drive review!

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.