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.

A Final 2020 Interview for SYBELIA DRIVE

Heavy Feather Review - “A Retrospective Viewpoint” - an interview by Bailey Bujnosek

“Karin Cecile Davidson’s Sybelia Drive traces the turbulent coming of age of Lulu, Rainey, and Saul in a Florida lake town rocked by the Vietnam War. Told through a multitude of voices, the novel weaves stories of absent fathers, detached mothers, rebellious children, and grieving neighbors, all reevaluating the lives they’ve made. Davidson’s debut explores universal themes of childhood, loss, and what it means to be a family through compelling characters and beautiful imagery.”

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.