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.
SYBELIA DRIVE's Half-Year Publication Anniversary
It’s April 6th and already six months have flown by since SYBELIA DRIVE’s October 6th publication! Celebrating this half-year anniversary with a split of champagne and half of an individual key lime tart!
So much has happened, and I’m looking forward to upcoming events of a first-time online book club gathering, participation with an online panel of debut novelists at the 2021 Ohioana Book Festival (April 23-25), and an online conversation with author William Lychack at White Whale Books (May 13 at 7 pm ET). Registration links to come on the Events page!
With gratitude to all who’ve read and loved the novel and in hopes of many more finding the novel and purchasing their own copies! And always in awe and celebration of libraries, I’m happy to announce that the Columbus Metropolitan Library (Columbus, Ohio) will also have copies of SYBELIA DRIVE available in coming months. If anyone out there loves and wants to share LuLu and Rainey’s story, reach out and request your own libraries to purchase copies. Everyone in the fictional town of Anna Clara will love y’all for it!
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.”
Eva's Christmas Eve
A balmy 85 degrees in West Palm Beach. A sultry kind of Christmas Eve, not typical of winter in Florida, even this far south, even in 1973. Tonight dinner and dancing, but for now, for Eva, a moment in the sun, in that white bikini she’d worn back when she met Will, her eventual husband; back before she’d any thoughts of having children, Rainey, a daughter as beautiful as she; back before she became a war widow.
Figures we picture when writing characters: for Eva, it was Grace Kelly, Faye Dunaway, Bridget Bardot. Look and Life magazine covers. Eventually, though, characters become themselves, more than the reflections that inspired them. They take on lives, which deepen and color and align with surrounding characters, reliable or unreliable in the way they navigate their fictional paths.
As a group they take on meaning, create a reason for being on the page, inform us of what was going on back in the late 60s and early 70s. And in the end, their individuality and relationships to each other stir the moment they were caught up in. In Sybelia Drive, for the women, it was the first glimmer and glance of feminism. One might not see this at first, but within the pages, there it is, billowing, slowly, and in its own way.
Back in October, Women Writers, Women’s Books featured an essay on the men and boys of Sybelia Drive. This December Sybelia Drive’s women and girls are up in lights: Minnie, Eva, Lillian, LuLu, Rainey, Hélène, Vita, An, and Esther. Inspired by a reflection on hope from writer Rebecca Solnit in her book of essays, Hope in the Dark, “The Women and Girls of Sybelia Drive” explores the characters in a way that, even after writing the novel, surprised me. Each of these women is strengthened by each other and by a deep thread of hope which they know won’t allow life to return to the way it was, but allows them to move forward into the kind of lives they’ve created themselves. Eva may be the one who has moved the farthest toward a self-fulfilled life, and so, she sits on the beach, awaiting and aware of the next adventure.
An Artist, A Poet, Two Novelists: Four Interviews on Women, Race, Diaspora, Identity, Language, Sexual Violence, Friendship, Fragility, Beauty
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.