Love and loss in the Gulf Coast: Columbus author Karin Cecile Davidson gives insight into her new novel

Craft: Exploring Creativity

If you’re looking for a break from the various crises filling our lives right now, you might find some solace in reading up on a volatile moment in the United States’ past. This week we talk to Columbus author Karin Cecile Davidson on her first novel, Sybelia Drive, which released on October 6th from Braddock Avenue Books. Sybelia Drive is interwoven with the perspectives of characters living in the Gulf Coast through the tumultuous ‘60s and ‘70s as they attempt to grapple with the Vietnam War and its impact on their communities.

Sybelia Drive is interwoven with the perspectives of characters living in the Gulf Coast through the tumultuous ‘60s and ‘70s as they attempt to grapple with the Vietnam War and its impact on their communities.

Davidson holds an MFA from Lesley University, is the interviews co-editor at the Newfound Journal, and is the recipient of several awards for her writing, including an Ohio Arts Council Residency and an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award. Karin’s favorite things to write are short stories (many of which have been published in Five Points, the Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere), and she explained that her Sybelia Drive “started out as a story” until her graduate adviser helped her realize she wasn’t “writing linked stories—[she was] actually writing a novel.”
Listen in to learn all about the Vietnam War, how Karin crafts a vivid image of a Gulf Coast lake town, and what it’s like to write a novel.