In The Geography of First Kisses (Kallisto Gaia Press), one finds portrayals of quiet elegance reminiscent of early-20th-century art films. The fourteen ethereal stories are tethered to the bays and backwaters of southern Louisiana, the fields of Iowa and Oklahoma, the pine woods of Florida, places where girls and women seek love and belonging, and instead discover relationships as complicated, bewildering, even sorrowful. A New Orleans girl spends a year collecting boyfriends and all the while considers the reach of her misadventures; a newlywed couple travels to Tulsa in search of a horse gone missing, perhaps more in search of themselves; a new mother is faced with understanding the miracles and mysteries of faith when her baby disappears; a young daughter travels to Tallahassee with her mother, trying to unravel the meaning of love crossed with abandonment. Saturated with poetic illusion and powered with prose of a dark, pulsating circuitry, the collection combines joy, heartache, and tenacity in a manner sorely missed in today’s super-structured literature.
If you follow the Street of Longing to where it dead-ends, inevitably, at the Avenue of Loneliness, there you will find Karin Cecile Davidson’s story collection The Geography of First Kisses. These characters long for everything: to be seen fully and to disappear; for this kiss to be the first, for this kiss to be the last; to go far away from this place and moment, to stay right here forever. And so it is for the reader also: I wished these stories never to end.
— Lori Ostland, author of After the Parade and The Bigness of the World
Josie Eanes spoke with Karin Cecile Davidson about an author’s relationship to her characters, the impact of setting on ideas and relationships, and the subtle art of intertwining elements of the fantastic and reality.
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Josie Eanes: The Geography of First Kisses is about love, and the characters are easy to fall in love with as well. What makes you fall in love with a character or a plot that you’re writing?
Karin Cecile Davidson: I love this question, Josie. No one has ever asked me this before, and I’m glad to hear that love comes across in the collection. Falling in love with my characters… Well, it’s never that easy for me, though I did once write a very short piece about a hitchhiking bear with whom (if we can qualify a bear as “whom”) I was immediately enamored. More typically though, I’d say I’m fascinated with certain personalities that show up on the page. For example, the nameless narrator in the title story flew so easily into being, and her search for that first kiss which led her to venture further into flirtatious territory and eventually into trouble made her a character that surprised me. Meli in “We Are Here Because of a Horse” is another character that intrigued me, but in a different way. I wanted to explore her history of abuse and her childhood visions of hope with care and respect, and her enigmatic appeal made me care about her and want to understand her situation, knowing all the while that, like the narrator, her husband Sam, I will never understand what she endured and witnessed. And so, in response, I suppose it’s the question of what a character truly wants that leads me to love them, to care enough to keep writing into their worlds and experiences.
JE: Each of the stories within The Geography of First Kisses establishes a specific, named setting, from the city of Tulsa to rural Iowa to Germany. These places are more than setting, they are deeply connected to the stories and their themes. Could you talk a little bit about how you envisioned setting working in the book?
KCD: To be honest, place is where I begin in my writing, with the intention of giving the characters firm ground to stand on or a sort of jumping-off point. This last bit I say with Eudora Welty’s story “No Place for You, My Love” in mind, a writer I’m deeply influenced by and a story that is infused with sense of place. Geography is stamped into this collection, in terms of place, direction, compass points, latitude, longitude, topography, distance, crossroads, finding the way, or feeling absolutely lost. From the diverse characters of several stories set in New Orleans, to Morgan Loving who’s made her way from high-desert Texas to Iowa cornfields, to six-year-old Celia’s crossings under Florida sunsets and starry skies, to Meli and Sam in Tulsa, and all the way across the Atlantic to Sandra in Berlin, the characters travel narrative territory in an actual physical sense, but also explore emotional, intellectual, and metaphorical landscapes. As the collection’s title suggests, these stories are all about place and those who inhabit its discrete corners, whether cities or towns, beaches or farmsteads, in light of exactly what goes on in each. In Flannery O’Connor’s words: “the peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet.” It’s up to the writer “to find that location.”
JE: The stories in your collection feature a wide spectrum of relationships, from ones that are seemingly healthy, to ones that are intensely toxic. How did you decide to have some relationships succeed and others not?
KCD: In writing, while occasionally I’ll head into more fabulist moments, I tend to be more of a realist. For me, I think that it’s a more honest approach in thinking about the world. Addressing subjects of abuse, divorce, heartbreak, resentment, vulnerability, and the risk of violence not only leads to dramatic tension in story, but also creates counterpoint within a collection to the lighter elements—the fragility of a bobwhite egg, the scent of smoke and perfume, bright little fish swimming in the shallows of a lake. In the real world, and in my fictional ones, relationships are never tidy. They are confusing, illuminating, crazymaking, wondrous things. That said, even in fabulist worlds, not all relationships are lasting. For every action there is a reaction, and so, while pigs fly, babies disappear, and a bright cluster of roses grows from a sidewalk crack, on the other side of town, a girl’s wrists are cinched, a mother scolds her young daughter, and a funeral takes the place of a wedding. Sounds pretty dark, doesn’t it? Seriously, though, sometimes it is.
JE: However brief they may be, relationships with large age gaps are featured or at least mentioned in quite a number of the stories; most of them occurring between teenage girls and adult men. For some of the characters in the collection, it’s simply an off-handed thing that happened in the past. For others, like in “The Biker and the Girl,” it’s potentially life changing. Why are these types of taboo relationships so frequent? How do they enhance the theme?
KCD: It’s interesting that the stories gave you this impression. “The Biker and the Girl” is truly the only story in which a teenage girl agrees to an evening with a man much older than she, a situation in which risk-taking could end badly. The relationships in the other stories, however, are between teenagers close in age to each other and between adults of about the same age, apart from Chloe’s affair with a professor when she is in college in her early twenties (“Skylight”) and Morgan’s insistence on staying with Howdy who, at the age of thirty, is about ten years older (“Sweet Iowa”). In addition, there are fathers and daughters, mothers and sons, which could add to the age gap, but those are familial relationships, not romantic ones. In response to taboo relationships, I’ll turn my response to the kinds of relationships that occur in some of the stories. Those of abuse, physical and emotional, as touched on in “The Geography of First Kisses,” “Skylight,” and “We Are Here Because of a Horse,” and focused on in “Gorilla.” Those which render relationships tangled in love and complication, as in “Eliza, in the Event of a Hurricane,” “That Bitter Scent,” “The Last I Saw Mitsou,” and “Soon the First Star.” And even those tinged or overwhelmed with loss, like “The Biker and the Girl,” “If You Ask Them Nicely,” and “Bobwhite.” All of these enhance the theme of love in my mind, for where love is searched out, there is not always the ease of actually finding it, but of something else entirely, such as the danger of love, the illusion of love, or the memory of love.
JE: Several of the stories like “Gorilla” and “Skylight” include flexible timelines, regularly shifting through the present and the past. How does having a non-linear timeline impact your stories? What makes you choose to employ this method of providing background or supplemental plots?
KCD: I love moving through narrative time, as long as the reader has a good handhold on where the story is going, where in time the characters are situated. Non-linear timelines can remark on a character’s emotional state as well, and Sandra of “Gorilla” and Chloe of “Skylight” are perfect examples of characters in heightened emotional territory. Domestic abuse is front and center in Sandra’s world, though it is presented primarily in the near past, while Chloe’s memories of her mother’s mostly emotional mishandling pull her back in time to her childhood. I find that moving deftly back and forth in time to incorporate a character’s background or glance across a subplot or another moving part of the story is more exciting for the writer and the reader. It keeps one on point, strengthens the tension, and hopefully creates storylines that are surprising as well as engaging.
JE: In several of the stories, there are elements of fantasy deeply intertwined with reality. In “We Are Here Because of a Horse” it’s the horse that visited Meli every night as a child, in “Sweet Iowa” it’s the pig tossing, and in “In the Great Wide” it’s baby Daphne who slowly disappears. Some details are more fantastic than others, but they all require the reader to suspend their disbelief to some degree. Your debut novel, Sybelia Drive, was largely realistic in style. What compelled you to move in this direction narratively?
KCD: Another great question! Strangely enough, I wrote many of the stories in this collection either before Sybelia Drive or when I was taking breaks from drafting the novel. “In the Great Wide” was written prior to beginning the novel, while “Sweet Iowa” and “We Are Here” were written alongside. The movement toward a more fabulist narrative had more to do with the subject and characters than moving away from realism. Antoinette’s world in New Orleans (“In the Great Wide”) is completely inundated in metaphor; therefore, I naturally fell into the fabulist mode of storytelling, attempting to create verisimilitude by making an unbelievable situation seem believable. To me, “Sweet Iowa” doesn’t really fall into surrealist terrain, although there is the idea of flying pigs, a different kind of suspended disbelief; whereas, “The Last I Saw Mitsou” is intentionally filled with the mystery of books appearing overnight in flowerpots and doorways. And again, metaphor is the main reason for the illusory tone in “We Are Here,” the vision “of the horse, dark and elegant and able” creating a shadow to the story’s light. I do love the works of Ramona Ausubel, Aimee Bender, Kelly Link, Yoko Ogawa, Haruki Murakami, Mikhail Bulgakov, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and so many more, all their stories and novels are incredible dives into deeply imagined worlds, that only they could have imagined. The challenge of creating a story as extraordinary as any of theirs is as terrifying as it is tremendous.
JE: What’s next for Karin Cecile Davidson?
KCD: Thanks so much, Josie, for this chance to speak with you. At present, I’m working on the final draft of a novel that’s all about travel, disappearance, marriage, photography, biology, global warming, music, and lives defined and redefined. It began as a response to a large volume of black-and-white photos, creating one paragraph for each image, and I quickly realized that marriage and its fault lines were central to the narrative. Structurally, it starts out as a road trip, Highway 61 the spine of the story, beginning in Minneapolis and ending in New Orleans, and so the working title is Highway 61. It’s contemplative and inquisitive and at times cruel, calling forth characters that circle back to your first question of “falling in love with characters.” In this case, I was fascinated by but did not fall in love with these characters until much later in the writing process. And, yes, some are more loved than others. To be disclosed in a future interview!
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Karin Cecile Davidson is the author of the story collection The Geography of First Kisses, winner of the 2022 Acacia Fiction Prize (Kallisto Gaia Press, 2023), and the novel Sybelia Drive (Braddock Avenue Books, 2020). Her stories have appeared in Five Points, Story, The Massachusetts Review, Colorado Review, Passages North, Post Road, The Los Angeles Review, and elsewhere. Her awards include an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, the Waasmode Short Fiction Prize, the Orlando Prize for Short Fiction, a Peter Taylor Fellowship, and residencies at the Fine Arts Work Center, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, and The Studios of Key West. Originally from New Orleans, Louisiana, she now lives in Columbus, Ohio.
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Josie Eanes studies creative writing at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.