Hypertext Magazine asked Karin Cecile Davidson, author of The Geography of First Kisses, “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?”
By Karin Cecile Davidson
There are only three stories in the collection that are told from the viewpoint of unnamed characters—“The Geography of First Kisses,” “The Biker and the Girl,” and “The Last I Saw Mitsou.” Location, direction, and sense of place in these stories are connected to longing, searching, and self-reflection, specifically in terms of love, and yes, sex, and being loved. By leading the collection with the title story, a direction is decided, and perhaps a conclusion is as well: even though a compass points north and leads north, south, east, west, there really is no definitive map. But there are choices, forks in the road, and like the scarecrow in “The Wizard of Oz,” we could deliberate over them, or befriend Dorothy and simply take one.
In “Geography,” the unnamed first-person narrator is finding her way, from age fifteen to sixteen, through those complex high school years where classes in World History and English Literature are crossed with love notes left in lockers and kisses traded in storage closets. If her goal is to find that first kiss before she turns sixteen, and this is alluded to in the first paragraph, then why even continue? Haven’t we all heard this story before? Exactly. The story is universal, we’ve all been there, and no matter the outcome, the story continues. The compass might be consistent in pointing north, but the way the landscape is truly shaped could have something to do with the actual direction we take. The girl in “Geography” may be unnamed, but the details of her story reveal her ultimate direction and may just remind of us of our own.
Karin Cecile Davidson is the author of the novel Sybelia Drive. 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 Acacia Fiction Prize, 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.
