{"id":880,"date":"2018-12-31T14:29:19","date_gmt":"2018-12-31T14:29:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/?p=880"},"modified":"2018-12-31T14:29:19","modified_gmt":"2018-12-31T14:29:19","slug":"lone-star-listensauthor-interviews-by-kay-ellington-lsll-publisher-16","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/?p=880","title":{"rendered":"Lone Star ListensAuthor interviews by Kay Ellington, LSLL Publisher"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Each week Lone Star Literary profiles a newsmaker in Texas books and letters, including authors, booksellers, publishers.<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/span>Kay Ellington has worked in management for a variety of media companies, including Gannett, Cox Communications, Knight-Ridder, and the New York Times Regional Group, from Texas to New York to California to the Southeast and back again to Texas. She is the coauthor, with Barbara Brannon, of the Texas novels The Paragraph Ranch<\/span>A Wedding at the Paragraph Ranch.<\/span><\/p>\n

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3.26.2017\u00a0 Master prose stylist Carolyn Osborn on journalism, creative writings, and the durations of a long life in letters<\/h1>\n

Photo at top right by Joe O’Connell; used by permission<\/p>\n

In 1951, when Carolyn Osborn enrolled at the University of Texas, <\/span>she said, \u201cWomen generally weren\u2019t encouraged to major in anything much but secondary education and home economics.\u201d An aunt who had been a reporter during World War II gave her the inspiration to try something different\u2014journalism. Now, more than sixty-five years later, Osborn still practices the craft of writing. Her latest book, a memoir titled Durations,<\/span> will be published by Wings Press in October.<\/p>\n

LONE STAR LITERARY LIFE: <\/span>Thank you for taking part in our Lone Star Listens interviews, Carolyn. Our readers enjoy getting to know Texas authors and their insights, and we thank you for being a part of this. Let\u2019s start with a little background. You were raised in Nashville until you were twelve, and then your family moved to Texas. What brought them to the Lone Star State?<\/span><\/p>\n

My brother and I came to Texas as the result of my father\u2019s divorce in 1946 from my mother, who was incurably mentally ill. This October, Bryce Milligan,<\/span> head of Wings Press, will publish my memoir called Durations,<\/span> which covers the World War II years and some years after when we settled in Gatesville, Texas with my wonderful stepmother.<\/p>\n

You earned an undergraduate degree from UT in Austin in 1955 and a master\u2019s in 1959. What was Austin like and UT like in the late fifties, particularly for a woman?<\/p>\n

In 1951 I came to Austin to the University of Texas to major in journalism. In that time women generally weren\u2019t encouraged to major in anything much but secondary education and home economics, but one of the aunts I had lived with in Nashville\u00a0 during the war had been a journalist, which was far more interesting. I worked on the Daily Texan and served a summer internship on the Marshall News Messenger<\/span>. There was no prejudice against women reporters at UT or in Marshall. Generally women were assigned to a daily newspaper\u2019s division called Society\u2014absent in the Texan\u2014but you could avoid it by proving you could write about something other than weddings and parties.<\/p>\n

Austin then was a provincial capitol of around 150,000 people. I was more curious about the foreign students at the university than I was in the activities of the Texas legislature. I married a law student, Joe Osborn, in 1955 and went with him to fulfill his army duty, first in Augusta, Georgia, where I worked on the combined Augusta Chronicle and Herald<\/span> as a feature writer, though I began in Society. The army sent us to El Paso. Happily, Joe found a battalion going to Germany and joined it, and we spent fourteen months touring Europe whenever possible for him to get leave.<\/p>\n

You started your career as a journalist and then made the switch to creative writing. When and how did that come about?<\/p>\n

By the time we returned to UT, I realized I wanted to try other forms of writing. As a feature writer in Augusta, I had been given the freedom to write about almost anything, but I\u2019d discovered that peoples\u2019 pasts, their interior lives, their loves and hates, their secrets, their hopes, the injustices they suffered, were the vital parts of their personalities. I knew I could write. But how was one to write about things which weren\u2019t discussed in family newspapers? I\u2019d always been a reader; my training in newspaper writing led to the short story, which led to getting an M.A. in creative writing in 1959, the year after my husband finished his law degree. Then, as now, he encouraged my writing.<\/p>\n

What was your first break as an creative writer, and how did it come about?<\/p>\n

My first break in short-story writing was winning UT\u2019s English Department’s prize story, printed in a little departmental magazine called Corral.<\/span> Fame and fortune didn\u2019t follow immediately, nor had I expected it to. I was later asked to teach part-time in the English Department. Freshman English, the job of all assistants, was my first assignment; however, I soon moved to teaching the modern short story, not how to write it, but how to understand it. Chekhov, Joyce, Kafka, Hemingway, Faulkner, Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty, Flannery O\u2019Connor,<\/span> and anyone I wanted to add\u2014all became my mentors. Teaching deepened my strength in writing my own short stories. In 1959 our first child, a son, was born, followed by daughters in 1961 and 1964. I quit teaching in 1962 and didn\u2019t resume until 1968.<\/p>\n

Fortunately we could afford household help, especially in the morning hours when I needed to write. I also used Austin’s public library, now the History Center, a spare room in a friend\u2019s apartment, and shared a studio with a painter friend who worked in the mornings and let me use it in the nights. In 1971, after I quit teaching again, I moved to a small Victorian house where I was invited to rent an office. Two painters, an architectural historian, and a pair of book designers had offices there also. It was an excellent mixture of people. I stayed for twenty-five years until moving to a newly built solitary office over our garage.<\/p>\n

You spent decades \u2014 literally \u2014 producing finely crafted stories before your debut novel, Uncertain Ground,<\/span> came out in 2010. What attracted you to short stories, and why did you finally decide to tackle the longer form?<\/p>\n

I cannot say exactly when I began working on my first novel, Uncertain Ground.<\/span> I\u2019d already had three collections of short stories published before I finished rewriting the novel. [It was] based partially on time I\u2019d spent in Galveston visiting a step-aunt and uncle before I married; I was fascinated with the island and its history. The main characters used, a twenty-year-old woman, her cowboy cousin, a young gay man, were all literally, like the city, on uncertain ground. They hadn\u2019t yet found complete adulthood, though they were on their way. I hadn\u2019t fully articulated this before the novel was written. It was a complex of ideas that happened during the writing and rewriting, something which often, in the process of creating short stories, also happened. I seldom know how a story, whether it\u2019s a short story or a novel, is going to end. In writing I find out. The work of the unconscious mind leads to consciousness; however, in this sort of work, it all must somehow fit. I\u2019m not talking just about plot, but about the true needs and desires of characters unstated outright, though seen in action.<\/p>\n

How has publishing changed since you started?<\/p>\n

Publishing, of course, changed since I started writing. I\u2019d never heard of\u00a0 computers or e-books, where I\u2019m happy now to have my work appear. I still write my first drafts by hand. There\u2019s something I can\u2019t define, which happens between hand and eye and story.<\/p>\n

I understand that you were one of the founders of the Texas Book Festival. How did that come about?<\/p>\n

Book festivals, to my knowledge, hadn\u2019t occurred in Texas. I learned about one when invited to read at the Southern Book Festival held in Nashville in 1991.There the state capitol loomed over underground offices, just as the Texas capitol does. And the capitol\u2019s Senate room was also used for the readings by the best known writers. I returned to Texas with the idea of having a book festival using our capitol. But I knew I hadn\u2019t the time to push that to reality while continuing to write. I talked to Mary Margaret Farabee<\/span>, a great organizer and fund raiser with contacts all over Austin, about the idea. One of our first blocks was the capitol was being renovated.<\/p>\n

Together, through the years, we continued working on the possibility. Meanwhile, someone with an altogether different plan to conduct a festival had approached Laura Bush.<\/span> Eventually, however, she contacted Mary Margaret to ask for other concepts. Taking the opportunity, Mary Margaret told her about the Southern Book Festival. The turning point was an invitation to John Egerton<\/span>, a leading figure in the Southern Book Festival, to talk to us about how well the Tennessee program worked. He came to our house to address the different factions, and as we\u2019d hoped, united them all. Having previously been asked to be the honorary chair, Laura, as a former librarian, was delighted. And she was not merely a figurehead. She was an active helper, one who used the governor\u2019s mansion for meetings. In 1996 the Texas Book Festival opened in the newly renovated Texas Capitol and all its new underground hearing rooms, including a large auditorium. We used the House and Senate rooms as well. I continued to work, especially with the booksellers, for three more years before leaving the festival in Mary Margaret\u2019s capable hands. Now I go every year to read whenever I have a new book published and to hear other writers.<\/p>\n

What is your creative process like? Do you continue to write every day?<\/p>\n

I try to write every weekday morning until I get so hungry for lunch I have to leave the office. Sometimes those hours are particularly unfruitful. However, it\u2019s such a habit I\u2019m discontent unless I\u2019m trying. I don\u2019t work on the weekends.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s next for Carolyn Osborn?<\/p>\n

Over the years, I\u2019ve had about sixty short stories published in literary magazines, which I believe are helping keep the short story alive. Many of my stories reappeared in four collections and in a number of anthologies. My second novel, Contrary People, grew out of a short story. Its characters kept intriguing me. Lately I\u2019ve begun to write essays. Seven of those will be included in the new book, Durations, along with the memoir. Historically the short story grew out of the essay, so I\u2019ve gone about this backward. No matter what came first, I don\u2019t find any of the literary forms easy. When I began writing, I read the Paris Review\u2019s<\/span> interviews called Writers at Work,<\/span> where all the people whose work I respected said they had large difficulties at first. Knowing this was a consolation. The greatest pleasure I have now, as I\u2019ve had for many years, is the freedom to create as I please.<\/p>\n

* * * * *<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

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Praise for Carolyn Osborn\u2019s CONTRARY PEOPLE<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cOsborn creates mature characters with depth in what is, finally, a literary romance that will appeal to readers who profess not to read romances.\u201d \u2014Booklist<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cA novel of lyrical stateliness from a master storyteller. Her subject this time is no less than that last great human lesson which we all must learn: how to face death while, as her engaging hero, Theo Isaac discovers, still embracing life.\u201d\u00a0 \u2014Sarah Bird, author of The Gap Year<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cCarolyn Osborn casts a sympathetic but enlightened eye on old and young lovers burdened with memories of those they have lost. Loneliness and longing are made sharper by the life experiences of the older pair while the fate of the two younger lovers is a variation of their elders\u2019 passions. Told with skill and deliberation, Contrary People<\/span> is not sad or gloomy but filled with good memories, happy days, and the joy and pain that belong to all of us.\u201d\u00a0 \u2014Robert Flynn, author of Jade: The Law<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cAs ever, Carolyn Osborn is spot on when it comes to giving us characters we can believe in, agonize over, and even invite to dance. This is an all-at-one-sitting read that goes deep and when it comes up for air leaves stacks of hard-won wisdom behind. Brava!\u201d\u00a0 \u2014Rosemary Catacalos, author of Again for the First Time<\/span><\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Each week Lone Star Literary profiles a newsmaker in Texas books and letters, including authors, booksellers, publishers. Kay Ellington has worked in management for a variety of media companies, including Gannett, Cox Communications, Knight-Ridder, and the New York Times Regional Group, from Texas to New York to California to the Southeast and back again to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-880","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/880","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=880"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/880\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=880"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=880"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=880"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}