By Joe O'Connell - Special to the Express-News
June 20, 2010
Carolyn Osborn may be the most experienced first-time novelist in Texas.
Consider her three celebrated short-story collections, O. Henry Award win, PEN Syndicated Fiction Award and former presidency of the Texas Institute of Letters. Oh, and the Texas Book Festival? Her idea.
"I'm delighted," she said with a wide grin about the publication of her novel "Uncertain Ground," which tells of a 20-year-old Celia Henderson finding her voice in 1953 Galveston.
"The 1950s had a certain innocence," she said. "People wanted that after World War II. But she doesn't fit the '50s mold."
Osborn wrote the novel's first draft in the 1960s and rewrote it again and again over the years until San Antonio's Wings Press decided it was time for the novel to see print. She sees the book not so much as a coming-of-age novel as about the formation of character.
"Character is our nature and finding out what that is," she said. Celia "is very curious. She accepts the world with open arms."
Perhaps looming just as large as a character is Galveston, a place of gambling, drinking and rule-breaking that is diametrically opposed to the 1950s Texas of liquor hidden in paper sacks and sexuality behind closed doors. The novel exquisitely shows this notion of living in a veiled reality through a scene in Galveston's famed Balinese Room, an exotic nightclub and gambling den built on a pier.
"She is determined not to have to marry," Osborn said. "She will suffer a great deal for this, but she just will not do it. She doesn't want her life to be formed by that one event."
The novel also examines the larger themes of sexuality and race as Celia becomes infatuated with Luis, an artist who is half Mexican and is rumored to be homosexual. Celia's cousin Emmett looks down on Luis, taking on the prejudices of the wealthy landowners and ranchers of the era.
"Celia is from somewhere else as I am," said Osborn, who was born in Tennessee but moved to Texas at 12. "People who are Mexican to her are merely exotic."
Emmett's attitudes can be seen as of the J. Frank Dobie school, Osborn said, adding that she believes the naturalist writer's mind became more open later in life.
Osborn is working these days with Friends of Paisano on fundraising to renovate Dobie's former Paisano Ranch outside of Austin, which is home to two Texas writers a year who receive fellowships from the Texas Institute of Letters.
In 1995, Osborn attended the Southern Festival of Books in Nashville and approached friend Mary Margaret Farabee about starting a Texas Book Festival with the help of a very hands-on Laura Bush.
"This will be its 15th year," Osborn said. "I hope I'll get to read."
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