Durations A Memoir and Personal Essays

This collection of essays explores the life of the author, from her Depression-era childhood in Tennessee to her adolescence in the Hill Country of Texas, from life as a small town cheerleader to life as a world-traveling author, from the child of a hard scrabble farmer to that of a semi-retired rancher.  Like the main character in her interconnected and often autobiographical short stories, Osborn is extremely curious about her occasionally eccentric family, yet she must continually accept the mysteries of reality -- a mother locked away for clinical depression, country neighbors who appear to live on nothing, the eternal balance of caring deeply for an unforgiving Texas Hill Country landscape while traveling the world from Europe to the Galapagos. Aware of the need for family mythology, she often mines family history (one of her forebears followed Daniel Boone over the Cumberland Gap and was an early settler in Tennessee, and his flintlock rifle hangs in Osborn's living room) and her own distinctly Southern background that witnesses a fading 19th-century morality, readily accepts individual eccentricity, and celebrates storytelling as a way of understanding the world.

Carolyn Osborn graduated from the University of Texas at Austin with a B.J. degree in 1955, and an M.A. in 1959. She has won awards from P.E.N., the Texas Institute of Letters, and a Distinguished Prose Award from The Antioch Review (2003). Her stories have been included in The O. Henry Prize Stories (Doubleday, 1991) and Lone Star Literature (Norton, 2003), among numerous other anthologies.