A Collection of Dr. Osborn’s Writings

Selected Essays

Reconsidering Elizabeth Bowen

MFS 52.1 (2006) 187-197

Prior to my work on Bowen, her fiction had been written off as “ungainly,” “excessive,” not always “well-mannered.” Decode that and what we see is that Bowen’s work was dismissed for not being adequately “ladylike,” “feminine,” even “hysterical.” I couldn’t resist looking into the ways that gendered criticism kept her from critical respect. This article was one of many results of that feminist-focused reexamination. Read it here.

Elizabeth Bowen: New Critical Perspectives

an introduction

The more I looked into Bowen’s critical reputation, the more gendered vocabulary I found. There were complaints about her “pointless verbal excess” (translation: she talked too much), her “neurotic” style (there was something wrong with her brain), her “highly wrought” style (her prose did not mind its manners). Of course, the question here was by whose standards was she being judged? As before, I couldn’t resist exploring how Bowen’s work threatens to blow the lid off the conventional (i.e., gender-blind) critical categories used to evaluate her work. Read it here.

How to measure this unaccountable darkness between the trees: the strange relation of style and meaning

The Last September

Bowen’s novels had been considered so irregular, even at times a bit sordid, that many chose just not to read or consider her work. In this article, I examine the way the “unacceptable…tics” and “mannerisms” in Bowen’s prose threaten to undermine the conventional (i.e., often masculinist) categories of interpretation historically used in Western criticism. Read it here.

Introduction Elizabeth Bowen: New Directions for Critical Thinking

MFS Modern Fiction Studies 53:2

In this article, I address critics’ struggle to fully engage with the provocative, unruly, impudent instabilities in Bowen’s work that don’t fit many Western, typically masculinist ideologies, including traditional ideas about gender and heteronormativity. Read it here.

Giving Stoker His Due: Dracula’s Guest and Other Weird Stories

Irish Literary

For a long time, Stoker was considered the black sheep of the literary family, the cousin you didn’t want to invite over for Thanksgiving. But I wanted to explore the deviant aspects of his writing that challenge the limiting binaries that we use in Western culture: female/male, inside/outside/ self/other in the hope of exposing the repressive power of those categories. Read it here.

Thomas Hardy

Literature & History

Because of my longstanding interest in feminism, violence, and gender disruptions, I chose to review this book to see if the irregularities in Hardy’s life were acknowledged or explored in the biography. Read it here.

“Revision/Re-Vision:’ A Feminist Writing Class

Rhetoric Review

This article presents a course I developed to guide students in exploring how language shapes and constructs gender. Centering on the word “hero,” the course encourages students to critically examine its historical and cultural definitions, analyze the gendered assumptions embedded within those definitions, and ultimately revise their own understanding of the term. Through close readings, discussions, and reflective writing, students engage with the ways language both reflects and reinforces societal norms, particularly in relation to conventional gender roles and expectations. Read it here.

What Helen Gurley Brown Taught Me about Teaching Basic Writing

Writer’s Craft, Teacher’s Art: Teaching What We Know, ed. Mimi Schwartz; Boynton Cook/Heinemann

I was a very literary young woman and when the editor of Cosmopolitan and well-known advocate of women’s sexual freedom offered me an assignment well beyond my experiential wheelhouse, I decided to try to fake it (please note the pun). Brown saw through it immediately and offered some advice that stayed with me from that day. “Write about what you know.” I took these words into basic writing and introductory creative writing classes and for decades witnessed their value as a teaching tool, especially in feminist-oriented courses. Read it here.

Doris Lessing

The 60s Without Apology, eds. Sohnya Sayres, Anders Stephanson, Stanley Aronowitz, Fredric Jameson; University of Minnesota Press

This essay explores my relationship, as an emerging feminist writer and thinker, with the work of one of my literary mentors. Specifically, I focused on The Golden Notebook (first read at 15 and reread many times more; it’s one of those books, like de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, that now needs a rubber band to hold the pages together) and the significance of the protagonist’s struggle to define her female identity in an unjust, inegalitarian, masculinist society. Read it here.

Choiceless Choices

review-essay of Admitting the Holocaust: Collected Essays, by Lawrence L. Langer, published in American Book Review

Langer coined the term “choiceless choices” to describe the no-win situations faced by many Jews during the Holocaust. Because of my interest in the ways language shapes our understanding of reality, and that includes incest and sexual violence, I wrote this essay to better understand his ideas about how language extends and sometimes limits our insight into historical events.

The Reader as Accomplice

Vassar Quarterly

When I was young, I was taught that a book was to be consumed, like a bag of potato chips. Then, if you had to, you hopefully guessed the secret message coded in the text, and spat that out for the teacher. But a book is not a bag of chips. In this essay, I reflect on the complex process of reading.

Editor

Developmental editor for The American Women’s Medical Association’s Women’s Complete Healthbook

For centuries, the symptoms of heart disease in women were misread or dismissed as signs of neurosis. That began to change in the 1980s, driven in part by the momentum of second-wave feminism and the efforts of women physicians in the American Medical Women’s Association (AMWA). When I was invited to serve as a developmental editor for AMWA’s first comprehensive guide to women’s health, I jumped at the opportunity to contribute to that long-overdue shift in perspective.

Fiction

Lie About

Short story, Exquisite Corpse

For a period of my life, I lived in a highly affluent, Ivy-League town where I was frequently struck by the casual indifference with which social inequities were met. What passed as refined civility often masked a deeper reluctance to confront the injustices upholding privilege. Given my interest in how conventional interpretive frameworks obscure and sustain epistemological injustices, I wrote this story in a quasi-Gothic style—the genre’s characteristic unsettling atmosphere allowed me to explore what lies beneath the surface of well-mannered denial. Read it here.

The Editor

Short story, Orchid

I wrote this story in an effort to represent some of the tacit gender tensions that often exist between partners in longstanding conventional heterosexual couples. Read it here.

The Secret

Short story, Kelsey Review

When the Kelsey Review invited me to submit an excerpt from my novel, Surviving the Wreck, I chose this edited passage because it highlights the powerful social and emotional inequities that lead to incestuous behavior.

Plays

Alex Goes to Infinity

performed at Broom Street Theater, Madison, WI

When children don’t fit squarely into heteronormative families, it can be hell. This play is about a young boy and his difficulties fitting squarely into his “normal” family.

Sprinkled with Rat Poison

performed at Broom Street Theater, Madison, WI

This play concerns a conventional patriarchal family and what happens when the center doesn’t hold.

Poems

Untitled

The Paterson Literary Review

Written during difficult period of my life when I felt creatively blocked, this series represents questions I had about my increasing concerns with institutional power, gender, incest, and other forms of sexual violence against girls and women.

Excerpts from My Mother’s Shoes

Writers at Rutgers Reading Series

My mother’s life as a woman crippled by polio began just as America entered one of the most disturbing and least discussed periods of its history. By the end of the 19th century, cities nationwide had enacted “ugly laws” designed to keep the lame, the blind, the diseased, and other “miserable objects” —including women who offended the conventional (read masculine) standards of beauty—off the streets. At Rutgers, I read descriptions of my mother’s ungainly walk, her imperfect stance, and the sexist humiliation and shame she endured as an “ugly woman” living in a male-dominated society.

Other Books

13 books of trade nonfiction published by Henry Holt & Company, Crown, Simon & Schuster, Perigree Trade, Pocket Books, and others.

Awards, Fellowships, & Grants

• Virginia Center for the Creative Arts
• Byrdcliffe
• Dorset Colony House
• The New Jersey State Council on the Arts
• Rutgers University