Wake Weekly, November 16, 2006

By Eren Tataragasi

Getting to the heart of things and cutting the “B.S.” is what poetry is all about. At least it is to Alice Osborn, local poet, mother, editor, assistant, teacher and grad student.

It sounds like Osborn has a lot on her plate, but she said it’s everything she needs to do to get her work out to the public.

Osborn said she started taking her writing seriously four years  ago, after giving birth to her son Daniel.

The makings of a poet

Osborn was born in Washington, D.C., and grew up in the northern Virginia suburbs.

She went to Virginia Tech for her undergraduate degree and majored in finance.

Her family moved to Charleston, S.C., after she finished college, and Osborn experienced a great culture shock having never been South.

She had a hard time finding a job, so she did a lot of volunteering, became president of the Virginia Tech Alumni Association. Then, in the year following odd jobs in advertising, Osborn began her nine-year career with Belk.

She transferred through Belk to Myrtle Beach for two years,  then moved to Raleigh in 2000 and became a buying officer after a few years in publicity.

Osborn said by 2001 she was all work and no play.

“That’s when I started recording my experiences,” she said.

Osborn met her husband Keith Wasserman, married in 2002 and had her son.

“We all realized rather quickly that my retail career sucked,” Osborn said.

She worked long hours and wanted to switch careers to spend time with her family.

“That’s when I realized what the heck had I been doing for nine years? I thought I had a lot more to offer than working in retail.”

She started taking her writing seriously.

“The way to start writing is to read,” she said. “When Daniel took naps, I read a novel a week.”

She was involved in Raleigh Jaycees, then got involved in book clubs, becoming book club chair.

“To take yourself seriously you have to read books, or I don’t think you have any business being a writer,” Osborn said.

She then began to think about grad school, but decided she wasn’t quite ready.

So she took baby steps and took three classes offered through UNC-Chapel Hill’s Friday Center.

In 2004 she became a member of the N.C. Writers’ Network.

She applied for graduate school in spring 2004, quit Belk and got into school the spring of 2005 for an English M.A. in rhetoric/ composition.

“I defended my thesis successfully last Friday and will graduate in December,” Osborn said, proud of her accomplishment.

Through her involvement with the Raleigh Jaycees she started to teach writers’ workshops and offered five free classes to the Jaycees and the community.

She then went on to do paid workshops for creative nonfiction and is now offering journaling classes.

She is also a writing tutor at Writing Speaking Tutorial Services at N.C. State University, where she attends grad school. 

Osborn also works as an assistant with Katharine Giovanni, a Wake Forest concierge consultant, six hours a week.

A full load

Osborn just released a book of poetry, Right Lane Ends.

“With your book that’s full-time because you have to market it; you just can’t sit still,” Osborn said.

Her book was compiled between May and August of 2006 with the help of colleagues and professors pushing her to get it finished.

“When you write about an image, feeling, experience, you get it all down, but you would never want to send that first draft to an editor,” Osborn said. “That’s what writing groups are good for.”

She self-published through Catawba Publishers in Charlotte and is now self-marketing her book as well, trying to squeeze it into any venue possible.

Osborn said a lot of what she writes is very personal, involving the relationships with her mother, father and brother.

Osborn is estranged from her parents and has been for the last four and a half years. In many of her poems the pain and anger leaps off the page giving the reader a bit of a slap.

“I’m doing what I want to do  with poems. I wanted to get to the heart of all of this and show the good that came out of it,” she said.

“A lot of times a poem is a mixed message of happy and sad, so to me that’s what a good poem is, it tells the truth and is honest. I try to get to the heart of something and cut out the .... I say it how it is.”

Osborn said she tries to get the balance in her poems because life is gray, not black and white.

Right Lane Ends is about driving, she said. She owns a 1996 Mustang that she loves.

“A car represents independence, freedom, responsibility — you’re an adult now and you can depend on yourself,” she said.

“The title means that you get in the left lane and leave the right lane and the past behind you because sometime you’ve got to let go of the past to move forward with your future.”

Her poems range in topics from personal experience, to two lynchings that occurred in the South during the times of segregation.

“I did a lot of research on lynching, and wanted to capture the emotions behind those events because not a lot is done on them today,” she said.

“My strength is telling a story through my poems.”

Her poetic influences include Ai, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Sharon Olds.

“You can’t be afraid of what people think if you’re going to write,” she said.

Osborn wants to do another book of poetry, based on Sept. 11, Flight 93 and the terrorists who drove the plane.

“It’s something no one would expect,” she said.

She is also working on a novel and looking for a new publisher. She would also like to pursue creative nonfiction writing and essays.

“This book is a vehicle for people to take me seriously,” Osborn said.

For more information on Osborn and her book, go to www.aliceosborn.com, call 971-9414 or e-mail avosborn@earthlink.net.