Two Things I Learned About Andrew Osborn

By: John Hogan

Posted: 4/29/08

The door to Andrew Osborn's office is open. He's sitting at his desk, meticulously correcting what I assume to be Literary Tradition II essays. The tweed sports jacket he wears fits perfectly, the cuffs of his white dress shirt exposed in just the right amounts. His legs - clad in neatly pressed dress pants - wrap tightly around the chair beneath him. With his back arched stiffly over his desk, he seems more like a hawk preparing for flight than an English professor grading essays written by freshmen. The frameless glasses that rest easily on his ears curve to the bone structure of his face, adding to his hawkish appearance while paradoxically correcting his imperfect sight. I knock softly on his door. Without turning his head, he says in a deep, matter of fact voice: "Is that you? Come in." That's the first thing I learned about Andrew Osborn: he's not easily distracted.

To say that Osborn maintains a pristine appearance is a gross understatement. He looks more like a mathematician than a poet. There's some truth to that look. Before Osborn ever considered himself a poet, he was interested in a career in the scientific field. He wrote poetry as a child, but never with any serious intentions. As a self-described "Jack of All Trades," poetry seemed to be more of a pastime than a profession: "I wrote a poem when I was a kid called 'Big Bang of the City.' Basically, it was about a country boy who was interested in a city. It focused on collisions between ball-bearing like entities."

Coming from Readfield, Maine, Osborn grew up in a rural setting. He attended a public high school that offered no AP classes. During his lunch breaks, Osborn would teach himself mathematics so that he wouldn't be behind upon entering college. Had he been just a few years older, he might have taken some of his high school English classes with the critically acclaimed horror fiction writer Stephen King, who taught at Osborn's high school for some time. King or no King, the high school he attended did not afford him the opportunity to write much. "In a public high school, if you don't have AP courses, and you don't have small class sizes, you don't get much of an opportunity to do any writing because the teachers can't read it," he said. "So, I'm assuming that I always had a talent for this [writing], but I never got to explore it until Harvard."
Upon entering Harvard as an undergraduate, Osborn planned to major in mathematics. Not long after he began his college career, however, he knew that math wasn't for him: "I was taking multi-variable calculus courses as a freshman. I was getting hundreds on all the tests, but so was everyone else. I didn't have any clue what it was all leading to. The classes were really boring. I knew that I was already a couple of years behind because the kids from the cities had been studying at elite science and math schools."

One morning at Harvard, a copy of the student literary magazine, The Advocate, was slipped under his door. This magazine changed his life. "I assumed adults had made it because it was so professional," he said, "I found out later that students had made it and students had edited it. So I started submitting to it and got some poems published. That was just cool, I liked that." Osborn eventually held the prestigious office of poetry editor of The Harvard Advocate, which is the oldest student publication in the country, and has been in circulation for more than 130 years.

To say that The Advocate is the sole reason why Osborn decided to become a poet, however, is far too shallow. He felt a much deeper attraction to the art than that. "Early in college, I was pretty cocky," he said; "I wasn't a very nice person. I intuited that in order to become a better person I would have to read more… I remember thinking to myself junior year, in a little mini-epiphany, that there're two senses to the word thoughtful. There's the sense of kind, and there's a sense of thinking a lot. I became convinced that in order to be the former, one had to be the latter." Osborn learned that thoughtfulness isn't just a word for being charitable, but that in order to be thoughtful you have to stretch your mind so that you can see where other people are coming from. Literature, in the specific form of poetry, helped him to do this.

His reason for studying literature seems to be the same reason why Osborn made most of his choices in his early life: he was trying to find himself. Though he eventually earned an MFA in creative writing from Iowa, which is the most prestigious writing program in the country, and a Ph.D. in literary criticism from the University of Texas, ranked a top ten program, Osborn took significant amounts of time off from his education to travel in the pursuit of self-knowledge.

His early travels were composed primarily of hitchhiking. "The whole idea of hitchhiking and being adventurous was all about my self-perception as a 'goody-goody,'" he said, "I was a kid who had wild, destined to be criminal stepsiblings. I hated them but also thought they were far cooler than me, so I wanted to emulate them in that respect." On one of these adventures, Osborn unwittingly accepted a ride from someone who turned out to be smoking marijuana. "I've heard that's not really supposed to impair your ability to drive," said Osborn, "but I did feel uncomfortable." On other occasions, these attempts at hitchhiking resulted in having to "call mom."

Perhaps more interesting than half-baked hitchhiking adventures were his road trips around the country. "I did a lot of driving in '90, the year between graduating college and going to Iowa," he said, "There was about a half year in there where I was prostituting myself to a bank. I needed to make money so I could go to Iowa. But the other half I spent living in a shack with a Vietnam pseudo vet or living in Chapel Hill and just finding out what the South was about." Concluding his domestic travels that year Osborn drove cross-country. "I never paid for a hotel once [meaning that he slept in his car], which is ridiculous. Also dangerous probably."

Osborn has one hobby that may be more dangerous than any of his travel experiences: bicycling. He owns a graphite bike-frame, a spandex uniform, and bike shoes. He means business. When he lived in Walla Walla, Washington, before coming to the University of Dallas in the fall of 2007, Osborn participated in organized cycling events. The name of one of these events he participated in is RAMROD (Ride Around Mt. Rainier in One Day), which is a 150 mile tour de force up and over the mountain with a 10,000 ft. vertical elevation. "If you take a spill on the downhill," said Andrew, "You aren't going to be OK." Osborn enjoys the fraternity aspect of biking more than anything else: "There's nothing like the camaraderie of 40 guys going for a long, intense bike ride together. I really miss it. It's something that Walla Walla had that I haven't been able to find here in Dallas so far."

When he lived in Walla Walla, Osborn taught as a visiting professor at Whitman College, a small liberal arts school. He liked very much the community that Walla Walla provided. It seemed to be a good atmosphere in which to raise his two daughters: Riley and Zoë. Zoë Francis Osborn is six years old. Osborn chose the name Zoë, while his wife, Kari, chose Francis. "Before we decided to name her that, I told my wife that I would have to go back and read J. D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey. Someone in the Glass family [the family around which the novel is based] killed himself. I didn't want to put that on my daughter." Fortunately for the Osborns, it was Seymour Glass who killed himself in the short story "A Perfect Day for Bananafish."

Though Walla Walla seemed the perfect community, Whitman College made it clear to Osborn that there was no tenure position available at the school for him. He decided to look for another job. "I came to the University of Dallas because I was told the students were good," he said, "And this proved to be true. When I came here for my interview, I could hear freshmen students talking in the halls about their literature classes. That's rare. Even at Whitman where the students are very good, they would always be talking about last night's "American Idol" or something like that."

Leaving Walla Walla must have been tough, but Osborn admits he prefers his professorship at UD to that of Whitman. "If you want to know what makes me tick, it's teaching," he said. Here at UD, the students are better and he's already on tenure track. Professionally, Dallas seems like the best place for him to be right now.

Because he loves teaching so much, Osborn faces an interesting problem. "I don't have much time these days to write poetry," said Andrew, "My career has taken me in directions such that I really am more and more a teacher/scholar first and every now and then I'm a poet. When you're still a young professor teaching 2 or 3 classes, then pretty much all your downtime is devoted to what your next lesson is going to be. And then, if you're a father, you're thinking about all that kind of stuff as well."

To date, Osborn's most significant publication in the creative field is his chap-book length manuscript Plato's Aviary, which won the 2002 Annual Aldrich Poetry Competition. For the time being, he remains a poet who is on no one's lips. I asked him if he ever thought he would become a known poet. "I've often thought about whether or not I want to become a known poet, but I think I would like to be, so I probably will," he said. This brings me to the second thing I learned about Andrew Osborn: he's confident. Not cocky like in his youth, not delusional like he might become in his old age, but confident.

Whether or not this young, hawk-like poet ever soars to fame, it seems that he has found a happy nest here at the University of Dallas, and we are glad to have him.