Still in Print: The Southern Novel Today

Pam Durban: So Far Back

Pam Durban So Far Back Jan Nordby Gretlund A Biographical Sketch The author was born Rosa Palmer Durban in Aiken, South Carolina, on March 4, 1947, the daughter of Frampton Wyman Durban, a real-estate appraiser, and Maria Hertwig. The writer grew up in Aiken, where her family has lived for generations. In the family tradition she attended a Catholic grade school, St. Mary Help of Christians. She left her hometown to attend the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, from which she graduated in 1969. In the early 1970s she wrote as a free-lancer for Osceola, a newspaper in Columbia, South Carolina. Durban worked as a journalist in Atlanta for The Great Speckled Bird, an alternative newspaper, and was also contributing editor for the Atlanta Gazette, 1974–75. In Atlanta she taped interviews with women in a textile mill community and published them as Cabbagetown Families in 1976. Portions of the book were made into a play called Cabbagetown: Three Women. She attended the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa and was awarded a master of fine arts degree in 1979. She married Frank H. Hunter, a photographer, on June 18, 1983. Their son, Wylie, was born in July 1987, and Durban received a Whiting Writer’s Award the same year. She was a founding editor of the magazine Five Points and served as its fiction editor, 1996–2001. Durban has taught creative writing at the University of New York at Geneseo , 1979–80; at Murray State in Kentucky, 1980–81; at Ohio University at Athens, 1981–86; and at Georgia State University, 1986–2001, where she was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1998. She is currently Doris Betts Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Throughout the early 1980s Durban published short stories in periodicals; her breakthrough came with “This Heat,” published in the Georgia Review in 1982, and three years later she collected the story and six others in All Set About with Fever Trees and Other Stories. The stories are mostly set in the South, and the roots are evident in the attempts to find out who people are, how they got to be that way, and how they manage to go on. In the Faulknerian tradition Pam Durban So Far Back 59 Durban tries to communicate the timeless and impressively experiments in storytelling . Several of the short stories look forward to her novels in idea, topic, and technique. The Laughing Place (1993), her first novel, is a stylistic triumph with its graceful and poetical narrative voice. It is an amusing and depressing story of widowed Annie Vess’s return to her native town, where she learns about her father’s life and the family secrets. We know her well, as she is also the main character of the last three stories in the short-story collection. The novel is a complexly woven story of a family and a community’s past and present. It is a major statement on the southern obsession with the past. Prejudice is a topic in her second novel, So Far Back. Upon its publication in 2000, Durban said, “That book deals with what I see as some fundamental southern attitudes, and I realized as I was writing it that I’m very conversant with them all.” So Far Back asks questions: Is there any point in trying to understand past injustice now? And to what extent is falsified history a part of our identity? The fact that the past proves not to be impervious to change gives the novel its depth. Upon its publication Durban was awarded the Lillian Smith Award for Fiction. Durban is working on a book of nonfiction, primarily of a biographical nature, of which the sections “The Old King,” “Veterans,” “Clocks,” and “A Southern Story” have already been published. She is also preparing her second collection of short stories, titled “Soon” and Other Stories, which will include the much praised stories “Gravity” and “The Jap Room.” And Pam Durban has finished several drafts of her third novel, tentatively to be called “The Tree of Forgetfulness.” So Far Back “Now it is my turn to trace the design, to tell the story and see where it ends, my turn to gather what I know, to take what I’ve read, what I’ve heard, what I’ve breathed in: to breathe it out, to go on with the story and leave a record for...