Janet Burroway

Janet Burroway (born September 21, 1936) is an American author.

Burroway was born in Tucson, Arizona, and educated at the University of Arizona, Barnard College in New York, Cambridge University in England, and the Yale School of Drama. Burroway’s published oeuvre includes eight novels, memoirs, short stories, poems, translations, plays, two children’s books, and two how-to books about the craft of writing. Her novel The Buzzards was nominated for the 1970 Pulitzer Prize, and Raw Silk, her most acclaimed novel thus far, was runner up for the 1977 National Book Award. While Burroway’s literary fame is due to her novels, the book that has won her the widest readership is Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft, first published in 1982. Now in its 9th edition, the book is used in writing programs throughout the United States at over four hundred colleges and universities, as well as in Canada and other English-speaking countries.

Early Life and Education

The second child and only daughter of tool and die worker Paul Burroway and his wife Alma (née Milner), Janet Burroway was raised in Phoenix, where she attended public school. (Her older brother, Stanley Burroway, a journalist, worked for the Los Angeles Times until his retirement.)[1] Burroway’s intelligence and gift for words were so obvious even in elementary school that one teacher began tutoring her in poetry after class.[2] Burroway told an interviewer that she began writing poetry at the age of five, and that her earliest memories are of “the fronds of an awesomely tall palm tree and beyond that the searing blue Arizona sky.”[3]

Her first scholarships were courtesy of local men’s clubs—the Elks and the Knights of Pythias—which allowed her to attend the University of Arizona. After studying there for a year (1954–55), Burroway won the Mademoiselle Magazine College Board Contest and spent part of the summer of 1955 in New York City as the magazine’s Guest Editor. (Several talented women writers of her generation have held that position, including poet Sylvia Plath and novelist Joan Didion, who was Burroway’s co-editor.) Burroway’s first poem to be published in a national magazine was “The Rivals,” which appeared in Seventeen when Burroway herself was eighteen (June 1954). In 1955 her first play, Garden Party, was produced at Barnard College. Seventeen also published Burroway’s first short story, “I Do Not Love You, Wesley,” in January 1957. In August of that same year, The Atlantic published Burroway’s poem “Song.”[4]

Burroway earned her A. B. cum laude from Barnard in 1958. She made Phi Beta Kappa, won the Barnard Memorial Prize for Drama, the Mount Holyoke Intercollegiate Poetry Prize, and several scholarships. In 1960, she moved to England where she attended Cambridge University on a Marshall Scholarship.[5]

After receiving her M. A. from Cambridge, Burroway taught at the University of Sussex from 1965-1970.

Personal life

Burroway married Belgian theatre director Walter Eysselinck and lived in Belgium for two years where she worked as a costume designer. The couple’s oldest son, Timothy Alan Eysselinck, was born in Ghent in 1964, where Burroway finished her second novel, The Dancer from the Dance (Faber and Faber, London, 1965; Little, Brown, Boston, 1967) and began her third, Eyes (Faber and Faber 1966; Little, Brown 1966). After Eysselinck took a theatre job in Sussex, the family relocated to England, where Burroway had their second child, Tobyn Alexander (Alex) Eysselinck, in 1966. She left Eysselinck in 1971.

She married William Dean Humphries, an artist, in 1978, but the marriage did not last. The two divorced in 1981.

In 1993, Burroway married her long-time partner, Utopian scholar Peter Ruppert. The two spend their time in Tallahassee, where Burroway is the Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor Emerita at Florida State University, in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, and in London.

Writing career

While in England, Burroway finished her first novel, Descend Again (Faber and Faber, London, 1960).[6] Often overlooked by critics because it was not published in the United States, the book is structured around the myth of Plato’s “Cave.” When asked whether fiction is more closely affiliated with poetry or drama, Burroway replies, “There are two different ways of organizing [a novel]: a dramatic, and a poetic way. And the people who organize fiction as drama are more likely to be on the best-seller list, and people who organize fiction as poetry are more likely to be boring, but profound. The best thing is to do both.” [7] In 1961 Burroway’s first book of poetry, But to the Season, was published by Keele University Press. Burroway spent 1960-1961 in New Haven, Connecticut after receiving an RCA/NBC scholarship in playwriting from the Yale School of Drama. “I had been interested in drama all along; I really would like to have been a playwright,” Burroway says now, in hindsight. “I found this a difficult decision [whether or not to attend Yale] and I’ll never know if I made the right one. My sense then was that the British are fundamentally artistic and Americans are not. I think I might have found a more congenial community in England, and that it offers more incentives to playwrights. As it is, I have lived back and forth between America and England . . . . [s]ometimes I have trouble deciding which nationality my characters are.”[8]

Her fourth novel, the critically acclaimed The Buzzards (and Burroway’s personal favorite), came out in 1969 (Little, Brown; published by Faber and Faber in England that same year), and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.[9] As critic Elisabeth Muhlenfeld has noted, “The Buzzards is a political novel of unusual artistry. Its controlling metaphor is adopted from the first chorus of the Oresteia . . . . [when] warrior-birds swoop upon a pregnant hare, tearing out the unborn brood.” [10] Ironically, that same year the first of Burroway’s two children’s books, The Truck on the Track, came out in England (Jonathan Cape). The American edition was published the following year by Bobbs-Merrill. The book enjoyed a long print run, and like Burroway’s second, The Giant Jam Sandwich, was televised by the BBC. In 2008 composer Philip Wharton set it to music for narrator and orchestra, and the piece had its debut performance with the Iowa City Symphony.

Burroway completed her fourth play, Hoddinott Veiling, in 1970; it was performed that year by ATV Network Television in London. Another play, The Fantasy Level, was first produced in 1961 at the Yale School of Drama, and again in 1968 by the Gardner Center for the Arts for the Brighton Festival in Sussex. The Beauty Operators (1968) was also produced by the Gardner Center for the Arts, then by the Armchair Theatre, Thames Television in London in 1970.[11]

In 1971, she admitted that she found motherhood “daunting” and that her troubled marriage had finally collapsed.[12] In her essay “I Didn’t Know Sylvia Plath” (published in Embalming Mom: Essays in Life, University of Iowa Press 2002), Burroway writes, “I married a man with a smaller talent than Ted Hughes [a poet and Sylvia Plath’s husband ], and a shorter fuse.” She came back to America with her sons after landing a stop-gap job in the Special Educational Opportunities Program at the University of Illinois. Depressed and distraught, Burroway contemplated suicide.

In 1972, Burroway accepted a position as Associate Professor of English Literature and Writing at Florida State University in Tallahassee. Except for brief stints at other institutions as a visiting professor, Burroway taught at Florida State University until her retirement in 2002.

Burroway received a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship in 1976, which was followed by two resident fellowships at Yaddo (in Saratoga Springs, New York), one in 1985 and again in 1987.[13]

Burroway’s fifth novel, Raw Silk (Little, Brown 1977) was a runner-up for the National Book Award. It had taken Burroway seven years to research and write, but it was responsible for introducing her to a wide popular audience. The book was also important for her personally, since she had incorporated chunks of her own life into it, a practice she had tentatively begun in The Buzzards. Burroway wrote about eighty pages in a two-day period, then revised the material down to nine pages that “worked perfectly well as narrative. And it forced me to see that if I was avoiding my real concerns and trying to write Great Literature, I would likely not be able to write.” [14] After that, Burroway looked over the books she had written and realized that the threads she consistently wove through her narrative and kept returning to—in particular, mentor relationships, the abandonment of children, race, and suicide—were in fact themes. “That’s why I began Raw Silk with, ‘This morning I abandoned my only child.’” [15] Burroway also credits a suggestion from her brother the journalist for deleting the beginning portions of the novel until all she had left as a starting point was that stark declarative sentence.[16]

Another book of poetry, Material Goods, was published in 1980 by the University Presses of Florida. In 1982, the first edition of Burroway’s indispensable “how-to” book, Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft, was published by Little, Brown. Burroway wrote two more novels, Opening Nights (Antheum, 1985), which draws on her background in theatre, and Cutting Stone (Houghton Mifflin, 1992), set, like her first novel, in a small Arizona town of another era. Cutting Stone became a Book-of-the-Month Club alternate selection, and in 1993-94 Burroway was awarded the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fellowship. A collection of essays-as-memoir, Embalming Mom, came out in 2002 (University of Iowa Press, Iowa City).

By 2004, Burroway was working on another novel, Paper, which dealt with the love affair between a white woman and a black mill worker.[17]

Then, a phone call and a simple four-word message, “Tim has shot himself,” shattered Burroway’s world.[18] Tim Eysselinck, her first-born, had flown from Iraq, where he was leader of a team training Iraqis, to his home in Namibia for a vacation, where he killed himself.[19][20] Burroway knew her son was depressed by “‘[t]he corruption, the incompetence, the greed, the lies’” of war. For a while, her son's suicide was all she could write about. In the essay “Six Months On: What I have Learned about Grief,” she says, “It is half a year since my son’s suicide. Timothy Alan Eysselinck, forty, Captain, Ranger, father, hunter, contractor overseeing mine removal in Iraq, Republican, idealist, perfectionist, gun nut, my firstborn, my baby” [21] Then, she couldn’t write about anything at all.

Eventually, she returned to the subject matter of Paper. [22] Drastically re-conceived and re-christened Bridge of Sand, the novel explores what happens when a white woman falls in love with a black man in the contemporary American South—and the reaction of Cassius’s parents to the couple’s affair is only the beginning. Burroway’s protagonist, Dana, is now female, and Burroway gives her the blue-collar background—a background similar to Burroway’s own. At the novel’s end, Dana, pregnant with Cassius’s son, returns to her working class roots. Burroway laughs. “When my brother read this novel, he said, ‘She’s going to give birth to Obama!’”[23]

Critical Acclaim

In the main, Janet Burroway’s work has been greeted with approval, enthusiasm, and, on occasion, rave reviews. Critic Elisabeth Muhlenfeld has called her “a writer of wide range and many voices” who has “consciously avoided current trends.” [24] Author Joan Fry referred to her as “a writer’s writer, a prodigiously talented all-American girl.” [25] Critic Thomas Rankin observed that Burroway’s fiction is known for “its stylistic excellence and tragicomic tone, portraying evil as the result of emotional blindness.” He also notes that Burroway “has been called a Renaissance woman for her achievements as a novelist, teacher, playwright, [poet], columnist, and critic,” but that her most important achievement “may be the encouragement and role modeling she provides for young women who aspire to write.”[26]

Known for her complex female protagonists, Burroway enjoys experimenting with technique; she is adept at assuming the speech and thought patterns of characters of another gender, race, or age. Time and again she emphasizes that the authors she most admires (and continues to reread) are Jane Austen, George Eliot, Joseph Conrad, and Henry James. Burroway admits that in “some ways I think that I have distorted my own vision by living so much of my life in literature, and not seeing the connection between what there is to write about and what’s immediate in my life until very late.”[27]

According to Elisabeth Muhlenfeld, “The Dancer from the Dance and Eyes both received positive reviews but on the whole attracted little notice. (Granville Hicks singled out Eyes in the Saturday Review as a rewarding, well-written book.)” [28] A reviewer for The Guardian, praising Raw Silk, noted that “She writes like a robust angel.” [29] Opening Nights was praised by the Los Angeles Times as “exhilarating, vivid and precise,” and The New Yorker called it “A fine and complex novel, a comedy and then some.” [30] Jonathan Spence observed that Burroway’s seventh novel, Cutting Stone, “is about many things, but perhaps most centrally it is about the mines and quarries of the human heart, and the myriad ways we delve into, gouge out, and transform ourselves.” [31] Walter Clemens, reviewing Opening Nights and Cutting Stone for Newsweek wrote that Burroway is “a subtle novelist with a gift for jolting surprises. . . . Common-sensical though she seems, Burroway is a sneaky virtuoso.”[32]

Booklist, in a review of Embalming Mom, called her “a pithy essayist with an inner compass that steers her to the ambiguity at the heart of the human condition,” and James L. Marra of Temple University, has called Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft “the best such book on the market.” [33] Imaginative Writing: The Elements of Craft received high praise from Porter Shreve (University of North Carolina, Greensboro), among others: “engaging, witty, specific, absolutely clear and propelled by the kind of energetic prose that inspires students to write well.”[34]

In 2005, Elephant Rock Productions in Chicago released a CD hosted by Burroway entitled So, Is It Done? Navigating the Revision Process. A review by The Writer sums up Burroway’s contributions to the art and craft of writing: “[She] talks about revision with class and grace . . . she encourages you to work harder than you ever imagined, partly because she believes in you and partly because you want to make her proud.”[35]

Publications

Books

Poetry

"The Rivals," Seventeen, June 1954.

"Song," The Atlantic, August 1957.

"Song" and "Owed to Dickens," New Poems by American Poets, ed. Rolfe Humphries, Ballantine, New York, 1957.

"Introduction" and "Epithalamion," Granta (Cambridge, England), 29 November 1958.

"Aubade," Granta, 24 January 1959.

"Prolegomenon," Granta, 7 March 1959.

"Footnote," Granta, 6 June 1959

"Piecework," Delta, October 1959.

"Benevolence," Granta, 7 November 1959.

"Aubade" and "Epithalamion," Universities Poetry 2, Keele University Press, 1959.

"D'Accord" and "The Scientist," Granta, 23 January 1960.

"Solo," Granta, 14 May 1960.

"James's Park," "D'Accord," and "The Scientist," Universities Poetry 3, Keele University Press, 1961.

"The Scientist," New Poems 1961, A P.E.N. Anthology, ed. Plomer, Cork and Thwaite, Hutchinson, London, 1961; The Guinness Book of Poetry, Putnam, London, 1962; Sound and Sense: An Introduction to Poetry, Fourth Edition, ed. Laurence Perrine, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York, 1973, and following editions; "set" for the 1994-95 American high school "Academic Decathelon."

"A Few Particulars," Twenty-Seven Poems, ed. Woolf and Taylor, University of Sussex Press, Brighton, 1966.

"Nuns at Birth," New Statesman (London), July 1970; Best Poems of 1970: Borestone Mountain Poetry Awards 1971; Articulations: Poetry about Illness and the Body, anthology, ed. Jon Mukland, U. Iowa Press, 1995.

"Lievre aux Capres," Cafe at St. Marks, ed. Van K. Brock, Anhinga Press, Tallahassee, 1975.

"Separation," New Statesman, 16 May 1975; MS. Magazine, November 1975.

"Hole," Sun Dog, Florida State University, Spring 1979.

"Lines to King's Cross Terminal," Critical Quarterly, Manchester, Spring 1980; Sarajevo: An Anthology for Bosnian Relief, Elgin Community College, fall 1993.

"Material Goods" and "Appleyard Odyssey," Sun Dog, Spring 1980.

"Mother Hood," Konglomerati, Spring 1983; North of Wakulla, an anthology, Anhinga Press, 1990.

"Catcher," Florida Review (First prize winner, Florida Poetry Contest), Fall 1983.

"Maternal Line," Red Bass, Nos. 8/9, Fall 1985.

"This Is," Apalachee Quarterly, Fall 1985, and Yearbook of American Poetry, Monitor, Beverly Hills, 1987.

"Florida Hard Freeze," Caprice, 1990.

"This Hammock is for Peter," The Chatahoochee Review, fall, 1992.

"Text/tile," memoir, produced as a text for dance, performed by the Dance Theatre, FSU, and published in Writing in Education, National Association of Writers in Education, Huddersfield, England, winter 1993.

"Three Ideas" ("Democracy," "Shame," "Heaven"), Caprice, Nov. 1995, Wichita, Kansas.

"Workout" ("Biceps," "Triceps," "Forceps"), Caprice, April 1996.

“Four Deadly Sins,” Chelsea, 2001.

“The Tim Poems: Roadkill, Scuppernong, Monologue, Airport, Plenty, Post,” Prairie Schooner, Fall 2006.

Stories

"I Do Not Love You, Wesley," Seventeen, January 1957.

"A Letter to Remember not to Mail," Granta (Cambridge, England), 8 November 1958.

"The Fantasy Level," Granta, 17 October 1959; The Yale Review, summer 1961

"The Rest of It, July," Granta, 30 April 1960.

"Extra Days," Story Quarterly, winter 1976; reprinted in The Best of Story Quarterly, 1990.

"Disaster," Apalachee Quarterly, Fall 1980.

"Embalming Mom," Apalachee Quarterly, Spring 1985; reprinted in The Source of the Spring, Conari Press, Spring 1998.

"Winn Dixie," New Letters on the Air, Winter 1985, and New Letters, Winter 1986; reprinted in New Visions, an anthology of Florida writers, Arbiter Press, 1989.

"Uncle Ben's," novella, New Letters, March 1987.

"Growth," New Virginia Quarterly, Winter 1990.

"I'toi," Prairie Schooner, Spring 1991.

"Pool," for the Florida Humanities Council project "Making Florida Home," 1993.

"Dad Scattered," in anthology The Day My Father Died, Running Press, N.Y. 1994.

"Tea Leaves," in Microfiction, anthology ed. Jerome Stern for W.W. Norton & Co., fall 1996.

"Report on Professional Activities," Black Warrior Review, Fall 1997 (with interview by Joan Fry). Nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

“Deconstruction,” Prairie Schooner, Winter 1999 (winner of the Lawrence Foundation Award).

“Regular,” New Letters, spring 2001.

“The Mandelbrot Set,” Five Points, Winter 2002; 2003 Pushcart Prize XXVII; Best of the Small Presses, ed. Bill Henderson.

“Oracles,” Prairie Schooner, fall 2004, winner of the Prairie Schooner “Readers’ Choice” award.

“Sublet,” Ninth Letter, Spring 2005.

“Chronotope,” Prairie Schooner, Summer 2006, winner of PS “Readers Choice” Award.

Excerpt from Devil’s Play, Iron Horse Review, Winter 2007.

Excerpt from Indian Dancer, “Blackout,” (winner of third prize, Love Story Competition), Narrative Magazine, Spring 2008.

Excerpts from Bridge of Sand, Prairie Schooner, Winter, 2008;and Narrative Magazine Autumn 2008.

"White Space," (winner of first prize, Winter Contest), Narrative Magazine, Winter 2009.

Plays and Performance Texts

Garden Party Barnard College, 1955.

The Fantasy Level Yale School of Drama, 1961; Roberson Memorial Center, Binghamton, N.Y., 1963; Belgian National Television (in Dutch translation), 1965; Gardner Center for the Arts, for the Brighton Festival, Sussex, 1968. Playwrights' Theatre, Tallahassee, 1979.

The Beauty Operators Gardner Center for the Arts, 1968; Armchair Theatre, Thames Television, London, 1970; Belgian National Television (in Dutch translation), 1971.

Hoddinott Veiling ATV Network Television, London, 1970; British Independent Television's entry in the 1970 Monte Carlo Festival "Best Television Drama" category.

Due Care and Attention ATV Network Television, London, 1973.

Dadadata: Homage to John Cage, text for dance FSU Dance Dept., Oct. 1990.

Text/Tile, text for dance FSU Dance Department for "Twelve Days of Dance", Nov. 1991. Reprise, Florida Museum of History, R.A. Gary Building, Oct. 5, 1997.

Medea with Child staged reading, Playwright's Theatre, London, June 1994; and International Women's Day, Tallahassee, 1995 Winner of the Reva Shiner Award, Bloomington Playwrights' Project; production October 1997.

The Empty Dress, text for dance "Gendered Space," Florida Women’s Studies Conference, FSU Oct. 1994, and "Twelve Days of Dance," FSU Dance Department, Nov. 1994, Center for Professional Development and Public Service, Jan. 1995.

Opening Nights, radio adaptation (with Charles Olsen) production by the Actors’ Repertory Theatre; sponsored by WFSU-TV and the FSU School for the Production of Film, Television and the Recording Arts; Tallahassee transmission summer 1997.

Yazoo City Station, text for dance FSU Dance Repertory Theatre, collaboration with Lynda Davis, March 1998.

Sweepstakes, a play Reading at the Playwrights’ Center of San Francisco, Oct. 1998 (finalist in the annual Dramarama competition); production by the Actors’ Repertory Theatre at Tallahassee Little Theatre, Feb. 11-21, 1999; reading, the Royal National Theatre Studio, London, Nov. 1999; and at Women’s Playwright’s Initiative, Orlando, Feb, 2006.

Quiltings: Text/tile Opus Three, text for dance Birdsong Nature Reserve, Oct. 1999; reprise for Dance Repertory Theatre in Concert, Feb. 25-26, 2000.

Division of Property, winner of the 2002 Arts & Letters Prize (chosen by Lanford Wilson), produced at Milledgeville, GA, April 2002, published in the Spring 2002 issue of Arts & Letters. Produced for the Imago One-Act Festival at the Stella Adler Academy and Theatre, Los Angeles, summer 2002.

Parts of Speech, readings with Jane Alexander in a staging by Edwin Sherin, FSU Conradi Theatre, March 2004; Women’s Playwright’s Initiative, directed by Ellen Jones, Orlando, January, 2007; and Chicago Dramatists, Dec. 2008.

Long Time No See, produced at Bloomington Playwrights’ Theatre, Bloomington, Indiana, July 31 – Aug.2, 2008.

Winn Dixie, film adaptation by Ana Silverlinck, USC Film School, 2008.

External links

References

  1. Burroway, Janet. “Wikipedia.” E-mail to Joan Fry. 3 January 2009.
  2. Muhlenfeld, Elisabeth. American Novelists Since World War II. Second Series. Gale Research Company, 1980.
  3. Fry, Joan. “A Conversation with Janet Burroway,” Black Warrior Review, Fall/Winter 1997.
  4. Burroway, Janet. Curriculum Vita.
  5. Burroway, Janet. Curriculum Vita.
  6. Burroway, Janet. http://www.JanetBurroway.com
  7. Fry, Joan. Black Warrior Review.
  8. Fry, Joan. Black Warrior Review.
  9. Burroway, Janet. Curriculum Vita.
  10. Muhlenfeld, Elisabeth. American Novelists Since World War II.
  11. Burroway, Janet. Curriculum Vita.
  12. Fry, Joan. Black Warrior Review.
  13. Burroway, Janet. Curriculum Vita.
  14. Fry, Joan. Black Warrior Review.
  15. Fry, Joan. Black Warrior Review.
  16. Fry, Joan. Unpublished interview, Tallahassee, FL. 20April 1993.
  17. Fry, Joan. Black Warrior Review.
  18. Burroway, Janet. “Life after Tim.” St. Petersburg Times. St. Petersburg, FL. 12 Dec. 2004. http://www.JanetBurroway.com/tim.htm
  19. Burroway, Janet. “Soldier Son,” New Letters, Vol. 64, No. 2, March 1998.
  20. Burroway, Janet. “Tim’s Last Kill.” The Guardian, London. 2 July 2004. <http://www.JanetBurroway.com/tim.htm>
  21. Burroway, Janet. http://www.JanetBurroway.com
  22. Burroway, Janet. http://www.JanetBurroway.com
  23. Muhlenfeld, Elisabeth.
  24. Fry, Joan. Black Warrior Review.
  25. Rankin, Thomas. "Janet Burroway." Guide to Literary Masters and Their Works. 2007. Literary Reference Center. EBSCO. Antelope Valley College, Lancaster, CA. 7 Jan. 2009 http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=lfh&AN=MOL9790201214&site=ehost-live
  26. Fry, Joan. Black Warrior Review.
  27. Muhlenfeld, Elisabeth.
  28. Burroway, Janet. http://www.JanetBurroway.com
  29. Burroway, Janet. http://www.JanetBurroway.com
  30. Burroway, Janet. http://www.JanetBurroway.com
  31. Contemporary Authors, New Revision Series. Vol. 44. Gale Research Inc. Detroit, MI. 1994.
  32. Burroway, Janet. http://www.JanetBurroway.com
  33. Burroway, Janet. http://www.JanetBurroway.com
  34. Burroway, Janet. http://www.JanetBurroway.com
  35. Burroway, Janet. http://www.JanetBurroway.com