A Woman of Letters:An Interview with Janet Burroway
by Ryan Little
Janet Burroway grew up Arizona and was educated at the University of Arizona, Barnard College in New York, Cambridge University in England, and the Yale School of Drama in Connecticut. Burroway’s published works include short stories, poems, translations, plays, two children’s books, eight novels, including her most recent, Bridge of Sand (2009), and two textbooks about the craft of writing. Her novel The Buzzards was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in 1970, and her highly acclaimed novel Raw Silk was runner up for a National Book
Award in 1977. Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft (now in its 8th edition) is the most widely used book on creative writing in colleges and universities in the U.S. She divides her time now between Wisconsin and Florida, where she was recently honored as a Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor Emerita at Florida State University.
__________
Ryan Little: If you could go back in time and tell yourself, as a young adult or upstart writer, one bit of wisdom mined from all that you’ve learned in the years since, what would it be and why?
Janet Burroway: I always liked Grace Paley’s answer to this question: “Keep a low overhead.” But really that is not my answer, which is: the most important thing you can do as a young writer, in a writing program or not, is to figure out how you can make writing a continuing part of your life. All the other problems may or may not be solved but only within a writing life. Publication is grand but mainly because it gives
you the courage to continue. Ron Carlson puts it: “The writer is the one who stays in the room.” Staying in the room is always hard and
does not get easier. You will have a job, a marriage, kids, both happy distraction and trouble. If writing can become a habitual refuge, rather
than a chore subject to your will, then it will sustain you, and it will get better. It will get better. Only if you do it.
RL: Throughout the year, you divide your time between Florida, London, and Wisconsin. How do these very different locales affect
your writing?
JB: Funny you should ask. We have just sold our flat in London, and are sort of consolidating in the States – partly because our granddaughters are now old enough to visit from London on their own, partly because I’ve become so involved in the theatre in Chicago that there isn’t time to split our year three ways. We are still basically Floridians and will be back down to Florida in January, but there will inevitably be more flying back and forth. But your real question has to do with the effect on my writing, and I probably only partially know the answer to that. I’ve spent altogether something like a dozen years in England, and that has certainly affected my diction, the rhythm of my sentences and the nature of my humor. (I like it wry and dry). There’s a beach comber in me, and a woods walker, and a city girl, and it exhilarates me to be able to drop one and pick up the other, probably as much as I like to finish a novel and go on to a play or a memoir. I grew up in Arizona, then spent several years in the east and England, and what I missed most in thirty years in Florida was the turn of the seasons. We have that in the woods in Wisconsin, and I love to watch it. For me personally, what all this moving around means is probably that I’m still looking for home—that is certainly the evidence of my novels, where my heroines tend to be relentlessly engaged in that pursuit. But also it has made me richly aware of my surroundings, and that is reflected in the books. Where is always as much a question as who and why in my stories.
RL: How do you choose what genre or format you will write in next? What are you working on now?
JB: This is one of those parts of writing that I don’t choose: the genre chooses me. I mean that an impulse to write on some subject or other
almost inevitably comes together with its genre—an image or a lyric line attaches itself automatically to a poem; an incident pulses with meaning and must be an essay—though there have been some exceptions: I thought Cutting Stone would be a screenplay, I suppose
because it was a western. At the moment I’m working on a musical—something I’ve wanted to do for most of my adulthood. And for this particular musical, an adaptation of Barry Unsworth’s Morality Play, I’ve been seeking the rights since I reviewed the novel for the New York Times Book Review in the late 90’s. I’ve prepared myself by taking an arduous workshop at Theatre Building Chicago, where I linked up with the very young and wonderful composer Matthew Kiedrowski. We’re about a third of the way into the book and have plotted all the songs. The real work is still ahead, but it’s a fascinating process, chock full of technical detail that must be right and emotional build that must occur in order to lead to song. Did you know that the American Musical has many rules? Neither did I. Here’s one: You can’t sing a lie.
RL: You have described Bridge of Sand as “a love song to the Gulf Coast.” Why set your novel here? What unique characteristics does
Florida offer?
JB: Well, of course, I’ve spent thirty years driving back and forth to Alligator Point, St. Teresa, St. George Island, Cape San Blas and points
between. For many, many years, a friend lent me a house at Alligator Point that was a sort of private Yaddo. I could only write for four days
without speaking to another soul, but I did those four many times, and much of my fiction, many essays are for me redolent of salt and sand.
The question was not really “why set a novel here?” but “what’s the right novel to set here?” This one seemed right to me because in the
people of the Florida Gulf coast I found the character of my parents and my childhood. I am deeply drawn to the working class people I
came from, and I have not got over railing at them about what I still perceive as their closed-mindedness. Dana in Bridge of Sand finds a
way, partial and imperfect it may be, to honor that life.
RL: You’ve been known to inscribe Bridge of Sand at book signings with the quote: “The sky was almost white. A pair of flying bluefish broke from the waves…” What is the significance of this quote?
JB: The significance is that there is only one book in the world inscribed with that line. Ken Kesey taught me, one AWP convention in Seattle,
this way to sign a book: you write “For…” and the person’s name, open the book at random, stick your finger on a phrase at random,
and write that phrase as an inscription. It’s a time-honored method of finding significance, old as St. Augustine. What it means at a signing is
that all the inscriptions will be different, and it also operates rather as a horoscope. Kesey said, “You won’t know what it means, but the person will.” It’s amazing, and fun, how often the quotation seems somehow apt. I’m as grateful to Kesey for this trick as for all of Cuckoo’s Nest.
RL: In the years since you began as a college professor, creative writing programs have become common at many colleges and universities
across the country. Have there been any negative aspects to having so many up-and-coming writers file through such programs? Do the
benefits of such programs outweigh the drawbacks?
JB: Emphatic yes to both questions. Here are some of the perceived drawbacks: The stories will tend to be all alike, or, worse, all like
the teacher’s. Talent will be quashed. Delicate sensibilities will be crushed. Contrarily, the programs will foster unrealistic ambition
and expectation. The teacher him/herself will become a dull and confined writer with no experience from which to write. The students
will not find jobs. There will be more writers than readers. We will all contemplate our navels. Students will stop trying to write well and
begin to consider their “career arcs.” I think these dangers all have to be faced and/or avoided, though the only one that really worries me is the last one. Here’s why the benefits weigh more: We need all the writers we can get. The language is imperiled by schlock culture, visual excess, the sound bite, and public lies both commercial and political. Writers are the monks of this dark age, saving the fine distinctions and the grace of which language is capable. People who want to attempt to express a truth have the right to that attempt. A workshop is a guaranteed audience with the gift of community and the gift of feedback. To write as a student is, in effect, to get paid for writing—in course credit. At the same time, it allows you to figure out how you will keep writing and so still have something joyous to do in retirement. As for the world, what it needs most is that we should be able to imagine each other. That is the only way to peace. And it is the particular task of imaginative writing to give us a way to imagine each other.
RL: How do you hope to be remembered in literary circles 50 or 100 years from now? How do you hope to be remembered by readers?
JB: It’s an indulgence and a confession, answering this question. I don’t generally think in these terms at all, still less admit to it. But, as
thrilled as I am that Writing Fiction and Imaginative Writing have been valuable to other writers, it is disappointing to be known primarily for
two textbooks while the novels are mostly out of print. I have a small, infrequent fantasy that some future student will happen upon a copy
of the battered textbook and decide to check whether I could practice what I preached. And will say: Hey!
RL: You have included an excerpt from your upcoming novel, Indian Dancer, in this edition of Saw Palm. What is the novel about?
JB: Indian Dancer is the most elusive novel I’ve undertaken. I think it contains my best writing, and it flows away from me like drops of
mercury. It’s had several shapes, several titles: Time Lapse, Simone, Montage, now Indian Dancer, which is the title of a Hannah Hoch
montage made up of many elements, none of which bears any relation to an Indian dancer. The novel is about a woman born in Belgium
in 1930, orphaned in 1942 as she is rescued to England, who spends her life avoiding that dark past. It began as a series of connected but
contradictory stories; I reinvented it with a narrative arc, changed my mind about both what she is avoiding and how. I have now decided
that the linked-stories shape was the right one, though at this juncture it means I must throw away half the novel. It’s despair, but rich despair. I’m frantic, but not bored, so I’ll keep at it ‘til Simone reveals herself.
This interview appeared in Volume 3.
Award in 1977. Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft (now in its 8th edition) is the most widely used book on creative writing in colleges and universities in the U.S. She divides her time now between Wisconsin and Florida, where she was recently honored as a Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor Emerita at Florida State University.
__________
Ryan Little: If you could go back in time and tell yourself, as a young adult or upstart writer, one bit of wisdom mined from all that you’ve learned in the years since, what would it be and why?
Janet Burroway: I always liked Grace Paley’s answer to this question: “Keep a low overhead.” But really that is not my answer, which is: the most important thing you can do as a young writer, in a writing program or not, is to figure out how you can make writing a continuing part of your life. All the other problems may or may not be solved but only within a writing life. Publication is grand but mainly because it gives
you the courage to continue. Ron Carlson puts it: “The writer is the one who stays in the room.” Staying in the room is always hard and
does not get easier. You will have a job, a marriage, kids, both happy distraction and trouble. If writing can become a habitual refuge, rather
than a chore subject to your will, then it will sustain you, and it will get better. It will get better. Only if you do it.
RL: Throughout the year, you divide your time between Florida, London, and Wisconsin. How do these very different locales affect
your writing?
JB: Funny you should ask. We have just sold our flat in London, and are sort of consolidating in the States – partly because our granddaughters are now old enough to visit from London on their own, partly because I’ve become so involved in the theatre in Chicago that there isn’t time to split our year three ways. We are still basically Floridians and will be back down to Florida in January, but there will inevitably be more flying back and forth. But your real question has to do with the effect on my writing, and I probably only partially know the answer to that. I’ve spent altogether something like a dozen years in England, and that has certainly affected my diction, the rhythm of my sentences and the nature of my humor. (I like it wry and dry). There’s a beach comber in me, and a woods walker, and a city girl, and it exhilarates me to be able to drop one and pick up the other, probably as much as I like to finish a novel and go on to a play or a memoir. I grew up in Arizona, then spent several years in the east and England, and what I missed most in thirty years in Florida was the turn of the seasons. We have that in the woods in Wisconsin, and I love to watch it. For me personally, what all this moving around means is probably that I’m still looking for home—that is certainly the evidence of my novels, where my heroines tend to be relentlessly engaged in that pursuit. But also it has made me richly aware of my surroundings, and that is reflected in the books. Where is always as much a question as who and why in my stories.
RL: How do you choose what genre or format you will write in next? What are you working on now?
JB: This is one of those parts of writing that I don’t choose: the genre chooses me. I mean that an impulse to write on some subject or other
almost inevitably comes together with its genre—an image or a lyric line attaches itself automatically to a poem; an incident pulses with meaning and must be an essay—though there have been some exceptions: I thought Cutting Stone would be a screenplay, I suppose
because it was a western. At the moment I’m working on a musical—something I’ve wanted to do for most of my adulthood. And for this particular musical, an adaptation of Barry Unsworth’s Morality Play, I’ve been seeking the rights since I reviewed the novel for the New York Times Book Review in the late 90’s. I’ve prepared myself by taking an arduous workshop at Theatre Building Chicago, where I linked up with the very young and wonderful composer Matthew Kiedrowski. We’re about a third of the way into the book and have plotted all the songs. The real work is still ahead, but it’s a fascinating process, chock full of technical detail that must be right and emotional build that must occur in order to lead to song. Did you know that the American Musical has many rules? Neither did I. Here’s one: You can’t sing a lie.
RL: You have described Bridge of Sand as “a love song to the Gulf Coast.” Why set your novel here? What unique characteristics does
Florida offer?
JB: Well, of course, I’ve spent thirty years driving back and forth to Alligator Point, St. Teresa, St. George Island, Cape San Blas and points
between. For many, many years, a friend lent me a house at Alligator Point that was a sort of private Yaddo. I could only write for four days
without speaking to another soul, but I did those four many times, and much of my fiction, many essays are for me redolent of salt and sand.
The question was not really “why set a novel here?” but “what’s the right novel to set here?” This one seemed right to me because in the
people of the Florida Gulf coast I found the character of my parents and my childhood. I am deeply drawn to the working class people I
came from, and I have not got over railing at them about what I still perceive as their closed-mindedness. Dana in Bridge of Sand finds a
way, partial and imperfect it may be, to honor that life.
RL: You’ve been known to inscribe Bridge of Sand at book signings with the quote: “The sky was almost white. A pair of flying bluefish broke from the waves…” What is the significance of this quote?
JB: The significance is that there is only one book in the world inscribed with that line. Ken Kesey taught me, one AWP convention in Seattle,
this way to sign a book: you write “For…” and the person’s name, open the book at random, stick your finger on a phrase at random,
and write that phrase as an inscription. It’s a time-honored method of finding significance, old as St. Augustine. What it means at a signing is
that all the inscriptions will be different, and it also operates rather as a horoscope. Kesey said, “You won’t know what it means, but the person will.” It’s amazing, and fun, how often the quotation seems somehow apt. I’m as grateful to Kesey for this trick as for all of Cuckoo’s Nest.
RL: In the years since you began as a college professor, creative writing programs have become common at many colleges and universities
across the country. Have there been any negative aspects to having so many up-and-coming writers file through such programs? Do the
benefits of such programs outweigh the drawbacks?
JB: Emphatic yes to both questions. Here are some of the perceived drawbacks: The stories will tend to be all alike, or, worse, all like
the teacher’s. Talent will be quashed. Delicate sensibilities will be crushed. Contrarily, the programs will foster unrealistic ambition
and expectation. The teacher him/herself will become a dull and confined writer with no experience from which to write. The students
will not find jobs. There will be more writers than readers. We will all contemplate our navels. Students will stop trying to write well and
begin to consider their “career arcs.” I think these dangers all have to be faced and/or avoided, though the only one that really worries me is the last one. Here’s why the benefits weigh more: We need all the writers we can get. The language is imperiled by schlock culture, visual excess, the sound bite, and public lies both commercial and political. Writers are the monks of this dark age, saving the fine distinctions and the grace of which language is capable. People who want to attempt to express a truth have the right to that attempt. A workshop is a guaranteed audience with the gift of community and the gift of feedback. To write as a student is, in effect, to get paid for writing—in course credit. At the same time, it allows you to figure out how you will keep writing and so still have something joyous to do in retirement. As for the world, what it needs most is that we should be able to imagine each other. That is the only way to peace. And it is the particular task of imaginative writing to give us a way to imagine each other.
RL: How do you hope to be remembered in literary circles 50 or 100 years from now? How do you hope to be remembered by readers?
JB: It’s an indulgence and a confession, answering this question. I don’t generally think in these terms at all, still less admit to it. But, as
thrilled as I am that Writing Fiction and Imaginative Writing have been valuable to other writers, it is disappointing to be known primarily for
two textbooks while the novels are mostly out of print. I have a small, infrequent fantasy that some future student will happen upon a copy
of the battered textbook and decide to check whether I could practice what I preached. And will say: Hey!
RL: You have included an excerpt from your upcoming novel, Indian Dancer, in this edition of Saw Palm. What is the novel about?
JB: Indian Dancer is the most elusive novel I’ve undertaken. I think it contains my best writing, and it flows away from me like drops of
mercury. It’s had several shapes, several titles: Time Lapse, Simone, Montage, now Indian Dancer, which is the title of a Hannah Hoch
montage made up of many elements, none of which bears any relation to an Indian dancer. The novel is about a woman born in Belgium
in 1930, orphaned in 1942 as she is rescued to England, who spends her life avoiding that dark past. It began as a series of connected but
contradictory stories; I reinvented it with a narrative arc, changed my mind about both what she is avoiding and how. I have now decided
that the linked-stories shape was the right one, though at this juncture it means I must throw away half the novel. It’s despair, but rich despair. I’m frantic, but not bored, so I’ll keep at it ‘til Simone reveals herself.
This interview appeared in Volume 3.
