Janet Burroway
Encyclopedia
Janet Gay Burroway 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, 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 7th edition, the book is used in writing programs throughout the country at over four hundred colleges and universities.
Like many precocious youngsters, Burroway understood that she had to leave Arizona to satisfy her intellectual hunger, and the only way to do that was by attending college. But since her family couldn’t afford to send her, that meant winning awards and scholarships, and getting published.
Her first scholarships were courtesy of local men’s clubs—the Elks and the Knights of Pythias—which gave her the financial wherewithal 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.” The young writer from the American outback was making a name for herself.
Burroway earned her A. B. cum laude from Barnard in 1958 on another scholarship. While there, she made Phi Beta Kappa, won the Barnard Memorial Prize for Drama, the Mount Holyoke Intercollegiate Poetry Prize, and several scholarships. Unsurprisingly, she chose the one that took her farthest from Arizona. In 1960 she moved to England where she attended Cambridge University on a Marshall Scholarship
.
While in England Burroway finished her first novel, Descend Again (Faber and Faber, London, 1960), which she had begun while attending Barnard. 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.” 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.”
While at Yale, 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. After receiving her M. A. from Cambridge, Burroway taught at the University of Sussex from 1965-1970. 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. 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.” 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. The Giant Jam Sandwich, published in 1972 by Jonathan Cape in England and in the US by Houghton Mifflin, is still available in hard and paperback and on cassette from both publishers. 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.
But Burroway, struggling to maintain her identity as a writer while being a traditional good wife and diligent mother, paid a heavy price for her productivity. In 1971, when Tim was seven and Alex was five, she admitted that she found motherhood “daunting” and that her troubled marriage had finally, fatally, collapsed. 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 left Eysselinck in 1971 and 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, distraught, and almost paralyzed by inertia, Burroway, like Sylvia Plath (whom she had met on a few occasions), contemplated suicide. But instead, like several of her own female protagonists, unlike Plath, she chose to live.
The following year, 1972, Burroway rallied sufficiently to interview for the position of Associate Professor of English Literature and Writing at Florida State University in Tallahassee, located in Florida’s panhandle by the Gulf of Mexico. Except for brief stints at other institutions--such as serving as Visiting Lecturer at the University of Iowa’s Writer’s Workshop--Burroway taught at Florida State University until her retirement in 2002. She married William Dean Humphries, an artist, in 1978, but the marriage did not last. The two divorced in 1981. Burroway continued to win awards, the most important being a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship in 1976, followed by two resident fellowships at Yaddo (in Saratoga Springs, New York), one in 1985 and again in 1987. She continued to write novels, plays, poetry, and essays.
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. In speaking of Eleanor, one of the female characters in that novel, Burroway says, “It was Eleanor’s experiences of an ordinary awful morning, or rather it was my experience of writing about her ordinary awful morning, that made me face that women’s concerns were my concerns, and that I had better pay attention to their significance. . . . [o]ne morning I got up in despair and said, ‘Eleanor has three children and I have two children and I’m going to give Eleanor everything to do that I have done this morning before I sat down at the table.’” 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.” 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.’” 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.
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. (In her second novel, The Dancer from the Dance, the young female protagonist is mixed-race.) “Race has been a central theme for me,” says Burroway, and her protagonist in Paper “believes that she understands what prejudice is, but thinks that prejudice is the province of whites against blacks, and so has a very difficult time understanding how outraged [her lover’s] family is that he is demeaning himself by going out with her.” Burroway notes she had been the editor of her high school newspaper in Arizona when desegregation took place, and that she won the Mademoiselle Guest Editorship for “an editorial called ‘Color Scheme,’ a piece of very wide-eyed righteousness about racism.”
Then, a phone call and a simple four-word message, “Tim has shot himself,” shattered Burroway’s world into fragments. Tim Eysselinck, her first-born son, had flown from Iraq, where he was leader of a team training Iraqis in mine removal, to his home in Namibia for a vacation with his wife and children, where he killed himself. Dark-haired, bearded, and dashing, Tim had his mother’s Wedgewood-blue eyes and fierce intelligence. He was polite, a Republican, and a card-carrying member of the National Rifle Association. Even though he loved his mother deeply, he had, since childhood, cherished values antithetical to hers. Several years before his suicide, Burroway had written that sometimes, when conversing, the two would “stumble into uneasy territory. We have learned to acknowledge that, mother and child, we not only don’t share a world view, we cannot respect each other’s. Our task is to love in the absence of that respect. It’s a tall order.” Tim once admitted to her that “‘It’s a good thing it’s you who’s the liberal, Mom. If I were the parent, I wouldn’t want to let you be you the way you’ve let me be me.’”
Burroway knew her son was depressed by “‘[t]he corruption, the incompetence, the greed, the lies’” of George Bush’s war, but she could not gauge the depth of his feelings. On the evening of April 23, 2004, Tim sat down at the dining room table of his family’s home in the Windhoek hills of Namibia and shot himself in the head.
In the larger scheme of things, a child who dies before his parents is unnatural. But a child who deliberately destroys himself is a torment to all who survive him. Burroway spent the next harrowing days and months trying to answer the unanswerable. For a while it 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” Then she couldn’t write about anything at all.
Eventually Burroway stepped back from the brink herself (again), chose life (again), and returned to her life’s work, writing. More specifically, she returned to the subject matter of her abandoned novel Paper. In an interview with Anna Crowe, Burroway says that twenty years earlier she had toured a paper mill. “I decided to write a novel about a poet, a man who leaves his family for a sabbatical and inadvertently rents a cottage in a paper mill town. He sits in front of the blank page while tons of the stuff pours off the rollers behind him--and can’t write, of course. Then his wife comes South to patch up their marriage and instead falls in love with a black mill hand.” But her editor hadn’t liked the novel. Burroway didn’t either--writing it had been drudgery. “The only thing I loved [about it] was the little store that had appeared quite incidentally,” Burroway admits. “I scrapped the novel, wrote three plays and a book of essays, and thought about the little store. I gave up the writer as hero. It’s always a good idea to give up the writer as hero.”
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!’”
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.
Known in particular for her complex female protagonists, Burroway enjoys experimenting with technique; she is particularly adept at assuming the speech and thought patterns of characters of another gender, race, or age. But her most important concern is the story itself. 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. “The novelists of the Great Tradition, in [F. R.] Leavis’s term, were absolutely my touchstone.” With characteristic honesty, 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.”
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 which readers were unfortunately very likely to miss.)” A reviewer for The Guardian, London, praising Raw Silk (the novel that followed The Buzzards), noted that “She [Burroway] writes like a robust angel.” 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.” 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.” 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.”
As if to demonstrate his point, Burroway’s nonfiction is also subtle, surprising, and common-sensical. 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, with admirable succinctness, called Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft “the best such book on the market.” Imaginative Writing: The Elements of Craft (Longman and Penguin Academics 2002) 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.”
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.”
But to the Season, poems, Keele University Press, 1961.
The Dancer from the Dance, novel, Faber and Faber, 1965; Little, Brown and Co., Boston, 1967.
Eyes, novel, Faber and Faber, 1966; Little, Brown, 1966.
"Poenulus, or The Little Carthaginian," adaptation from the Latin, in Five Roman Comedies, ed. Palmer Bovie, E. P. Dutton & Co., New York, 1970; reprinted in The Complete Roman Drama series, Johns Hopkins University Press, ed. David Slavitt and Palmer Bovie, 1995.
The Buzzards, novel, Little, Brown, 1969 (nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, 1970); Faber and Faber, 1970.
The Truck on the Track, children's book, Jonathan Cape, London, 1970; Bobbs-Merrill, Indiana, 1971; Jr. Literary Guild Selection, 1971; Pan paperback edition, London, 1972; Televised by the BBC, London, 1975.
The Giant Jam Sandwich, children's book, Jonathan Cape, London, 1972; Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1973; German translation, Das Riesen-Marmeladenbrot, K. Thienmanns, Stuttgart, 1974; Pan paperback edition, 1975; National Scholastic Publications, "Lucky Club" choice; Televised by the BBC, London, 1977; Weekly Reader Children's Book Club, Fall 1978; Paperback edition Sandpiper, Boston, 1987; Read on Dutch and Belgian television in Netherlandish translation 1988; Paperback edition, Piccolo, London, 1988; Cassette edition, Houghton Mifflin, 1990.
Raw Silk, novel, Little, Brown, March 1977 (runner up for the National Book Award, 1977); Victor Gollancz, Ltd., London, July 1977; condensed in Redbook Magazine, Jan. 1976; condensed in Cosmopolitan (London), July 1977; serialized in Cleo (Australia), 1977-78; paperback edition, Pocket Books, New York, March 1979. Second paperback edition Bantam Books, N.Y., June 1986.
Material Goods, poems, University Presses of Florida, Sept. 1980.
Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft; Little, Brown & Co, College Division, Boston, 1982; Second Edition Oct. 1986; first selection, Writer's Digest Book Club, Jan. 1987; Third edition, HarperCollins, New York, Sept. 1991; Fourth Edition, HarperCollins, 1995; Fifth Edition, Addison Wesley Longman, 1999, Seventh Edition, Longman, 2006.
Opening Nights, novel, Atheneum, New York, June 1985, and Gollancz, July 1985; Paperback Edition, Bantam Books, New York, June 1986; Book-of-the-Month-Club alternate selection from Jan. 1986.; Swedish translation, Plats pa Scen, Bonniers, Stockholm, 1987; Radio adaptation in production from Arts Repertory Theatre and the FSU School of Motion Picture, Television and Recording Arts, transmitted on WFSU summer 1996.
Cutting Stone, novel; Houghton Mifflin, Boston, April 1992, and Victor Gollancz, London, July 1992; paperback edition Pinnacle Books (division of Zebra, Inc.) Oct. 1993; paperback edition, Indigo Books, Victor Gollancz June 1996.
Embalming Mom, essays, Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2002; paperback edition, 2003.
Imaginative Writing: the Elements of Craft, New York: Longman and Penguin Academics, 2002; second edition 2006.
From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction, ed. (the lectures of Robert Olen Butler). Grove Press, New York, 2005.
Bridge of Sand, New York and Boston, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2009; and Sidney, Australia, Murdoch Books 2009.
"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.
"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.
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.
Burroway was born in Tucson, Arizona
Tucson, Arizona
Tucson is a city in and the county seat of Pima County, Arizona, United States. The city is located 118 miles southeast of Phoenix and 60 miles north of the U.S.-Mexico border. The 2010 United States Census puts the city's population at 520,116 with a metropolitan area population at 1,020,200...
, and educated at the University of Arizona
University of Arizona
The University of Arizona is a land-grant and space-grant public institution of higher education and research located in Tucson, Arizona, United States. The University of Arizona was the first university in the state of Arizona, founded in 1885...
, Barnard College
Barnard College
Barnard College is a private women's liberal arts college and a member of the Seven Sisters. Founded in 1889, Barnard has been affiliated with Columbia University since 1900. The campus stretches along Broadway between 116th and 120th Streets in the Morningside Heights neighborhood in the borough...
in New York, Cambridge University in England , and the Yale School of Drama
Yale School of Drama
The Yale School of Drama is a graduate professional school of Yale University providing training in every discipline of the theatre: acting, design , directing, dramaturgy and dramatic criticism, playwriting, stage management, sound design, technical design and production, and theater...
. Burroway’s published oeuvre includes eight novels, 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
Pulitzer Prize
The Pulitzer Prize is a U.S. award for achievements in newspaper and online journalism, literature and musical composition. It was established by American publisher Joseph Pulitzer and is administered by Columbia University in New York City...
, and Raw Silk, her most acclaimed novel thus far, was runner up for the 1977 National Book Award
National Book Award
The National Book Awards are a set of American literary awards. Started in 1950, the Awards are presented annually to American authors for literature published in the current year. In 1989 the National Book Foundation, a nonprofit organization which now oversees and manages the National Book...
. 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 7th edition, the book is used in writing programs throughout the country at over four hundred colleges and universities.
Biography
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.) Burroway’s intelligence and gift for words were so obvious even in elementary school that one teacher began tutoring her in poetry after class. 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.”Like many precocious youngsters, Burroway understood that she had to leave Arizona to satisfy her intellectual hunger, and the only way to do that was by attending college. But since her family couldn’t afford to send her, that meant winning awards and scholarships, and getting published.
Her first scholarships were courtesy of local men’s clubs—the Elks and the Knights of Pythias—which gave her the financial wherewithal 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.” The young writer from the American outback was making a name for herself.
Burroway earned her A. B. cum laude from Barnard in 1958 on another scholarship. While there, she made Phi Beta Kappa, won the Barnard Memorial Prize for Drama, the Mount Holyoke Intercollegiate Poetry Prize, and several scholarships. Unsurprisingly, she chose the one that took her farthest from Arizona. In 1960 she moved to England where she attended Cambridge University on a Marshall Scholarship
Marshall Scholarship
The Marshall Scholarship, a postgraduate scholarships available to Americans, was created by the Parliament of the United Kingdom when the Marshall Aid Commemoration Act was passed in 1953. The scholarships serve as a living gift to the United States of America in recognition of the post-World War...
.
While in England Burroway finished her first novel, Descend Again (Faber and Faber, London, 1960), which she had begun while attending Barnard. 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.” 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.”
While at Yale, 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. After receiving her M. A. from Cambridge, Burroway taught at the University of Sussex from 1965-1970. 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. 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.” 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. The Giant Jam Sandwich, published in 1972 by Jonathan Cape in England and in the US by Houghton Mifflin, is still available in hard and paperback and on cassette from both publishers. 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.
But Burroway, struggling to maintain her identity as a writer while being a traditional good wife and diligent mother, paid a heavy price for her productivity. In 1971, when Tim was seven and Alex was five, she admitted that she found motherhood “daunting” and that her troubled marriage had finally, fatally, collapsed. 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 left Eysselinck in 1971 and 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, distraught, and almost paralyzed by inertia, Burroway, like Sylvia Plath (whom she had met on a few occasions), contemplated suicide. But instead, like several of her own female protagonists, unlike Plath, she chose to live.
The following year, 1972, Burroway rallied sufficiently to interview for the position of Associate Professor of English Literature and Writing at Florida State University in Tallahassee, located in Florida’s panhandle by the Gulf of Mexico. Except for brief stints at other institutions--such as serving as Visiting Lecturer at the University of Iowa’s Writer’s Workshop--Burroway taught at Florida State University until her retirement in 2002. She married William Dean Humphries, an artist, in 1978, but the marriage did not last. The two divorced in 1981. Burroway continued to win awards, the most important being a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship in 1976, followed by two resident fellowships at Yaddo (in Saratoga Springs, New York), one in 1985 and again in 1987. She continued to write novels, plays, poetry, and essays.
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. In speaking of Eleanor, one of the female characters in that novel, Burroway says, “It was Eleanor’s experiences of an ordinary awful morning, or rather it was my experience of writing about her ordinary awful morning, that made me face that women’s concerns were my concerns, and that I had better pay attention to their significance. . . . [o]ne morning I got up in despair and said, ‘Eleanor has three children and I have two children and I’m going to give Eleanor everything to do that I have done this morning before I sat down at the table.’” 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.” 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.’” 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.
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. (In her second novel, The Dancer from the Dance, the young female protagonist is mixed-race.) “Race has been a central theme for me,” says Burroway, and her protagonist in Paper “believes that she understands what prejudice is, but thinks that prejudice is the province of whites against blacks, and so has a very difficult time understanding how outraged [her lover’s] family is that he is demeaning himself by going out with her.” Burroway notes she had been the editor of her high school newspaper in Arizona when desegregation took place, and that she won the Mademoiselle Guest Editorship for “an editorial called ‘Color Scheme,’ a piece of very wide-eyed righteousness about racism.”
Then, a phone call and a simple four-word message, “Tim has shot himself,” shattered Burroway’s world into fragments. Tim Eysselinck, her first-born son, had flown from Iraq, where he was leader of a team training Iraqis in mine removal, to his home in Namibia for a vacation with his wife and children, where he killed himself. Dark-haired, bearded, and dashing, Tim had his mother’s Wedgewood-blue eyes and fierce intelligence. He was polite, a Republican, and a card-carrying member of the National Rifle Association. Even though he loved his mother deeply, he had, since childhood, cherished values antithetical to hers. Several years before his suicide, Burroway had written that sometimes, when conversing, the two would “stumble into uneasy territory. We have learned to acknowledge that, mother and child, we not only don’t share a world view, we cannot respect each other’s. Our task is to love in the absence of that respect. It’s a tall order.” Tim once admitted to her that “‘It’s a good thing it’s you who’s the liberal, Mom. If I were the parent, I wouldn’t want to let you be you the way you’ve let me be me.’”
Burroway knew her son was depressed by “‘[t]he corruption, the incompetence, the greed, the lies’” of George Bush’s war, but she could not gauge the depth of his feelings. On the evening of April 23, 2004, Tim sat down at the dining room table of his family’s home in the Windhoek hills of Namibia and shot himself in the head.
In the larger scheme of things, a child who dies before his parents is unnatural. But a child who deliberately destroys himself is a torment to all who survive him. Burroway spent the next harrowing days and months trying to answer the unanswerable. For a while it 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” Then she couldn’t write about anything at all.
Eventually Burroway stepped back from the brink herself (again), chose life (again), and returned to her life’s work, writing. More specifically, she returned to the subject matter of her abandoned novel Paper. In an interview with Anna Crowe, Burroway says that twenty years earlier she had toured a paper mill. “I decided to write a novel about a poet, a man who leaves his family for a sabbatical and inadvertently rents a cottage in a paper mill town. He sits in front of the blank page while tons of the stuff pours off the rollers behind him--and can’t write, of course. Then his wife comes South to patch up their marriage and instead falls in love with a black mill hand.” But her editor hadn’t liked the novel. Burroway didn’t either--writing it had been drudgery. “The only thing I loved [about it] was the little store that had appeared quite incidentally,” Burroway admits. “I scrapped the novel, wrote three plays and a book of essays, and thought about the little store. I gave up the writer as hero. It’s always a good idea to give up the writer as hero.”
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!’”
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.
Critical Acclaim, Public Appreciation
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.” Author Joan Fry referred to her as “a writer’s writer, a prodigiously talented all-American girl who . . . found her literary voice in England.” 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.”Known in particular for her complex female protagonists, Burroway enjoys experimenting with technique; she is particularly adept at assuming the speech and thought patterns of characters of another gender, race, or age. But her most important concern is the story itself. 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. “The novelists of the Great Tradition, in [F. R.] Leavis’s term, were absolutely my touchstone.” With characteristic honesty, 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.”
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 which readers were unfortunately very likely to miss.)” A reviewer for The Guardian, London, praising Raw Silk (the novel that followed The Buzzards), noted that “She [Burroway] writes like a robust angel.” 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.” 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.” 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.”
As if to demonstrate his point, Burroway’s nonfiction is also subtle, surprising, and common-sensical. 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, with admirable succinctness, called Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft “the best such book on the market.” Imaginative Writing: The Elements of Craft (Longman and Penguin Academics 2002) 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.”
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.”
Books
Descend Again, novel, Faber and Faber, London, 1960.But to the Season, poems, Keele University Press, 1961.
The Dancer from the Dance, novel, Faber and Faber, 1965; Little, Brown and Co., Boston, 1967.
Eyes, novel, Faber and Faber, 1966; Little, Brown, 1966.
"Poenulus, or The Little Carthaginian," adaptation from the Latin, in Five Roman Comedies, ed. Palmer Bovie, E. P. Dutton & Co., New York, 1970; reprinted in The Complete Roman Drama series, Johns Hopkins University Press, ed. David Slavitt and Palmer Bovie, 1995.
The Buzzards, novel, Little, Brown, 1969 (nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, 1970); Faber and Faber, 1970.
The Truck on the Track, children's book, Jonathan Cape, London, 1970; Bobbs-Merrill, Indiana, 1971; Jr. Literary Guild Selection, 1971; Pan paperback edition, London, 1972; Televised by the BBC, London, 1975.
The Giant Jam Sandwich, children's book, Jonathan Cape, London, 1972; Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1973; German translation, Das Riesen-Marmeladenbrot, K. Thienmanns, Stuttgart, 1974; Pan paperback edition, 1975; National Scholastic Publications, "Lucky Club" choice; Televised by the BBC, London, 1977; Weekly Reader Children's Book Club, Fall 1978; Paperback edition Sandpiper, Boston, 1987; Read on Dutch and Belgian television in Netherlandish translation 1988; Paperback edition, Piccolo, London, 1988; Cassette edition, Houghton Mifflin, 1990.
Raw Silk, novel, Little, Brown, March 1977 (runner up for the National Book Award, 1977); Victor Gollancz, Ltd., London, July 1977; condensed in Redbook Magazine, Jan. 1976; condensed in Cosmopolitan (London), July 1977; serialized in Cleo (Australia), 1977-78; paperback edition, Pocket Books, New York, March 1979. Second paperback edition Bantam Books, N.Y., June 1986.
Material Goods, poems, University Presses of Florida, Sept. 1980.
Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft; Little, Brown & Co, College Division, Boston, 1982; Second Edition Oct. 1986; first selection, Writer's Digest Book Club, Jan. 1987; Third edition, HarperCollins, New York, Sept. 1991; Fourth Edition, HarperCollins, 1995; Fifth Edition, Addison Wesley Longman, 1999, Seventh Edition, Longman, 2006.
Opening Nights, novel, Atheneum, New York, June 1985, and Gollancz, July 1985; Paperback Edition, Bantam Books, New York, June 1986; Book-of-the-Month-Club alternate selection from Jan. 1986.; Swedish translation, Plats pa Scen, Bonniers, Stockholm, 1987; Radio adaptation in production from Arts Repertory Theatre and the FSU School of Motion Picture, Television and Recording Arts, transmitted on WFSU summer 1996.
Cutting Stone, novel; Houghton Mifflin, Boston, April 1992, and Victor Gollancz, London, July 1992; paperback edition Pinnacle Books (division of Zebra, Inc.) Oct. 1993; paperback edition, Indigo Books, Victor Gollancz June 1996.
Embalming Mom, essays, Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2002; paperback edition, 2003.
Imaginative Writing: the Elements of Craft, New York: Longman and Penguin Academics, 2002; second edition 2006.
From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction, ed. (the lectures of Robert Olen Butler). Grove Press, New York, 2005.
Bridge of Sand, New York and Boston, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2009; and Sidney, Australia, Murdoch Books 2009.
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
Borestone Mountain Poetry Awards
The Borestone Mountain Poetry Awards was an annual series of poetry anthologies first published in 1949. The poems were selected from those published in a given year in English-language magazines and books; in each volume, individual poems were designated as first, second, or third place in a...
; 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 PartyBarnard 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.