I attended Janet Burroway’s reading last Tuesday night and found it to be very interesting. When I initially went, I wasn’t sure what I would get out of it, if anything, or if it would keep my interest. I actually got quite a bit out of it and was interested throughout.
It started out with about a five minute–or so–introduction from one of the professors from the creative writing program. She also mentioned you, Steve, at one point. I forget exactly when it was, but she was talking about how at the question and answer session earlier in the day, somebody had said something about getting in the habit of writing at least once a day. She was trying to figure out who said it and four or five people in the 30 or so person crowd was like “it was probably Steve!” She laughed and said, “Oh yes, it was Steve.” Just thought I’d let you know she remembered you.
After the introduction, Janet came up and preluded her readings a little bit with a background of how her book came to be. I think the book is called “Bridge of Sand.” Anyways, she talked about how her readings were going to be threefold and in reverse order and she discussed how for four years, she would wake up and head downstairs to write this book everyday for four years. And for four years, she hated every minute of it. She talked about how she dreaded it and how just the thought of writing it depressed her. She never explained why and I was really tempted to ask, but I didn’t want to interrupt her to ask. She said that she just wanted to keep going with it because she was really hellbent on finishing her first novel. She said that she was worried that if she didn’t finish this novel, she would never finish another novel in her life. I don’t know if this is her first novel or not, since I don’t know much about her, but I could kind of understand that. It makes sense, but I also figure that if she hated it, she shouldn’t have kept going with it. It obviously turned out good. I don’t know how successful it was, but it was made into the novel, so like I said, it worked out in the end.
She then read three different passages. The first was about how the main character was playing with the little girl of the maid who worked at the narrator’s house and just the racial dynamics of living in a time where the narrator’s grandmother was a bigot and the mother was a racist and she was open.
The second passage was from earlier in the book when the narrator, who is older in this excerpt, stops at a gas station/motel to get some gas and stay for a little while and it was just talking about how her husband had died not too long before and she was just trying to get away for a little while. She had really good description in this part, talking about how the gas station attendant was endearing, but a little creepy.
The third passage was at the very beginning of the book, I think. It was talking about how the narrator was sitting in the back of her limo or car service or something at her husband’s funeral and discussing a little backstory about how her marriage was and how she hated it and was planning on leaving before she found out that he had some sort of cancer. Colon cancer, I think.
This all related to my own writing because it just got me thinking about how I would handle the same situation she did when writing this book. If I hated and dreaded writing something like that everyday for four years, I couldn’t see myself continuing to write the book. I also got to thinking about the discipline it must take her for her to continue to write something she hates, as well. That’s the kind of discipline that helps people write novels, the kind of discipline I’m not sure I have.
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