#375 Inside the Emotion of Fiction RAW SILK by Janet Burroway, published by Little Brown on January 1, 1977
What is the date you began writing this piece of fiction and the date when you finished the piece of fiction?
I must have begun Raw Silk in England around 1969 as I waited for the publication of The Buzzards—in which I had hinted at the difficulty of my marriage—and continued writing it, with great difficulty, through a divorce and my reincarnation as a single mother in Florida in 1974 or ‘75.
Where did you do most of your writing for this fiction work? And please describe in detail. And can you please include a photo?
In England I sat at an enormous desk looking out over dahlia beds, and in Florida I wrote first in a motel-like apartment with a view of a parking lot, later in the converted garage of a small ranch style house.
I have a photo of the kitchen in the English house but not the study. That is where I would have started writing the novel. The elbow-up photo is from an early period in Florida, maybe about the time Raw Silk was in proofs (BELOW.) The Florida photo with the big windows is from the house that Raw Silk built. Sorry the early ones aren’t exactly right, but we didn’t take many photos in those days.
What were your writing habits while writing this work- did you drink something as you wrote, listen to music, write in pen and paper, directly on laptop; specific time of day?
In England I was writing on the old Smith Corona typewriter (with its faulty e) that my parents gave me for high school graduation. In Florida, first on a terrible Royal portable and then, once I got paid for my teaching job, on a big IBM. I was smoking regularly—or rather, there was always a smoking ashtray by my typewriter. How often I raised the cigarette to my mouth depended on whether I was writing well or felt stuck, which was often. I drank a lot of coffee, and a cup was always getting cold beyond the ashtray. I wrote daytimes when I wasn’t teaching, but I’m basically a night person, was most likely to get really going after the kids were in bed.
Please include just one excerpt and include page numbers as reference. This one excerpt can be as short or as long as you prefer.
“…I’m just an ordinary sinner”
“What’s your sin?”
“My sin?”
He shook the napkin over his knees and gestured, palm-upward, the way he’d lifted Catman up the elevator shaft, as if he could lift my mood on the palms of his hands.
“What circle of hell do you belong to, what’s the particular temptation you can’t resist? Avarice? Overweening pride? Your sin.”
“Oh.”
“That’s it.”
“I have committed…”
“Yes?”
“The sin of submission.”
“I believe you.”
‘You may believe me.”
(Page 304 of the first paperback edition; the very end of Chapter 24.)
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Why is this excerpt so emotional for you as a writer to write? And can you describe your own emotional experience of writing this specific excerpt?
Not long ago someone asked me if I could identify a theme that ran through my books. I thought about it, and what I came up with is that each of them has at its center a woman “who decides to live after all.” Later, I realized that I have always been writing about women who, formed in the repression of the fifties, carry their wounds through the sixties and beyond, struggling to become themselves against their own learned tendencies to be nice, take care of others, to submit to men. I had begun Raw Silk feeling trapped in my first marriage; I finished it feeling the trauma of divorce but not yet the freedom of my independence. Yet when I came to write this, I felt as if I had identified something important. It grieved me, but also relieved me, to put it succinctly on the page.
BELOW: Janet Burroway at a book signing for Raw Silk
I have to add that there was another sort of emotion at work in my writing this book. Here’s a passage with that sort of emotion:
“Talk like uncorking, then, smashed bottles, floodgates and dynamited dams; but I also want to say, talk like a lock, the measured gating of a conduit to its level, the equilibrium of water.”
(p. 306, beginning of Chapter 24.)
As Virginia finds it suddenly possible to talk honestly, I suddenly connected two of the major metaphors of the book: water, which usually represents some kind of sex, danger or freedom, and balance, which she stumbles trying to achieve in an unbalanced life (including falling down the stairs when her husband hits her). When the two metaphors came together I had a moment of pure artistic ecstasy.
BELOW: Janet Burroway with her husband
Were there any deletions from this excerpt that you can share with us? And can you please include a photo of your marked up rough drafts of this excerpt.
I had struggled with this book for several years. But now I had fallen in love (briefly, I must say; the effect on the book was the best thing about it)—and I was full of energy and purpose. I was teaching, but I wrote the last four or five chapters in three weeks. They were all in my head. I felt that I was writing three pages ahead, and only typing what was already written. It was the best writing experience I ever had. I don’t think there were, by contrast with the earlier chapters, many deletions here, but I can’t tell for sure because any rough drafts are archived at the Florida State University. Same is true of sending a marked-up page. I can send a page that’s more typical of me, from the novel that will come out in the fall of ’25, Simone in Pieces.
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