DEPARTMENT OF PUBLIC RELATIONS			Joyce Guyette, Assistant Director
ERSKINE COLLEGE					Telephone: 864-379-8858
DUE WEST, SC					March 3, 1997

SUBJECT: WOODROW WILSON FELLOW JANET BURROWAY SPENDS WEEK AT ERSKINE

for immediate release

DUE WEST, SC - Janet Burroway, Florida State University professor, novelist, playwright, and poet, spent last week meeting with Erskine College students. This year's Woodrow Wilson Fellow learned her way around campus quite well, thank you, and enjoyed both the time spent with faculty and students and the welcome solitude of her temporary home in a guest room on the Erskine campus.

The feel of the classes she visited is "a combination of comfort and stimulation," she says. Of the small-college atmosphere at Erskine, Burroway remarks, "What it does for classes is that it lowers the tension." Just for the record, she finds the fre shman shyer than the upperclassmen.

Burroway enjoyed her time in Abbeville County. She and her husband are in the midst of making building plans and she is on the lookout for ideas here. Toward the middle of the week, she could be seen on the Erskine campus in front of a statue of one o f Erskine's past presidentsÑsketching windows. "The old houses in Abbeville knock me out," she says. "There is one particular house that is being restoredÑone with turretsÑthat fascinates me."

In addition to her time with classes at Erskine, Burroway was guest speaker at a meeting of the American Association of University Women (AAUW) on Thursday night. She read from two examples of her recent writing, one a non-fiction essay that jumps aro und in time like a fictional account, the other a short story featuring a protagonist who may well reappear in Burroway's fiction. "I love this character!" she grins. Each reading drew absolute attention from the audience.

Burroway started out, she says, "as a very uptight, deliberate, thinking writer." Over the last 15 years she has striven "to break that rigid way of writing." One method currently in use to 'loosen up' writing is so-called "free writing," which makes use of free association and clusters of writing grouped around a subject. The idea is to write now, think later, or, as Burroway describes it, "Sit down and start writing, don't sit down and start worrying."

"Of course, you can go too far the other way," she admits. For example, in the course of her teaching career, Burroway has encountered students who dash off a first draft and see it as a finished piece. "Ultimately, you've got to be very critical of your own writing."

Her experience as a writer and teacher has given Burroway a basic confidence in evaluating her students' work, and she has seen a number of her students at Florida State go on to successful writing careers, but she declares "There is no way really to predict such success."

Burroway's success as a novelist has been substantialÑThe Buzzards (1970) was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and Raw Silk (1977) was runner up for the National Book AwardÑbut she finds it difficult to work in enough writing time while keeping up wi th her teaching load and paperwork at Florida State.

Recently Burroway and her husband, Florida State professor Peter Ruppert, found themselves together at a small college in Florida. "Both of us began fantasizing about what it would be like to teach at a small liberal arts school," she laughs. Her Ersk ine experience may make that idea even more attractive.

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