Reading Response - Burroway

For our initial writing 3-2-1 response, I was fortunate enough to glean some information about memoirs by the authors of Confessions of a Counterfeit Farm Girl and Dreaming in Hindi, both of who shared their experiences during the writing and research of their memoir-style writing. The Burroway text enumerated many of the issues that were brought up by some aspiring writers in the crowd. Specifically, I believe one of the questions was regarding 'fact and truth', which was 'how do your family react to what you write?'. Burroway matches the response, and offers some good guidance on this. She states that when it comes to things like memory, the writer is responsible for "honest attempt and honest presentation", because the ability to write the truth is limited when using words. This is kind of the same concept which I think threads through a lot of the book - words are a limiting means of expression.

Another part of the Burroway text which I found interesting (in addition to the fact that basically 'ditto' for the fiction writing guidance) was the concept of authorial intrusion. Not only did this part of the text evoke mental images of the Dukes of Hazzard for me, personally, but it exposed something I hadn't thought about in regards to the topic of 'essay', and that is the authors ability to provide summary interspersed without necessarily being penalized by the reader. Of course, like all writing tools, it must be implemented judiciously, but that is one more tool which I now have available (and plan to use) in the writing arsenal.