Burroughs, Franklin (Gorham, Jr.) 1942-

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BURROUGHS, Franklin (Gorham, Jr.) 1942-

PERSONAL: Born March 7, 1942, in Conway, SC; married Susan Hay; children: three daughters. Education: University of the South, B.A. (magna cum laude), 1964; Harvard University, A.M., 1965, Ph.D., 1970.

ADDRESSES: Home and offıce—133 Bay Road, Bowdoinham, ME 04008. Agent—c/o Author Mail, University of Georgia Press, 330 Research Dr., Athens, GA 30602-4901.

CAREER: Bowdoin College, Bowdoin, ME, professor of English and Harrison King McCann Professor of the English Language, 1968-2002, professor emeritus, 2002—.

AWARDS, HONORS: Pushcart Prize, 1989; fellowship in creative nonfiction, National Endowment for the Arts, 1994; Editor's prize, American Scholar, 2003.

WRITINGS:

Billy Watson's Croker Sack: Essays, Norton (New York, NY), 1991.

Horry and the Waccamaw (nonfiction), Norton (New York, NY), 1992, second edition published as The River Home: A Return to the Carolina Low Country, illustrated by John M. Bryan, University of Georgia Press (Athens, GA), 1998.

Work anthologized in Best American Essays, 1987 and 1989, The Quotable Moose: A Contemporary Maine Reader, 1994, In Short: A Collection of Brief Creative Nonfiction, 1996, American Nature Writing, 1999, The Woods Stretched for Miles: New Nature Writing from the South, 1999, Nature Writing: The Tradition in English, 2002, The Pushcart Book of Essays: The Best Essays from a Quarter-Century of the Pushcart Prize, 2002, and On Wilderness: Voices from Maine, 2003. Author of introduction to Rice Planter and Sportsman: The Recollections of J. Motte Alston, 1821-1909, edited by Arney R. Childs, 1999; frequent contributor to Friends of Merrymeeting Bay newsletter.

SIDELIGHTS: Author of two well-received nonfiction works that explore the relationship between humans and nature, Franklin Burroughs is an emeritus professor at Maine's Bowdoin College, where he taught for thirty-four years before retiring in 2002. Burroughs's essays have also appeared in numerous magazine and in book collections. He is known for his evocation of an unsentimentalized nature, as in his 1991 collection of essays, Billy Watson's Croker Sack, and his description of a six-day canoe trip in Horry and the Waccamaw, revised in a 1998 edition titled The River Home: A Return to the Carolina Low Country.

Burroughs, a transplanted Southerner residing in Maine, deals with topics from moose hunting to snapping turtles in South Carolina in his debut book, Billy Watson's Croker Sack. He also compares his fishing experiences to those of American novelist Ernest Hemingway's short-story protagonist Nick Adams. A reviewer for Publishers Weekly found the collection "a pleasure to read" and one that will make the reader "contemplate the connections between humans and nature."

In Horry and the Waccamaw, Burroughs details his 150-mile trip on South Carolina's Waccamaw River. Following in the wake of Nathaniel Holmes Bishop who made a similar trip in 1878, Burroughs details not only flora and fauna along the way, but also the history and culture of the region. A contributor for Publishers Weekly described the work as "a jewel of a book, a well-baited hook for those who rue a world too fast a-changing." A contributor to BrothersJudd. com, reviewing the revised edition, The River Home, concluded that "this is a wonderful bucolic look at the history and nature of the Waccamaw, which will leave you wishing that you too had such a place coursing through your blood."

Burroughs told CA: "I first became interested in writing from a desire to hold onto things—personal experiences, odd feelings of connection or analogy between disconnected realms—a Hopkins poem and a plank of longleaf pine, something somebody said to me a long time ago and something that happened today. It is not that different from the impulse of a historian, which is always, regardless of its political coloration, conservative: a desire to rescue or preserve from oblivion, and to insist that meaning can be retroactively salvaged from existence. In the process of doing this, one realizes the extent to which private life is involved with public life, private happiness or unhappiness with money and politics, natural history with human history.

"In terms of who or what influences my work, the natural world would be foremost. Stories and anecdotes I heard from my father and his friends in my boyhood—both their content and their way of telling—were a big influence. They were, incidentally, a revelation of how pervasive and instinctive the desire to relive the experience by retelling it is. Audubon's illustrations in The Birds of America must have either created or confirmed in me a sense of the magic of animals, very early in my life. A whole lot of reading, and in all sorts of ways. Yeats seems to be a poet who is always at hand, providing the arresting, memorable, succinct phrase or image one has been groping toward. Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Thoreau, T. S. Eliot and Sir Thomas Brown for their way of taking you back to the precise, original sense of a word, which is generally metaphorical; and for what Eliot called a musical structure, as opposed to a strictly narrative or logical one. Many, many more. My education was pre-postmodern, and left me thoroughly saturated with the canonical tradition, particularly of British literature. That's almost like a lexicon, its resource as indispensable and as hard to trace as the resources of a dictionary. And, speaking of dictionaries, the Oxford English Dictionary often provides connections or citations or simple lexical history that avail; it has to be close at hand.

"I would describe my writing process as slow, tentative, and extremely wasteful of time and paper. I never write as though I were writing a first draft. I never have more than an instinct idea of where an essay will wind up. I navigate mostly by looking behind me, at what I have written, like a man trailing a rope behind him while rowing a boat in a fog. He hopes that if he keeps the rope in a straight line behind him, it will keep him from just going randomly in circles, and will eventually bring him to a landmark so that he can see where he is and where he needs to go.

"I alternate by being surprised at how hard and uncertain the process remains, and surprised by the fact that all that blindfolded stumbling around can eventually bear fruit. The whole thing relies on a kind of faith, and faith presupposes doubt. Congenitally, I am much more a doubter than a believer.

"As a writer, I think in terms of the essay rather than the book. The essays of mine I like best are the ones that seem to me to have the richest weave, and to have moments that approximate the intensity of a particular experience or sensation, which is for me always imbedded in an elaborate context of thought, anecdote, and memory. 'Dawn's Early Light,' 'Passion or Conquest,' and 'Compression Wood' satisfy me.

"I came to writing late. As an English professor primarily interested in teaching, but under some compulsion to write, I spent two decades trying to write the requisite kind of academic criticism/scholarship. I produced enough, barely, to satisfy the dean, but it was hard going and gave me no satisfaction. I was in my mid-forties before I wrote and published my first piece of non-academic work, about an old hunting dog that we'd finally had to put down. I did have a bit of a backlog of letters and very intermittent journals to draw from in that essay and in the ones that followed.

"In my own mind, I remained a teacher who wrote rather than a writer who taught. This may have particularly affected my ambitions, making them quite modest, at least with regard to how much or how often I published. I seem unable to get beyond the idea that writing is a byproduct of the life I lead, and not something that should shape it. I could wish that this were otherwise.

"To the extent that I think about my writing in terms of its product, I think and fret about the quality of the individual published piece. I have written, and will write, so little, that I want to make that little good. I want it to be able to stand the test that has always seemed to me to separate literature from writing: does the work stand re-reading? Is the second reading at least as satisfying as the first?"