Creative Writing Fellowship in 1976, which was followed by two resident fellowships at Yaddo (in Saratoga Springs, New York), one in 1985 and again in 1987. Burroway's fifth novel, Raw Silk took seven years to research and write, but it was responsible for introducing her to a wide popular audience. The book was also important for her personally, since she had incorporated chunks of her own life into it, a practice she had tentatively begun in The Buzzards. Burroway wrote about eighty pages in a two-day period, then revised the material down to nine pages that “worked perfectly well as narrative. And it forced me to see that if I was avoiding my real concerns and trying to write Great Literature, I would likely not be able to write.” After that, Burroway looked over the books she had written and realized that the threads she consistently wove through her narrative and kept returning to—in particular, mentor relationships, the abandonment of children, race, and suicide—were in fact themes. “That's why I began Raw Silk with, ‘This morning I abandoned my only child.’” Another book of poetry, Material Goods, was published in 1980 by the University Presses of Florida. In 1982, the first edition of Burroway’s “how-to” book, Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft, was published. Burroway wrote two more novels, Opening Nights (Antheum, 1985), which draws on her background in theatre, and Cutting Stone, set, like her first novel, in a small Arizona town of another era. Cutting Stone became a Book-of-the-Month Club alternate selection, and in 1993-94 Burroway was awarded the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fellowship. A collection of essays-as-memoir, Embalming Mom, came out in 2002. By 2004, Burroway was working on another novel, Paper, which dealt with the love affair between a white woman and a black mill worker. In 2004, Burroway's eldest son committed suicide. For a while, his suicide was all she could write about. Writing about Tim helped her cope with her grief. Eventually, she returned to the subject matter of Paper. Re-conceived and re-christened Bridge of Sand, the novel explores what happens when a white woman falls in love with a black man in the contemporary American South. Known for her complex female protagonists, Burroway enjoys experimenting with technique; she is adept at assuming the speech and thought patterns of characters of another gender, race, or age. The authors she most admires (and continues to