COM professor releases novel

College of Communication professor Kathryn Burak said that while she was attending graduate school at University of Massachusetts Amherst, she was inspired to write a story set in the town. After three years of research, writing and editing, Burak released her book Tuesday at the Milton Public Library.

Burak said her book, “Emily’s Dress and Other Missing Things” is the story of a young girl, Claire, who steals Emily Dickinson’s dress from the Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst and investigates the mystery of her best friend’s disappearance.

“It’s got a little mystery, a little romance, but there’s a bigger story about how to find hope in the world,” Burak said.

Burak joined the BU faculty in 1990 as an adjunct and became a full-time professor in 1999. She is a senior lecturuer in the COM Writing Program.

Burak said she has been published in numerous journals and magazines, and is co-author of the textbook “Writing in the Works.”

She said she is happy to be able to write in so many different genres.

“I’ve been writing textbooks for 11 years, and I do enjoy creating new ways to think about teaching, but it felt great to be working with my imagination in a different way,” Burak said.

Burak said she began to think about the novel while living in Amherst, but found her inspiration when she attended a poetry reading at BU in 2009.

“Robert Pinsky was reading from his translation of Dante’s ‘Inferno,’ and when he came to this line,  ‘And then the hunger had more power than even sorrow had over me,’ I thought, that’s [my story],” Burak said. “This girl who is grieving feels her hunger for life — for living and feeling love — and it’s stronger than her sadness.  That’s what I’ll write about.”

COM Dean Tom Fiedler said the book’s release is important to the field of communication.

“In the same way that a faculty member at the medical school, for instance, might do some kind of research that is applicable to a patient’s needs … what a COM faculty member accomplishes by doing what Professor Burak has done is demonstrating the craft that she is also teaching,” Fiedler said.

He said faculty should be recognized for their individual accomplishments.

“I think it’s something that’s important for our faculty to do and to be recognized when they do it,” Fiedler said.

Burak said she agrees that professors in the field should continue to write and practice their skills.

“I think it’s good for writing teachers to have an active writing life — to be rewriting, to be facing rejection, working with editors, understanding the marketplace,” she said.

Her writing is helpful in her academic environment as well as the professional world, Burak said.

“I think of my students as fellow writers,” she said. “I like sharing a ‘writing life’ with them,” she said.

Burak said she is inspired by and learns from her students.

A line from the acknowledgements page of her book reads, “I can’t forget the young people in my life who inspire me every single day — my writing students at Boston University.”

Burak said she was hesitant to ask for help from the Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst, but instead they were appreciative of her endeavor.

“When I visited in June, Jane Wald, the director, let me have some time all by myself in Emily Dickinson’s room,” she said. “It was a very powerful moment for me, being really there after spending so very much time there in my imagination. It was as if my imaginary life and my real life intersected at that point in the graph. I cried.”