In the suburbs of Great Neck, New York, she first began writing poetry and articles which were published in Life magazine, The New Republic, Mademoiselle, McCall's, Saturday Review, Redbook, Good Housekeeping, and numerous literary quarterlies and anthologies.
[2] She also produced documentaries on noted cultural figures such as James Baldwin (whom she knew as a teenager), Timothy Leary and Country Joe McDonald.
Her last completed film was Elegy for the Naked Guy, about the life and death of Andrew Martinez, a well-known figure on the Berkeley campus in the mid-'90s who died in prison in 2007.
She left behind a vast archive in almost every media--visual art (painting and drawing); writing (a dozen published books and thousands of pages of unpublished manuscripts); music (thousands of hours of reel-to-reel, cassette tapes of her original music and hundreds of songs); and a huge library of both edited and unedited film and video, representing her habit of recording about an hour of reality every day for the past 36 years.
Burch was fond of referring to the Collyer Brothers, a pair of New Yorkers who suffered from a fear of throwing anything away and filled their apartment from top to bottom.