Biography

Betsy Warland (1946 -...)

Poet, nonfiction writer, essayist, teacher and editor Betsy Warland was born in Fort Dodge, Iowa in 1946. She obtained her B. A. in Art and Education at Luther College, Decorah, Iowa in 1970. Warland emigrated to Canada in 1973, becoming a citizen in 1980. Over the past twenty-five years she has been one of Canada's leading feminist writers as well as influential innovative writers.

In her most recent book, Only This Blue: A Long Poem with an Essay (The Mercury Press, 2005), she traces moments of awe and dread on her journey through a life-threatening experience. Light, colour, sound, all are evoked in poetic lines pared to the bone, reflecting daily perceptions turned on their head. In her essay, “Nose to Nose,” she deepens her investigation of the relationship between scored space and scored line. A textual meditation, her essay invites readers to consider the shape and movement of poetry and prose, their origins and their possible place in the written world.

Perhaps most known for her language-focused writing and ways of working with silence, her scoring of blank space on the page evokes as much meaning as her inscribing of written language. The unsayable, the secreted, the unknowable: these are her obsessions — how one encounters them in lover relationships, family, a homophobic society, a mono-truth society, or the inner work of spiritual practice.

A writer dedicated to emerging writers, Betsy Warland mentors and teaches various textual forms — Poetry, Lyric Prose, Nonfiction — in The Writer's Studio at Simon Fraser University's Writing and Publishing Program in Vancouver. This is a year-long, part-time (non-credit) intensive Certificate in Creative Writing.

RECENT PROJECTS

HERizons - Spring 2007, Vol. 20, No. 4, Winnipeg. Interview of Warland by Di Brandt, pp. 28 - 31. www.herizons.ca

Bloodroot - Tracing the Untelling of Motherloss (Sumach Press/Second Story Press, 2000), is a compelling prose narrative about negotiating her mother's growing incapacities and impending death and each of their disparate relationships to narrative and truth. Warland has published ten books of poetry and prose (see Books).

What Holds Us Here is a collection of nine suites of poems on various forms of longing ranging from Van Gogh's paintings, to love found and lost, to a muse on the nature of narrative. It was published by Buschek Books in 1999.

For the most recent example of one of Warland’s critical essays on visual art, contact The Mendel Art Gallery for “blow,” the booklet on Ellen Moffat’s audio/text installation of 2004. Warland wrote an essay for “polish,” an exhibit at the Medicine Hat Museum & Art Gallery by Mary Kavanagh in 2003. You can contact The Surrey Art Gallery for hundreds + thousands, a catalogue on Diana Lynn Thompson's installation of 2000.

Warland gave a talk in 2003 on Phyllis Webb's visual art and poetry at the conference “Wider Boundaries of Daring - The Modernist Impulse in Canadian Women's Poetry.” Held at the University of Windsor, Ontario, her talk now appears in the 2005 anthology ReGenerations: Canadian Women Poets in Conversation, edited by Di Brandt and Barbara Godard (Black Moss Press).

Of additional interest is “Still (stille),” Wendy Oberlander's 2001 film on which Warland worked as script editor and consultant. The film, using rare archival footage, follows Oberlander looking back on her mother's early life as an assimilated Jew in Berlin, prior to fleeing from Germany and World War II.

A number of Warland's suites of poems have been set in song cycles. Most recent is “Yellow the Sweet Ache,” by Vancouver composer Lloyd Burritt, premiered at Capilano College in 2000. Warland has also written an operatic play on Vivaldi.

Other work of interest is an encore issue of (f.)Lip — a newsletter of innovative feminist writing — featured in The Capilano Review, Series 2, No. 33, 2001. You can find “The Unfinished Moon,” an essay, in Lesbian Self-Writing: The Embodiment of Experience, edited by Linda Hall, 2000, and also in the Journal of Lesbian Studies, Vol. 4, No. 4, 2000.

An interview with Warland was featured in CV2 (Contemporary Verse), volume 24, no. 4, spring 2002 (email: cv2@mts.net). Excerpts from one of Warland's works-in-progress, “Breathing the Page: Ecosystem for Creating Narrative,” can be found in The Capilano Review, Series 2, No. 29, 1999.

Betsy Warland's archives can be found in the National Library of Canada. She served as a juror for the national poetry award, The Governor General's Award, in 1996. She is a member of The Writers' Union of Canada.