Betsy Warland (1946 -…)
Creative nonfiction writer, poet, essayist, teacher, manuscript consultant, 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.
A writer dedicated to emerging writers, Betsy Warland is the director of The Writer’s Studio Program at Simon Fraser University’s Writing and Publishing Program, and of her own five-month manuscript development program, Vancouver Manuscript Intensive. She is also on faculty in both programs.
Perhaps most known for her language-focused writing and ways of working with silence, scoring blank space on the page evokes as much meaning to her as inscribing 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.
Currently, Betsy is working on a lyric prose manuscript “Oscar of Between”.
Critics write
“Betsy Warland demonstrates her exceptional ability to undermine linguistic hegemonies without being demanding or showy.”
“Betsy Warland has gained a reputation for saying what few writers risk fixing in print…Not a word is wasted. However, as the reader discovers, sometimes what is excised speaks most clearly.”
“Her honesty is astounding. Where one page reads like an open wound, the next blooms with insight.”
New and selected books
Breathing the Page: Reading the Act of Writing
Warland’s 24 essays on writing, Breathing the Page: Reading the Act of Writing (Cormorant Books, 2010), was a twelve-year writing project. Warland’s evoking the non-everydayness of the seemingly every day materials with which writers work and her conceptualizing the forces encountered beneath the language of craft embody decades of her quest as a writer, teacher of creative writing, and manuscript consultant.
Only This Blue: A Long Poem with an Essay
In 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.
Bloodroot: Tracing the Untelling of Motherloss
Bloodroot: Tracing the Untelling of Motherloss (Sumach Press/Canadian Scholars’ 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.
What Holds Us Here
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 BuschekBooks in 1999.
Betsy Warland 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. Her archives can be found in the National Library of Canada.