Hello dear readers, writers and those who are both,

Oscar Invites You to a Conversation

I began writing Oscar of Between: A Memoir of Identity and Ideas while in London in 2007. In late 2012, I created Oscar’s Salon — a new interactive publishing form I find provocative, even magical. Every month, I invite a guest writer or artist to dialogue with or bounce off of my excerpt. You, the readers, have also become a vital part of this exchange through your online comments.

On March 14, 2017,  Oscar’s Salon finale features a behind-the-scenes look at my great Oscar Team that enabled me to produce and promote the monthly Salon. Below is the full list of 50 Guest Writers and Artists and 41 Featured Readers from December 2012 – March 2017.

I am particularly eager to hear from those of you who have read both Oscars. How is your experience of each similar? Different?

I am always intrigued to read your thoughts.

We—myself along with the guest writers and artists—are all ears! Tell us about your experiences of, and thoughts about, “the Oscars” ( the digital salon Oscar and/or the book Oscar) in the comment box that follows the Featured Reader.

-Betsy ala Oscar

oscar of between book on a table

Buy Oscar of Between here and I’ll sign the copy with a personal message.

50 Guest Writers and Guest Artists

Click on their name to reach the Oscar post that contains their work.

41 Featured Readers

Click on their name to reach the Oscar post that contains their work.

Latest Excerpts from the book, Oscar of Between

Oscar of Between adapted for musical performance

Oscar of Between adapted for musical performance

Oscar of Between by Betsy Warland will be performed with musical accompaniment on September 19, 2018! You are cordially invited to a read-through performance of The Art of Camouflage for mezzo soprano/baritone, piano & percussion by Lloyd Burritt. Betsy's...

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Behind the Scenes of Oscar’s Salon

Behind the Scenes of Oscar’s Salon

Oscar’s Salon would have simply not been possible, not been nearly as well put together, nor would the word about it have gotten out nearly as well to you without Oscar’s Team.

Each of them has been exceptional in terms of their skills, ideas, reliability, enthusiasm and patience.

It’s been a lot of work over the past four and a half years. And, happily, with this team, a lot of fun.

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Oscar, Part 36B  Excerpt with Guest Artist Jocelyn Morlock

Oscar, Part 36B Excerpt with Guest Artist Jocelyn Morlock

The category is our predicament.
Everyone not in our category is a not. This is the knot.
“… photographs of black victims of lynching taken between the 1880’s and 1930’s … show Americans grinning beneath the naked mutilated body of a black man or woman hanging behind them from a tree. The lynching photographs were souvenirs of a collective action whose participants felt perfectly justified in what they had done.”

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Oscar, Part 36A  Excerpt with Guest Writer Yvonne Blomer

Oscar, Part 36A Excerpt with Guest Writer Yvonne Blomer

More and more transgender people are choosing gender reassignment via hormone injections and various types of surgery. It’s a relief, often a joyful experience to become the gender one has always felt oneself to be. Mismatched gender can feel like imposed camouflage yet reassignment—in heterosexual society eyes— is often viewed as deception. It’s a camouflage conundrum either way.

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Oscar, Part 35  Excerpt with Guest Writer Mark Goldstein

Oscar, Part 35 Excerpt with Guest Writer Mark Goldstein

The larger one notices it tucked in there. Menace pulses out from it (is Oscar imagining this?). It swings over on a guy strand and lands close to the small one, which immediately darts to the other side — its terror palpable. Oscar wants to intercede but traffic is too heavy — she’s caught in the web of this story, gripped by the larger spider’s absolute intent to kill radiating from its body.

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Oscar, Part 34 C Excerpt with Guest Writer Cathie Borrie

Oscar, Part 34 C Excerpt with Guest Writer Cathie Borrie

At the pyramid’s apex: morality, creativity, spontaneity, acceptance, purpose, meaning and inner potential. Oscar’s repeated packing up her personal and professional necessities as she moved between seven temporary locations prior to Montreal plunged her to the bottom. She takes some comfort in this for at the bottom nothing is extraneous: a particular alertness is required. Simplicity.

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Oscar, Part 34 B Excerpt with Guest Writer M. NourbeSe Philip

Oscar, Part 34 B Excerpt with Guest Writer M. NourbeSe Philip

Dinner last night. Lise and Oscar talking about Lise’s meditation retreat at Auschwitz. The puzzlement about why so few survivors of the death camps would talk about it after they were liberated. Oscar mentions an article she read about the alarming increase of PTS in U.S. soldiers and how the suicide rate for returning Canadian soldiers has also shot up.

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Oscar, Part 34 A Excerpt with Guest Writer Annie Ross

Oscar, Part 34 A Excerpt with Guest Writer Annie Ross

The woman excused herself and went into the bathroom. Within a minute, her partner abruptly strode over and pushed open the washroom door. Went in.

Silence – sound of the lock – silence.

Scuffling then her odd groan that signaled he had entered her, then increasing sounds of force and agony – everyone in the store frozen in disbelief – then her aching sobs. That’s when the male customer went in. Silence. Then. Oscar. Went in. Told him:

“Let her go.”

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Oscar, Part 33 C Excerpt with Guest Writer Ray Hsu

Oscar, Part 33 C Excerpt with Guest Writer Ray Hsu

The liar’s sense of reality doesn’t suddenly crumble nor does she or he feel profoundly betrayed. Also, the liar is not subjected to ongoing blame whereas the deceived one usually is (“You should have realized what was going on; you must have turned a blind eye; you drove him to do it.”)

We identify with the liar. Disassociate from the one deceived.
“Manipulation of the truth is worse than no truth.”

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Oscar, Part 33 B Excerpt with Guest Writer Alisa Gordaneer

Oscar, Part 33 B Excerpt with Guest Writer Alisa Gordaneer

Curtain call. Oscar calling out “Bravo!” “Brava!” Final drop of the curtain then the bewilderment of entering hundreds and hundreds of bodies chatting and moving out of the hall down into the subway. J and Oscar staying close, acknowledging how they each want to hold on to what has just happened. Not forget.

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Oscar, Part 33 A Excerpt with Guest Writer a rawlings

Oscar, Part 33 A Excerpt with Guest Writer a rawlings

“Hey. Watch out! This is the latest scam! Don’t help him! It was on the news last night!”
Oscar. Squats to pick up coins and tokens, glances up at him as he stops to watch. Quick assessment. He decides. Crouches down and helps as people stream by on either side but continues on to his girlfriend:
“If you put your bag down to help them, they grab it and take off!”

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Oscar, Part 32 C Excerpt with Guest Writer Cynthia Flood

Oscar, Part 32 C Excerpt with Guest Writer Cynthia Flood

Czeslaw Milosz said a writer in the family is the end of family.
Jamaica Kincaid said she writes about her family as if they were dead.
What do author and family have in common?
A book can bring us to our knees.
It has taken Oscar almost forty years to acknowledge in writing the other author in the family.
Thomas Heggen.

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Oscar, Part 32 B Excerpt with Guest Writer Rahat Kurd

Oscar, Part 32 B Excerpt with Guest Writer Rahat Kurd

After the attack on Pearl Harbor, he enlisted and was stationed on a Navy supply ship for fourteen months. Utterly bored, he repeatedly requested a transfer to a destroyer but his commander repeatedly denied his request. To counter numbing monotony, he began writing vignettes about the small dramas being played out on ship.

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Oscar, Part 32 Excerpt with Guest Artist Ellen Moffat

Oscar, Part 32 Excerpt with Guest Artist Ellen Moffat

Two large hives. Oscar and bees gingerly becoming acquainted. When they buzz around her (don’t bat them away!) she hums the note they make and this seems to ease their uncertainty. She watches their typical fourteen-hour workday: constant stream of ninety-degree-angle ascent and descent to and from control-tower hives.

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Oscar, Part 31B Excerpt with Guest Writer Miranda Pearson

Oscar, Part 31B Excerpt with Guest Writer Miranda Pearson

October 2013. Oscar in Vancouver at the reception before the Virginia Woolf Conference banquet. Oscar nervous “in the extreme” (Orlando). As Oscar walks into the hotel convention lobby, she spots Miranda and Sharon (who’s also reading) huddled together by Helen, the conference chair. Helen offers to buy them a drink. Oscar confesses she’s socially inept in these situations, to which Miranda and Sharon confess similar feelings.

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Oscar, Part 31A Excerpt with Guest Writer Suzette Mayr

Oscar, Part 31A Excerpt with Guest Writer Suzette Mayr

Vancouver. Oscar invited to read at the 23rd Annual Virginia Woolf Conference banquet – between the entree and dessert.
Of all her betweennesses, this is a new challenge for Oscar.
She considers. A palate cleanser? Something refreshing, humorous (the typical fare), but this is not Oscar’s forte.
Oscar flummoxed. Every idea of what to read nosedives like an inadequately made paper airplane.
Then Orlando taps her on the shoulder.
There’s the fit: Orlando and Oscar– food, drink, lively exchange of ideas.

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Oscar, Part 30 Excerpt with Guest Artist Allyson Clay

Oscar, Part 30 Excerpt with Guest Artist Allyson Clay

On Vancouver streets, panhandlers most often are met with suspicion, anger or averted eyes (“you don’t exist”).

Street people streetwise living close to the ground see through who we are as we rush by. Panhandlers’ eyes and Oscar’s often meet; sometimes they speak and, not infrequently, Oscar gives some change (change—what is needed here).

No “Milord! Milady! Milady! Milord!” Street people spot-on about gender for they cannot afford even the most unintentional insult.

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Oscar, Part 29 Excerpt with Guest Writer Erín Moure

Oscar, Part 29 Excerpt with Guest Writer Erín Moure

Over the course of her life, all the unacknowledged, unsaid undercurrents about her betweenness denied outright but mostly camouflaged. To have it spontaneously shouted at her and to shout back was refreshing. Yet, she also realizes she is safe, she is not a young Black man who could have been as easily shot.

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Oscar, Part 28 Excerpt with Guest Writer Cathy Ostlere

Oscar, Part 28 Excerpt with Guest Writer Cathy Ostlere

Big Data collection corporations on average have 18,000 pieces of information culled from every aspect of our online activities to sell to other corporate marketing departments. Big Data’s cannibalizing of our habits and preferences is becoming the world’s most valuable and profitable resource.

Big Data refuses to disclose its information on us, to us. Harmful misinformation is almost impossible to correct.

For Big Data (echo of Big Daddy), anonymity on our computers, our handheld devices is a ruse.

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Oscar, Part 27 Excerpt with Guest Writer Phil Hall

Oscar, Part 27 Excerpt with Guest Writer Phil Hall

It happens.

Happens after twenty years of writing; twenty years of applying; twenty years of “Unfortunately(s) …”

It happens on a sunny Montreal day as the magic realism of the storm’s creations begins to melt. On this 20th of March, 2013, day: the spring equinox. This day when the length between sunrise and sunset/sunset and sunrise is exactly the same. It happens on this one day of perfect betweenness. Oscar receives the call.

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