Born in 1946, Betsy Warland emigrated from the U.S. in 1972. By the 1980s she was one of Canada's leading proponents and editors of feminist writing. Since coordinating the bilingual Women and Words conference at UBC in 1983, she has co-edited (f.)lip, a newsletter of innovative feminist writing, and co-edited Telling It: Women and Language Across Cultures. The SFU Writers Studio has become a fertile training ground for both writers and editors with the ongoing presence of Warland who served as its director from 2001 to 2012.
Billed as a literary equivalent to the groundbreaking movie Orlando, inspired by Virginia Woolf's classic novel of the same name, Betsy Warland's Oscar of Between: A Memoir of Identity & Ideas (Dagger 2016) has an effective premise: "In 2007, at the age of sixty, Betsy Warland finds herself single and without a sense of family. On an impulse, she decides to travel to London to celebrate her birthday, where she experiences an odd compulsion to see an exhibit on the invention of military camouflage. Within the first five minutes of her visit, her lifelong feeling of being aberrant reveals its source: she had never learned the art of camouflage."
Warland adopted the alias Oscar and proceeded to her biographical story from the perspective of "a person of between," starting with her America childhood in the rural Midwest. We revisit her first queer kiss, a divorce, her relationship with Daphne Marlatt (unnamed in press material) and her subsequent "years of unacknowledged exclusion from a community in which she thought she belonged" after they split up. [One can argue that Warland has always been a relatively prominent literary figure in B.C. from the days when she co-founded and coordinated the Women & Words -les femmes et le mots conference at UBC in 1983 to her years as the director of the SFU's Writers Studio (2001-2012)].
Ultimately Oscar becomes relatively comfortable with whatever gender interpretations people want to make. "In Oscar's daily life, when encountering someone, it goes like this: some address her as a male; some address her as a female; some begin with one and then switch (sometimes apologetically) to the other; some identify Oscar as lesbian and their faces harden, or open into a momentary glance of arousal; some know they don't know and openly scrutinize; some decide female but stare perplexedly at her now-sans-breast chest; some are bemused by or drawn to or relate to her androgyny; and for some none of this matters."
Besty Warland co-founded the national Creative Writer Non-Fiction Collective in 2004 and remains on the The (SFU) Writers Studio teaching faculty. In 2007, she founded the six-month Vancouver Manuscript Intensive program for which she is the director and a mentor.
Tracing the Untelling of Motherloss traces the beginnings of her mother's declining health and eventual death, over a period during which the two renew their bonds of love after a long period of estrangement. In her poetic work of creative non-fiction, Warland recounts how she and her mother were able to overcome old conflicts and differences to discover that dying and death mean more than despair and duty. This book, according to Warland, is "about abandoning disappointment, acquiescing to grace."
She offers her insights in the nuances of writing beyond sentence construction and words--such as the touchy-feely aspects of materials, environment, etc. in Breathing the Page: Reading the Act of Writing (Cormorant $20). It's not just about text; it's also about textures.
Betsy Warland’s thirteenth book, Lost Lagoon/lost in thought (Caitlin $20) is in her longstanding style of lyric prose. She combines observations about Vancouver’s Lost Lagoon, which was named by the 19th century Mohawk/English poet Pauline Johnson, with a dialogue on the small but important ways city dwellers can reconnect with nature and wildlife despite the stresses of contemporary urban life.
BOOKS:
Open Is Broken (Longspoon Press, 1984)
Serpent (W)rite: (a reader's gloss) (Coach House Press, 1987)
Marlatt, Daphne and Betsy Warland. Double Negative.
Illus. Cheryl Sourkes (Gynergy Books, 1988)
Proper Deafinitions: Collected Theorograms (Press Gang, 1990)
The Bat Had Blue Eyes (Women's Press, 1993)
Marlatt, Daphne and Betsy Warland.
Two Women In A Birth (Guernica, 1993)
What Holds Us Here (Buschek Books, 1998)
Bloodroot: Tracing the Untelling of Motherloss (Second Story, 2000) 1-896764-29-0/ 20th anniversary edition (Inanna, 2021) $22.95 9781771338370
Only This Blue (The Mercury Press 2005) A long poem with an essay
Breathing the Page: Reading the Act of Writing (Cormorant Books 2010) $20.00 978-1-897151-78-5
Oscar of Between: A Memoir of Identity & Ideas (Dagger 2016) $21.95 978-1-987915-16-7
Lost Lagoon/lost in thought (Caitlin 2020) $20 9781773860251
[BCBW 2020]
Billed as a literary equivalent to the groundbreaking movie Orlando, inspired by Virginia Woolf's classic novel of the same name, Betsy Warland's Oscar of Between: A Memoir of Identity & Ideas (Dagger 2016) has an effective premise: "In 2007, at the age of sixty, Betsy Warland finds herself single and without a sense of family. On an impulse, she decides to travel to London to celebrate her birthday, where she experiences an odd compulsion to see an exhibit on the invention of military camouflage. Within the first five minutes of her visit, her lifelong feeling of being aberrant reveals its source: she had never learned the art of camouflage."
Warland adopted the alias Oscar and proceeded to her biographical story from the perspective of "a person of between," starting with her America childhood in the rural Midwest. We revisit her first queer kiss, a divorce, her relationship with Daphne Marlatt (unnamed in press material) and her subsequent "years of unacknowledged exclusion from a community in which she thought she belonged" after they split up. [One can argue that Warland has always been a relatively prominent literary figure in B.C. from the days when she co-founded and coordinated the Women & Words -les femmes et le mots conference at UBC in 1983 to her years as the director of the SFU's Writers Studio (2001-2012)].
Ultimately Oscar becomes relatively comfortable with whatever gender interpretations people want to make. "In Oscar's daily life, when encountering someone, it goes like this: some address her as a male; some address her as a female; some begin with one and then switch (sometimes apologetically) to the other; some identify Oscar as lesbian and their faces harden, or open into a momentary glance of arousal; some know they don't know and openly scrutinize; some decide female but stare perplexedly at her now-sans-breast chest; some are bemused by or drawn to or relate to her androgyny; and for some none of this matters."
Besty Warland co-founded the national Creative Writer Non-Fiction Collective in 2004 and remains on the The (SFU) Writers Studio teaching faculty. In 2007, she founded the six-month Vancouver Manuscript Intensive program for which she is the director and a mentor.
Tracing the Untelling of Motherloss traces the beginnings of her mother's declining health and eventual death, over a period during which the two renew their bonds of love after a long period of estrangement. In her poetic work of creative non-fiction, Warland recounts how she and her mother were able to overcome old conflicts and differences to discover that dying and death mean more than despair and duty. This book, according to Warland, is "about abandoning disappointment, acquiescing to grace."
She offers her insights in the nuances of writing beyond sentence construction and words--such as the touchy-feely aspects of materials, environment, etc. in Breathing the Page: Reading the Act of Writing (Cormorant $20). It's not just about text; it's also about textures.
Betsy Warland’s thirteenth book, Lost Lagoon/lost in thought (Caitlin $20) is in her longstanding style of lyric prose. She combines observations about Vancouver’s Lost Lagoon, which was named by the 19th century Mohawk/English poet Pauline Johnson, with a dialogue on the small but important ways city dwellers can reconnect with nature and wildlife despite the stresses of contemporary urban life.
BOOKS:
Open Is Broken (Longspoon Press, 1984)
Serpent (W)rite: (a reader's gloss) (Coach House Press, 1987)
Marlatt, Daphne and Betsy Warland. Double Negative.
Illus. Cheryl Sourkes (Gynergy Books, 1988)
Proper Deafinitions: Collected Theorograms (Press Gang, 1990)
The Bat Had Blue Eyes (Women's Press, 1993)
Marlatt, Daphne and Betsy Warland.
Two Women In A Birth (Guernica, 1993)
What Holds Us Here (Buschek Books, 1998)
Bloodroot: Tracing the Untelling of Motherloss (Second Story, 2000) 1-896764-29-0/ 20th anniversary edition (Inanna, 2021) $22.95 9781771338370
Only This Blue (The Mercury Press 2005) A long poem with an essay
Breathing the Page: Reading the Act of Writing (Cormorant Books 2010) $20.00 978-1-897151-78-5
Oscar of Between: A Memoir of Identity & Ideas (Dagger 2016) $21.95 978-1-987915-16-7
Lost Lagoon/lost in thought (Caitlin 2020) $20 9781773860251
[BCBW 2020]
Articles: 1 Article for this author
Oscar of Between: A Memoir of Ideas and Identity
Revew 2017
Reviewed by Catriona Sandilands
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In 2007, Betsy Warland of Simon Fraser University took a birthday trip to London for a range of plays and events, including an exhibition on military camouflage at the Imperial War Museum and a production of Edward Albee play, The Lady of Dubuque, starring Maggie Smith, Peter Francis Smith, Vivienne Benesch, and others, at the Theatre Royal in Haymarket.
Reviewer Catriona Sandilands traces how these and other influences provoked Warland to examine her experience of betweenness and her own identity as a person of between - between genders, genres, homes, and jobs. -- Ed.
*
In telling this story, she found her narrative position: a person of between (p. 216).
As far as prepositions go, "between"; is an interesting one. Depending on the context, it can refer to the space or time separating two entities, as in "between a rock and a hard place,"; but it can also refer to their connection, as in "between friends."; On the one hand, there is a sense of being caught in the midst of discrete, categorical things on each side; on the other, there is a sense of coming together in spaces of encounter to create something that is much more than the two individual entities involved.
Oscar of Between, Betsy Warland's new work of "creative nonfiction lyric prose narrative"; (as she describes it on p. 99), is a meditation on "persons of between,"; including herself: persons between genders, between homes, between citizenships, between jobs, between genres.
It is also, as is Warland's forte, a formal experiment with the possibilities of a language that might reflect and enact an experience of between: between prose and poetry, intimacy and publicity, individuality and community, immediacy and timelessness.
Beginning with a 2007, sixtieth birthday trip to London (Part 1) and ending in Vancouver in 2015 (Part 36), the work travels back and forth between personal events and reflections, and world political violences, to create a powerful memoir that embodies both the pain and isolation, and the resilient fecundity, of betweenness in both content and form.
En route to an exhibition on the art of camouflage at the Imperial War Museum in London, Warland decides/discovers that she is also now Oscar: "Second proper name. / Seeking her out. / Betsy now also Oscar"; (p. 22).
Three threads led to the new name and identity: Oscar Wilde; Oscar in the Edward Albee play she has just seen (The Lady of Dubuque), the character's Blackness announced awkwardly and obviously in the midst of the play's conventional Midwestern Whiteness; Oscar her former student's newborn child.
Oscar "of Between"; has never quite fit in either gender or genre: Oscar of the double mastectomy is called "sir"; and "ma'am"; seconds apart; Oscar, "neither man / nor marked with natural cover"; (p. 16) must turn to art for camouflage; Oscar's art also stubbornly refuses to fit categories, conventions, and even the literary and political communities of which she thought she was a part.
The narrative of not fitting is powerful and returns, iteratively, to the fine art of passing, of blending, unnoticed, into one's surroundings to avoid harm: "on days turbulent with unpredictable reactions, Oscar longs for the simplicity of camouflage"; (p. 77). But, citing the web of violences creating the need for camouflage in its many forms, the book cultivates a thoughtful, questioning practice of living and writing otherwise: camouflage "would only put her at odds with who Oscar is"; (p. 77).
To be sure, Oscar of Between traces a particular path through current questions around trans and genderqueer identities. It is crucial to point out how violently policed are those who live between in this respect: I write these words on the very day that the Trump administration rescinded the law protecting transgender students' rights to use the bathroom corresponding to their gender identity. (Oscar would, I think, not have let this news go by without comment.)
But that is not really the point of the book. Between, for Warland, is not simply a refusal of binary genders; it is a larger, primary, embodied consideration of the ways in which classifications and taxonomies are, quite literally and destructively, our modern "predicament"; (the Latin praedicamentum is a rendering of the Greek kat?goria). "In some older cultures, a person of between plays an important role, but not so in North America except among some [I]ndigenous peoples"; (p. 213); indeed, to be between in Western modernity is to lack, rather than to be open to, meaning and substance.
As Oscar discovers, however, living between is also an invitation to a different kind of community. Between is not only a condition of misfit but also a result of collaboration (as in, between us we can come up with something new). Because of Warland's recent, difficult experiences with publishers (specifically, a five year-long struggle to find a home for her complex 2010 essay collection Breathing the Page), she decided initially to create an online "Oscar's Salon"; in which she could publish excerpts from the emerging memoir in tandem with the work of other writers (and others) with whom the excerpt resonated (as of the time of writing, the Salon is still live at http://www.betsywarland.com/excerpts-from-oscar-of-between/).
Also, within the memoir itself, some of the most important epiphanies about betweenness arise in the course of dialogue with particular, other people of between.
With Margaret: "Oscar describing how persons of between can appear on the surface to have little or nothing in common yet once they understand betweenness, suddenly recognize one another"; (p. 45).
With Darrel: Oscar "says, when she became a writer, her betweenness gradually came more into focus with her subject matter and lack of inclusion. As she developed her style of blending poetic strategies, exploration of ideas and narrative prose she great to accept her solitariness"; (p. 216). Between is, here, an emerging conversation.
As Oscar reflects toward the end of the memoir, "the narrative movement of Oscar of Between resembles the longing notes of an Argentine bandoneon - its tango concertina's repeated squeezing in (intimate) then pulling out (public) -- squeezing in pulling out squeezing close extending out in a kind of grace"; (p. 205).
Warland's personal prose draws us into her encounters and conversations with an air of collusion; sometimes, however, her words explode on the page, as when she is remarking on one of the egregious acts of gun violence that both frame and penetrate her individual experience over the years the book was written.
Ultimately, perhaps, this between is the one that I found the most compelling: between personal and political, Warland's memoir is a vital exploration of what it means to inhabit the early twenty-first century with attention, openness, and generosity.
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Catriona (Cate) Sandilands is a Professor in the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University, where she teaches at the intersections of environmental literature, humanities, and philosophy; queer, lesbian, and feminist studies; and ecological politics (especially but not only in BC). The author of close to seventy articles (academic and not so academic) on topics ranging from national parks to lesbian communities, Walter Benjamin to honeybees, melancholic natures to monstrous plants, she is probably best known for The Good-Natured Feminist: Ecofeminism and Democracy (Minnesota, 1999) and Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire (Indiana, 2010). She is currently working on two projects, the first a reflective monograph on Jane Rule's public lives as represented by her novels, stories, essays, epistolary activism, and community engagements, and the other a collaboratively produced collection of stories, memoirs, and poetry on climate change centred on the Salish Sea.