About the Award
Administered and sponsored by Vancouver Manuscript Intensive since 2021, the Warland Award, previously known as the VMI Betsy Warland Between Genres Award, recognizes titles that combine two or more genres, such as memoir and literary criticism, fiction and non-fiction, or memoir and poetry. This award honours Betsy Warland, a Canadian-American author, creator, and mentor, whose literary production and thinking about the writing life has supported writers across Canada and beyond. In recognizing Warland’s contribution to literary community we celebrate the importance of the hybrid and unclassifiable.
Warland has written books as collaborations, conversations, and explorations. Her innovative enquiry into language as well as blank space (the inscribed in conversation with the unwritten) has been constant in her multi-genre approach to writing. Perhaps most known for her language-focused writing and ways of working with silence, Warland considers the unsayable, the secreted, the unknowable: these are her obsessions—how we encounter them in love relationships, family, a homophobic society, a mono-truth society and the inner work of spiritual practice. Warland’s serpent (w)rite (a reader’s gloss) published in 1987, was one of the first “mash-up” books in Canada. Speaking about Bloodroot, written in 2000 and reissued in 2020 with an accompanying essay, Warland emphasizes “the narrative power of intentional blank space as much as the texted space to convey the story of loss, absence and the never-to-be-known or said.”
About Betsy Warland
Warland was born in the United States in 1946 and immigrated to Canada in 1973, becoming a citizen in 1980. Trained as a visual artist, her creative efforts enjoy a spectrum of influence, including that of her deep belief in community. In 1975, she initiated the Toronto Women’s Writing Collective that produced numerous literary events and publications. She also initiated and co-coordinated the Women and Words—les femmes et le mots conference (Vancouver 1983), that brought together one thousand women from across Canada involved in all aspects of contemporary literature.
Dedicated to emerging writers, Warland is the former director of The Writer’s Studio, part of Simon Fraser University’s Writing and Communications Program (2000-2011). In 2004, she co-founded the cross-Canada Creative Writers Nonfiction Collective and in 2006 she founded the hallmark manuscript development program, Vancouver Manuscript Intensive, where she continues to instruct and mentor authors as a Mentor Emerita.
Warland received the Mayor’s Arts Award for Literature in Vancouver in 2016 and her archives are in the National Library of Canada.
Warland’s titles include:
- Bloodroot—Tracing the Untelling of Motherloss, Inanna Publications, 2021 (with a new long essay by the author reflecting on the book twenty years later)
- Lost Lagoon—lost in thought, Caitlin Press, 2020
- Oscar of Between—A Memoir of Identity and Ideas (lyric prose memoir). Caitlin Press, 2016
- Breathing the Page—Reading the Act of Writing (twenty-four essays). Cormorant Books, 2010, 2nd ed 2022
- Only This Blue (long poem and essay), Mercury Press, 2005
- Bloodroot – Tracing the Untelling of Motherloss (prose), Second Story Press, 2000
- What Holds Us Here (poetry), Buschek Books, 1998
- Two Women in a Birth (poetry and prose with Daphne Marlatt), Guernica Editions, 1994
- The Bat Had Blue Eyes (poetry and prose), Women’s Press, 1993
- Proper Deafinitions (creative nonfiction), Press Gang Publishers, 1990
- Double Negative (poetry and prose with Daphne Marlatt), gynergy books/Ragweed Press, 1988
- serpent (w)rite (a long poem), Coach House Press, 1987
- open is broken (poetry), Longspoon Press, 1984
- A Gathering Instinct (poetry), Williams-Wallace, 1981
Examples of hybrid texts in the spirit of the Warland Between Genres Award:
For further information: [email protected]