Word Vancouver in Conversation with Betsy Warland

We at Word Vancouver are excited to have Betsy Warland as the LGBTQ2S curator for our online 2020 festival! Tune in to the festival from September 19-27 for some amazing readings and panels from Billeh Nickerson, Hasan Namir, Cathy Stonehouse, Amber Dawn and more.

Now let’s get to know a little more about Betsy:

Betsy Warland has published 13 books of creative nonfiction, lyric prose and poetry. Warland’s 2020 book of prose poems, Lost Lagoon/lost in thought (set in Stanley Park) was published by Caitlin Press. Lloyd Burritt’s opera The Art of Camouflage, based on her 2016 book, Oscar of Between—A Memoir of Identity and Ideas, will be premiered in a one-act opera festival in 2020. Warland received the City of Vancouver Mayor’s Award for Literary Excellence in 2016.

We had a chance to speak with Betsy about her current reads, the Vancouver literary community and the power of writing and reading during this time.

What book(s) are you currently reading?

E.M. Forster, Maurice, Arleen Pare, Earle Street, Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Beautiful Struggle, mercedes eng, my yt mama, Billy-Ray Belcourt, A History of My Brief Body, Sonnet L’Abbe, Sonnet’s Shakesspear.

What first sparked your love of writing?

When I was moved to a small rural school in grade three, the classroom was so chaotic that I forgot how to read and switched to drawing instead. When it was discovered that I had forgotten how to read, and my parents had to teach me again but I was seeing reading through the eyes of drawing. Also, it wasn’t until my first book was being copyedited that it became apparent I wrote English as if it were my second language. I grew up in a Norwegian immigrant community and spent a lot of time with the elders so English has always felt foreign to me. When I am in England, I experience the musicality of it but in North America, Caucasian speakers sound angular and almost monotone to me. When I began reading Emily Dickenson, Audre Lorde, Chaucer, Plath, Zora Neale Hurston, Steinbeck, Alice Walker, Harper Lee, June Jordan, Virginia Woolf, I realized there were other ways of writing and telling stories and I was hooked. My 1984 collection of poems and prose, open is broken, provoked me to find an additional strategy to writing lesbian erotic love poems via etymological routes that reinterpreted key words— for example, “intercourse, “intercurrere, to run between.”

 Alongside your poetry, you have also written non-fiction. Is there a form of writing you are more drawn to? Do you find they influence each other?

Over the decades of my writing life, the strict genre classifications have become less and less relevant, even artificial. Since my book serpent (w)rite (1987), which I think was the first “mash-up” in Canada of poetry, prose and quotes from other books. I’ve gravitated more and more to using devices and strategies of poetry, fiction and nonfiction in my writing. In our day-to-day experience of narrative in our lives, we are constantly weaving elements of poetry, prose, fiction and nonfiction together. This is how narrative actually manifests in our daily lives so I write that way on the page. Creative nonfiction, as a “new” genre, doesn’t have the prescribed constraints of the established genres and this is liberating.

You have been quite influential in the literary community of Vancouver. How do you feel that poets across generations inform each other’s craft? 

This is something I have become more interested in nourishing and it’s apparent in how I curated the LGBTQ2S dedicated stage this year. There is some cross-pollination and connections but I think we could enjoy it quote a lot more than we do. When I look at other artistic and social-political communities, and observe the their depth of experience in their knowing one another’s work more over the decades, I see how grounding that is. I see the benefits.  

What is important to consider while titling a poem?

The title and the final line of the poem are very important. They bookend —“hold” the poem together. The trick is to ignite the reader’s curiosity but resist a title that billboards what the poem is about, Then, in the final line—resist a punch line ending (that dumbs the reader down). The final line propels the poem & reader forward on the crest of the wave of what the poem just did.

What books are you excited to read by local authors?

In addition to Pare, L’Abbe, eng, Belcourt mentioned above, also Shaena Lambert’s novel Petra, (coming out this fall), Chantal Gibson’s How She Read, Kevin Spenst, Heart Amok, and Junie Desil’s Eat Salt/Gaze at the Ocean (coming out this fall).

What is the importance of reading during this time?

I’m going to interpret this question in two ways. First, reading books is offering a kind of unrestricted intimacy that people deeply need (no masks, no social distancing, available anytime, the kind of “conversation” you can hold in your hands). To listen to someone reading online, or via an audio book, is also comforting. My online book launch for Lost Lagoon/lost in thought in April, was among the first on the West Coast and the response was remarkable. So many people attended from across Canada, some in the USA, several from abroad and this was elating: to freely come together like this! Many people told me how comforting it was to gather; to be read to. It was comforting for me too.

What are the biggest changes/ uplifting moments you have experienced during the pandemic?

As a freelancer, I must continue to earn my living. All my public-based gigs have been cancelled or postponed indefinitely and it’s an odd feeling to have a wall of silence for new books. Fortunately, manuscript consults have increased (writers have more time to write and focus on finishing their manuscripts!). For myself, I’ve been far more involved with writing (and making short videos) connected with the book. There’s an illusion that online stuff is quick and easy but I find it is taking a lot of time. Maybe it is taking more time for me because I have to produce new material (text, videos, images) for each “gig” as they are all different platforms with different spins and audiences. SO, no time to really write yet these online “gigs” are poking me to think and write about aspects of writing that I haven’t publicaly articulated before. The pandemic is impacting every aspect of our lives from micro to macro and it’s revealing how we think and our underlying assumptions that we automatically operate on. It’s a wake-up call about the stories we tell ourselves (and one another); it’s revealing how habitually we occupy and don’t occupy narrative and that determines everything else. This is sobering and provocative. The foregrounding and growing momentum of Black Lives Matter and Indigenous Lives Matter is signalling that this time, instead of “a change’s gonna come,” now it’s “…a change must come.”

You can follow Betsy at:

Instagram @betsy.warland

Twitter @betsywarland

Facebook @betsywarland

http://www.betsywarland.com/