In The Bat Had Blue Eyes poet Betsy Warland mines her memory for the secrets of her early years, the storiesbehind the one she knows. "A phenomenal literary experience awaits you here." - London Free Press

Bat Had Blue Eyes, The

Literature & Fiction

Warland, Betsy

Poetry

Womens Pr

Inversions: Writings by Dykes, Queers and Lesbians

History & Criticism

Press Gang Pub

Hundreds and Thousands : Traces of a Journey

Thompson, Diana

Davison, Liane

Surrey Art Gallery

What Holds Us Here : Poems

Buschekbooks

Breathing the Page: Reading the Act of Writing

Self-Help

Creativity

Cormorant Books

In Bloodroot, Betsy Warland traces how a mother and daughter's shared gender can shape the very anatomy of narrative itself. In her mother's final year,Warland quietly discovered how to disentangle a crucial, concealed story that had rendered their relationship disconnected and fraught. Warland weaves a common ground that moves beyond duty and despair, providing both questions and guideposts for readers, particularly those faced with ageing and ill parents and their loss. 
The 2000 edition of Bloodroot broke new ground in memoir form and uncharted storytelling. The 2021 edition, reprinted by Inanna for the launch of its InannaSignature Feminist Publications series, includes a new foreword by Susan Olding and a new essay by Warland that explores subsequent questions, insights and tenderness only the passage of time can enable.

Bloodroot: Tracing the Untelling of Motherloss (Inanna Signature Feminist Publications)

Biographies & Memoirs

Community & Culture

Inanna Publications

From the writer whose earlier books have been described as “a radiant prism of colour, memory and longing” and acclaimed as “ripe — ready to move into song” comes Bloodroot, Warland's personal telling of the loss of her mother. In this compelling and beautiful work of creative non-fiction, writer and poet Betsy Warland takes the reader with her as she negotiates her mother's growing incapacity and death. Her narrative traces the story that bound them together in the mother-daughter relationship, and her reflections help her find clarity, understanding and acceptance. Warland weaves a common ground that moves beyond duty and despair, providing both questions and guideposts for readers, particularly those faced with ageing and ill parents and their loss.

Bloodroot: Tracing the Untelling of Motherloss

Death & Grief

Sumach Pr

Twelve years in the makingBreathing the Page: Reading the Act of Writing is a must-read for students of creative writing. This collection is comprised of two sets of twelve essays each. "Materials" reflects on the history and animate nature of the objects we use in the act of writing, from computers, to pens and pencils, right down to paper. Warland subverts our assumptions about these tools by making the case that our materials are also our collaborators. Concepts investigates, names, and addresses the powerful forces at work beneath the language of craft. Warland shows that what ultimately determines whether a piece of writing succeeds or flounders is a writers ability to be humbled, overcome, or guided by these forces.

Cormorant Books Inc.

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. This marked the beginning of OSCAR OF BETWEEN: A MEMOIR OF IDENTITY AND IDEAS. Taking the name Oscar, she embarks on an intimate, nine-year quest by telling her story as "a person of between." As Oscar, she is able to make sense of her self and the culture that shaped her. She traces this experience of in-betweenness from her childhood in the rural Midwest, through to her first queer kiss in 1978, divorce, coming out, writing life. In 1984, she and her lover wrote lesbian erotic love poetry collections in dialogue with one another, the first and only tandem collections on this subject in English Canada. After the two split, she experienced years of unacknowledged exclusion from a community in which she thought she belonged. In the process of writing Oscar's story, Warland considers our culture's rigid, even violent demarcations as she becomes at ease with never knowing what gender she will be addressed as: "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." A contemporary ORLANDO, OSCAR OF BETWEEN extends beyond the author's personal narrative, pushing the boundaries of form, and by doing so, invents new ways to see ourselves.

Oscar of Between: A Memoir of Identity and Ideas

Caitlin Press Inc.

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Books by Warland, Betsy