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A Book A Month Giveaway for October
Enter to win an inscribed copy of Betsy’s book, Proper Deafinitions, during the month of October.
The sixteen collected texts and essays in Proper Deafinitions continue to be as deeply subversive and visionary as they were when it was published in 1990. Louise Forsyth wrote “Her voice celebrates in generosity and with subtle humour the shimmering notion of women as seekers, as thinkers, as creators…” and US author Julie R. Enszer recently wrote, “Warland’s textual innovations on the page were powerful and shattering…seem to imagine what was to come with the advances in hypertext…web browsers and more interactive texts online.”
New! VMI Plot & Structure Workshop with Kathryn Para
Plot and Structure with Kathryn Para, MFA Shortlisted: Ethel Wilson Fiction
Winner: Great BC Novel Contest
Whether you’re writing short or long, literary or genre fiction, for the stage, screen or web, your story needs a plot. We will discuss how to develop your character’s needs and desires into internal and external plots and use specific writing tools to focus your plot threads and embed your theme. Then we’ll explore causality and how it drives the plot and brings your story to a satisfying end.
Self-Editing: The Layers’ Technique Workshop in Vancouver
Cost: $200 plus GST (10.00) total $210 includes refreshments Dates & times: October 23, 7 pm-9:00 pm, October 24, 9:30 am- 5:30 pm Register: Workshop is limited to 12 writers. Register with...
VMI’s Writer Q & As for September
Have you seen the series of posts we’ve introduced on the new Vancouver Manuscript Intensive website? The series is called Writer Q & As. Look for 2 to 3 questions from writers answered by Betsy, VMI mentors or guest writers every month under the News & Missives section. Here are this month’s selections:
How do you know when to stop revising? I presume that if one does get picked up by an agent or publisher they will have their own editor who will ask you to revise again, so when do you know to leave it alone? I have thought I was done a couple of times but based on good feedback, I have revised my manuscript which has made it stronger but when do I stop? [Jane Mortifee]
Next month: “Writing the Between” A Sunshine Coast Writing Workshop
Are you inspired by the authors at the Sechelt Festival of the Written Arts but struggling with your own manuscript? On October 2 and 3, author Betsy Warland will bring one of her most popular workshops to Gibsons, Writing the Between.
Betsy is the author of eleven books of poetry and non-fiction, and has over 20 years of experience as a writing teacher, editor and manuscript consultant. Her latest book, Breathing the Page: Reading the Act of Writing is a best-seller.
Best known for her language-focused writing and ways of working with silence, Betsy finds as much meaning in scoring blank space on the page as she does in inscribing written language. The unsayable, the secreted, the unknowable: these are her obsessions – how we encounter them in lover relationships, family, society and spiritual practice.
A Book Giveaway for September
Have you been entering our monthly book giveaways? So far, we have had 7 winners of an inscribed copy of one of Betsy’s books. This month, we are giving away the book, Double Negative, written by both Daphne Marlatt and Betsy Warland. In this 1988 ground-breaking collaboration, Betsy Warland and Daphne Marlatt travel across Australia, writing their way into the doubleness or duplicity of language, of collaboration, of the Other, settler, and aboriginal, and homoeroticism in an air-conditioned train car – the Australian Nullarbor Desert on either side of their minds. Double Negative rejects the prevailing notion of woman as negative space and writes woman in the positive.
Writer Q & As on the new VMI website
We’re introducing a series of posts on the new Vancouver Manuscript Intensive website called Writer Q & As. Look for 2 to 3 questions from writers answered by Betsy, VMI mentors or guest writers every month under the News & Missives section. Here are this month’s selections:
I’m a poet who writes sixty or seventy poems and THEN tries to group them into a manuscript. This is a difficult way to find a through line or order as I don’t automatically have a beautiful way to group the poems. I pick the title from my favourite poem and hope for the best. Any advice would be appreciated. [Jude Neale]
What is the best way to go about ordering a manuscript of poetry? [Tina Biello]
This vexing question arises again and again no matter how many books you have published. Occasionally, a collection is written with a clear narrative structure but more often it is not. The standard approach of grouping poems in predictable subject categories weakens the collection, in my opinion. It’s antithetical to how life and perception actually is experienced. The more closely you create the quirky flow of experience the more your reader will be drawn in.
A Book A Month Giveaway for August
Every month until the end of December 2015, we are giving away one incribed book by Betsy Warland.* This month, we are giving away only this blue.
When faced with a life-threatening experience, one expects to be confronted with the big questions. What, however, can prove to have far more impact, is the disorientation and re-vision that alters not only our sensations but perceptions of the normally unremarkable bits of the everyday. Warland evokes these startling moments and enlists her reader in the intrigue of this changed state of consciousness. Written like a poetic symphony in four colour movements, Nicole Brossard described it as: “A book of colours brought back to beauty and meaning, which stays with us as an embrace.”
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