Horizon Information Portal

e-branch

Home

My Account/Renew Loans

Find Magazine Articles & more

Oscar of between : a memoir of identity and ideas / Betsy Warland.

by Warland, Betsy, 1946-

View full image

Dagger Editions, an imprint of Caitlin Press, 2016.

Warland, Betsy, 1946-

Women poets, Canadian -- 20th century -- Biography.

Women authors, Canadian -- 20th century -- Biography.

Feminists -- Canada -- Biography.

Transgender people -- Identity.

Transgender people -- Canada -- Biography.

9781987915167 (pbk.)

223 p. ; 21 cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

"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. 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. Betsy Warland is the author of eleven books of poetry and creative nonfiction. Her book Breathing the Page: Reading the Act of Writing is a collection of twenty-four essays about writing"--Provided by publisher.

"Betsy Warland is one of Canada's leading feminist writers, and the author of a dozen books of poetry, creative nonfiction, and lyric prose. Warland was born in Fort Dodge, Iowa, in 1946. She studied at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa, before immigrating to Canada in 1972. Much of Warland's literary output has been in the form of essays, memoirs, and poetry books relating to feminism, women's studies, and lesbian issues. Her work has appeared in Canadian and international journals and anthologies. Warland's first poem appeared in an issue of Waves in 1976, and she published her first volume of poetry, A Gathering Instinct, in 1981"--From wikipedia.org website.

Horizon Information Portal 3.24_8902M

© 2001-2013 SirsiDynix All rights reserved.

Horizon Information Portal