Writers: a new ‘how-to’ philosophy

Breathing the Page: Reading the Act of Writing (Second Edition Including Ten Additional Essays)
by Betsy Warland

Toronto: Cormorant Books, 2023
$24.95 / 9781770867031

Reviewed by Natalie Virginia Lang

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When the elusive creative genius seizes a writer, it is their quest to capture and tell the story in front of them. How does one do that? Is it as simple as putting pen to paper and letting the words flow from somewhere deep within, landing perfectly on the page, like Mozart? Is it about formulas and charts and a long-detailed plan that is then revised, blended, layered, and bound together? Is it both? And once a writer has a draft, how then do they go about crafting the final piece in precisely the right way, in hopes of the work being considered truly great writing?

Betsy Warland is the former director of the SFU Writer’s Studio and the Vancouver Manuscript Intensive. She is also a manuscript consultant, editor, and creative writing teacher. Considered by many as a master of the written word, Warland broke barriers in 1981 with A Gathering Instinct, her first book of poetry. In the collection, Warland’s command of language and vocabulary, coupled with her use of sparseness and space, set the tone for readers to slowly digest those delicate and tentative moments of change, loss, and uncertainty that we all experience.

Since then, Warland has published fourteen books of creative non-fiction, lyric prose, and poetry and has arguably become one of the most evocative and influential Canadian writers of our time. With a collection of poetry and prose that is bold, honest and vulnerable, Warland understands that effective writing can persuade us to, in the words of Max Wyman, author of The Compassionate Imagination, “look more carefully, less comfortably, at the unregarded aspects of our lives.” 

These distinct contributions to a collective body of writing, capturing the often enigmatic and uncomfortable multiplicity of humanity, as well as her dedication to writing communities in British Columbia and across Canada, make Warland’s book on writing, Breathing the Page: Reading the Act of Writing, a valuable and necessary companion to any writer.  

The first edition of Breathing the Page was published by Cormorant Books in 2010. The book challenged the status quo set forward by more traditional guides for writing. Where John Braine’s How to Write a Novel helps us to understand the basic mechanics of finishing a novel, and Jack Hodgins’s A Passion for Narrative is a comprehensive how-to guide for new writers, Betsy Warland looks at writing as a complex “web of relationships.”

Within this sphere of intimacy, the writer must discover what is wholly distinctive to them. Any discovered insights should then be expressed through effective articulation of language and form. Warland challenges readers to sense for those forces lying beneath language and structure that, if we are open and intuitive, may lead to truly great works—works that are both entirely unique to the embodiment of the writer’s life experience and at the same time have the potential to strike a deep vibration in anyone who reads the words.  

The second edition of Breathing the Page adds ten new essays. Warland builds on an already strong narrative about the power of relationships between the writer, the reader, the crafting tools, and the potential resonance that a narrative may have. Notably, Warland contemplates untapped potential hidden within resistance, contradiction, failure, and a lacking that all writers, artists, and indeed human beings, feel when we enter the creative sphere—when we attempt to capture the right word at the right moment, in the endeavour to add our voice to the creative canon.

In the opening essay, “Locating the Reader,” Warland situates us with the reminder to first “create the conditions to locate the reader effectively.” To do this, she argues, the writer must cultivate a “particular state of consciousness.” In this way, Warland doesn’t begin with a how-to monologue, or a long list of steps and strategies that worked for her or other great writers (though voices from Emily Dickinson, Dennis Lee, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, among others, are quoted throughout the text). Instead, she asks the writer to be curious, to cast aside expectations and notions of separation between reader and writer to create the circumstances for a “bond between reader and narrative to flourish”—to cultivate a relationship. 

This nod to relationships is a dominant theme for Warland. It is an effective tool used to explore various elements integral to writing, such as the pencil, the paper, the alphabet, and basic grammar. Warland comments on their history and how they continue to influence the conscious and unconscious minds of writers. 

In a brief essay on the writing table, Warland writes that “A table is the pitch of living: it deserves odes as one of our oldest, most steadfast companions.” For Warland, writing, the places we write, the tools we use, the thoughts we cultivate, and the narratives we attempt to share with others, demands reverence. It is awareness of the interconnectedness in our lives that matters here. Great writing, then, is less about the mechanics (though that certainly does play an important role), than it is about identifying “those reciprocal relationship[s] between nourishment and language” so that we can sit before a blank page and delve into the deepest parts of our minds and hearts and share our thoughts and experiences with the world. In doing this, we are sharing in a relationship—relationship between reader and writer, relationship between pen and paper, and table and writer, relationship between one life and another. 

To guide the reader along, Warland writes personal anecdotes into her essays. In “Thoughts about Lack Narratives,” Warland describes her 2016 memoir, Oscar of Between: A Memoir of Identity and Ideas. She uses the example of searching for voice and the difficulties she encountered when her given name (Betsy Warland) didn’t seem to fit anymore. Instead, she created “a person of between” in the name Oscar.

The point Warland attempts to illustrate here is that “all compelling writing—writing of deep necessity and cultural value—issues from various forms of lack that impoverish us.” These “lacks,” or missing pieces of narratives that have not yet been told—perhaps because the world may be uncomfortable with them, or perhaps because we are not yet ready to tell them—are where resonant writing lies. Warland is convinced that as writers, “we must learn to live with profound vulnerability.” In doing this, we are filling in the lack of stories that others have been too afraid to tell. We become more resilient in ourselves as we learn from ourselves—our fears and identities—and we can start to tell authentic narratives that our world, culturally and socially, so desperately needs.

When we come across the devastation of landscape, or when a child is drowned in a river while attempting to swim toward a brighter future, or when we are struck by monumental beauty held in the simplest of everyday moments, or when we are imagining a world wholly unlike our own, we can take a moment to embody and embrace what we experience. We may lean into our disoriented invigoration so that when we put pen to paper, or when we sit in our writing room at our writing table, to begin carving the narrative, we will remember that the “most compelling writers are those who have deeply learned from the peculiarities of how they think, feel, and write.” 

It is this peculiarity that Breathing the Page so exemplifies. While Warland explains to us the power of a “signature style,” she is showcasing that power in her use of personal narrative anecdotes, conversations, questions to lead us into an essay, and blank space to illustrate the loosening weight of sparseness. The form and formatting of this book is in itself a lesson on writing—one need only to examine its style and the passion, compassion, and connection, that style brings forward, to start writing better. 

Breathing the Page is more than a writer’s manual. It is a collection of meditations, philosophies through which we can live our lives, where we can embody with courage and passion those moments that seem impossible to capture. The highly othering academic lessons of how-to books on writing are increasingly becoming a way of the past. They are being replaced with books like Breathing the Page, where a return to the body, to the senses, to relationships, and an intuitive uncovering of language, form, and identity, are changing the paradigm of what it means to be a writer.

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Natalie Virginia Lang is a teacher and writer. She is an alumnus of the Graduate Liberal Studies program at SFU and has contributed essays to BCR, including “Remnants of Sumas Mountain” and “Letters from the Pandemic: Dear Will.”  Lang is the author of Remnants: Reveries of a Mountain Dweller (Caitlin Press, 2023), a memoir inviting readers to re-examine our relationships with the natural world. [Editor’s note: Natalie Virginia Lang has reviewed books by Christina Myers, Catherine McGregor and Shailoo Bedi (eds.), Rick Antonson, Dave Doroghy, Sheena Kamal, Jae Waller, and carla bergman for BCR.]

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The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors, 2023-25: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction and poetry)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an online book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, Maria Tippett, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

“Only connect.” – E.M. Forster