The VMI Betsy Warland Between Genres Award

Announcing the winner!

CONGRATULATIONS to VMI Betsy Warland Between Genres Award WINNER Armand Garnet Ruffo for his book The Dialogues: The Song of Francis Pegahmagabow from Wolsak & Wynn!

Judge Steve Collis says of it, “In The Dialogues: The Song of Francis Pegahmagabow, Armand Garnet Ruffo transforms a libretto (still embedded at the heart of this book) into a fully-formed documentary poem, effortlessly blending production notes and an extended reflection on the process of writing and recovering Indigenous history. This is a story of the First World War, and one Indigenous Canadian’s spiritual journey and political awakening. But it is also a wide-ranging meditation on the meaning of war writ large, from the bible to Gaza and the “war against the very planet that sustains us,” tracing a path that connects the unmarked graves of residential schools and Great War battlefields. I don’t really know how Ruffo does it—balancing all that he brings into focus here—but he certainly does it, with wisdom and humour, insight and poetry. Like veteran and activist Francis Pegahmagabow himself, we are invited to “take a piece of one of the branches” of this book, place it in our mouths, “and become the grey earth.”

Armand Garnet Ruffo is an Anishnaabe writer from northern Ontario and a member of the Chapleau (Fox Lake) Cree First Nation. A recipient of an Honorary Life Membership Award from the League of Canadian Poets and the Latner Griffin Writers’ Trust Poetry Prize, he is recognized as a major contributor to both Indigenous literature and Indigenous literary scholarship in Canada. His publications Norval Morrisseau: Man Changing into Thunderbird (2014) and Treaty #(2019) were finalists for Governor General’s Literary Awards. He teaches at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario.

Congratulations to the finalists and their presses!

Join us at the Blending Genres panel on October 26, 2024 at Vancouver Writers Fest on Granville Island at 1:30pm  to hear judge Stephen Collis announce the winner! This panel, moderated by Elee Kraljii Gardiner features Alison McCreesh’s Degrees of Separation, Sarah Leavitt’s Something, Not Nothing, Canisia Lubrin’s Code Noir, and Michael Turner’s Playlist blends poetry, memoir, and music journalism to consider a writing life immersed in music. Purchase tickets here.

For a book published in Canada that is a hybrid genre, or straddles two or more genres. The winner will receive $500 at a ceremony in October 2024, presented by the judge with Betsy Warland, special guest of honour. Finalists (no cash prize) will also be awarded and will receive certificates.

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Why create The VMI Betsy Warland Between Genres Award?

Creative nonfiction writer, poet, essayist, teacher, manuscript consultant, and editor Betsy Warland’s 14 books are not easily classified or categorized in one genre, yet they have contributed greatly to Canadian literary history and continue to influence emerging authors. Many beloved books do not find a comfortable place on a bookshelf or on a prize list because they are innovative in terms of form, creating/inviting/forcing new ways of being read. Considered uncategorizable, they are overlooked or misread. Named in honour of Betsy Warland, this award celebrates work that disrupts convention about what a book should be, how it should read, what it should sound like, what subject matter is acceptable.

2024 Judge

Stephen Collis is the author of over a dozen books of poetry and prose, including The Commons (2008), the BC Book Prize winning On the Material (2010), and Almost Islands: Phyllis Webb and the Pursuit of the Unwritten (2018)—all published by Talonbooks. A History of the Theories of Rain (2021) was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award for poetry, and in 2019, Collis was the recipient of the Writers’ Trust of Canada Latner Poetry Prize. The Middle, the second volume of a trilogy begun with A History of the Theories of Rain, will be published in 2024. He lives near Vancouver, on unceded Coast Salish Territory, and teaches poetry and poetics at Simon Fraser University. 

Submission Details

• Books must be published by a Canadian publisher.
• Self-published books are eligible if they have gone through a formal, independent editing process, have an ISBN, and are available for purchase in Canadian bookstores.
• Titles must be published between October 1, 2023-September 30, 2024. Books published between October 1, 2024-September 30, 2025 will be eligible for the Award in the following year. 
• Entry fee of $25.00 is payable by cheque to VMI or by etransfer to eleethursdays AT gmail.com . The entrance fee partially covers postage, fees for judges, and administration.
• Submit one hard copy AND one digital copy.
  • Hard copy: Vancouver Manuscript Intensive
    3489 West 43rd Avenue
    Vancouver BC V6N 3J6
  • Digital copy: WarlandAward@gmail.com
• Submissions must be postmarked in the week of April 8-April 12, 2024 or July 22-26, 2024. Our submission manager cannot accept manuscripts outside those dates. We encourage minimal, eco-friendly, and/or recycled packaging.
• We accept one manuscript per author per year.
• Submitted copies will be donated to writing programs in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.
• In years without a suitable candidate the prize will not be awarded. If a conflict of interest is identified that title may be resubmitted the following year.
• Queries may be directed to WarlandAward@gmail.com

More About the Award

Administered and sponsored by Vancouver Manuscript Intensive, The VMI Betsy Warland Between Genres Award recognizes titles that combine two or more genres, such as memoir and literary criticism, fiction and non-fiction, or memoir and poetry. Warland has written books as collaborations, conversations, and explorations. Her innovative exploration of language as well as blank space (the inscribed in conversation with the unwritten) has been constant in her multi-genre approach to writing. Perhaps most known for her language-focused writing and ways of working with silence, Warland considers the unsayable, the secreted, the unknowable: these are her obsessions—how we encounter them in love relationships, family, a homophobic society, a mono-truth society and the inner work of spiritual practice. Warland’s serpent (w)rite (a reader’s gloss) published in 1987, was one of the first “mash-up” books in Canada. Speaking about Bloodroot, written in 2000 and reissued in 2020 with an accompanying essay, Warland emphasizes “the narrative power of intentional blank space as much as the texted space to convey the story of loss, absence and the never-to-be-known or said.”

This award honours Warland’s trajectory and ethos by celebrating the importance of the hybrid and unclassifiable.

Warland was born in the United States in 1946 and immigrated to Canada in 1973, becoming a citizen in 1980. Trained as a visual artist, her creative efforts enjoy a spectrum of influence, including that of her deep belief in community. In 1975, she initiated the Toronto Women’s Writing Collective that produced numerous literary events and publications. She also initiated and co-coordinated the Women and Words—les femmes et le mots conference (Vancouver 1983), that brought together one thousand women from across Canada involved in all aspects of contemporary literature. Dedicated to emerging writers, Warland is the former director of The Writer’s Studio, part of Simon Fraser University’s Writing and Communications Program (2000-2011). In 2004, she co-founded the cross-Canada Creative Writers Nonfiction Collective and in 2006 she founded the hallmark manuscript development program, Vancouver Manuscript Intensive, where she continues to instruct and mentor authors as a Mentor Emerita. Warland received the Mayor’s Arts Award for Literature in Vancouver in 2016 and her archives are in the National Library of Canada.

Warland’s titles include:

• Bloodroot—Tracing the Untelling of Motherloss, Inanna Publications, 2021 (with a new long essay by the author reflecting on the book twenty years later) 
• Lost Lagoon—lost in thought, Caitlin Press, 2020
• Oscar of Between—A Memoir of Identity and Ideas (lyric prose memoir). Caitlin Press, 2016
• Breathing the Page—Reading the Act of Writing (twenty-four essays). Cormorant Books, 2010
• Only This Blue (long poem and essay), Mercury Press, 2005
• Bloodroot – Tracing the Untelling of Motherloss (prose), Second Story Press, 2000
• What Holds Us Here (poetry), Buschek Books, 1998
• Two Women in a Birth (poetry and prose with Daphne Marlatt), Guernica Editions, 1994
• The Bat Had Blue Eyes (poetry and prose), Women’s Press, 1993
• Proper Deafinitions (creative nonfiction), Press Gang Publishers, 1990
• Double Negative (poetry and prose with Daphne Marlatt), gynergy books/Ragweed Press, 1988
• serpent (w)rite (a long poem), Coach House Press, 1987
• open is broken (poetry), Longspoon Press, 1984
• A Gathering Instinct (poetry), Williams-Wallace, 1981

Examples of hybrid texts in the spirit of the Warland Between Genres Award:

• Oscar of Between: a memoir of identity and ideas by Betsy Warland
• If on a winter’s night a traveler by Italo Calvino
• Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson
• Magic for Beginners by Kelly Link
• 2666 by Robert Bolaño
• The Queen’s Throat by Wayne Koestenbaum
• I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You: A Letter to My Daughter by David Chariandy
• The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson
• The Pillow Book by Sei Shonagun

For further information: WarlandAward@gmail.com