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 Inanna Signature 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.

Betsy Warland has published 13 books of poetry, creative nonfiction, and lyric prose. Warland’s 2010 book of essays on new approaches to writing, Breathing the Page—Reading the Act of Writing became a bestseller. Author, mentor, teacher, manuscript consultant, editor, Warland received the City of Vancouver Mayor’s Award for Literary Excellence in 2016. Warland is the director of Vancouver Manuscript Intensive, co-founder of the national Creative Writing Nonfiction Collective, and established The Writer’s Studio at Simon Fraser University where per was director of the program from 2001–2012, a TWS Mentor in 2001–2003, 2005, and remains on TWS teaching faculty.In March of 2016, Warland’s Oscar of Between—A Memoir of Identity and Ideas launched Caitlin Press’ new imprint, Dagger Editions. The book evolved from pers new publishing template: an interactive online salon that features excerpts from per manuscript Oscar of Between, guest writers, artist’s work, and lively comments from readers. Oscar of Between was the basis for Lloyd Burritt’s chamber opera, The Art of Camouflage in 2018, which will be performed in the Indie Opera West festival (Vancouver) in 2020. Lost Lagoon/lost in thought is Warland’s most recent book, published in Winter 2020.

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“The first time I read Bloodroot, I was astounded. The book’s daring form, ground-breaking at the time, corresponded with the nonlinearity of grief and the fragmented nature of memory and gave a generation of young writers permission to tell their stories in the way they demanded to be told. Twenty-one years later, the beauty and lucidity of Warland’s prose, the artistry in her storytelling, and the boldness of her voice continue to resonate. This book is still astonishing, still heart-opening, and more necessary than ever."
— Ayelet Tsabari, author of The Art of Leaving

“Bloodroot is a deeply moving and evocative memoir, a reminder that death is not a finite moment, but an unsteady process of holding on and letting go. Read the text. Read the white space. Read the silences in between. Every page is marked by Betsy Warland’s presence and precision.”
—Chantal Gibson, author of How She Read

“Betsy Warland’s Bloodroot is a classic in motherloss memoir that reaches every reader where she is in that life-long journey of learning to accept death as part of our lives. Generations have profited from this complex, brilliant, and insightful book. And now with the new edition, Warland offers more—it reunites the original work with its roots.”
—Carolyn Gammon

"What makes Bloodroot a precious reading is the path it follows from facts to memory and fragments of oneself, to thoughts creating and assembling enough proofs to "untell a (her) mother" and compose a viable relation to the truth."
—Nicole Brossard, poet, novelist and essayist, author of Mauve Desert

Reading Bloodroot, a thrilling accomplishment of craft, intellect and intuition, I relived my own process of motherlessness. And Warland’s narrative of motherloss is a process, though not linear, of storytelling. Bloodroot’s narrative offers us its own companionship, its own collusion with us as our mothers die.”
—Myrna Kostash, based in Edmonton, author of Ghosts That Walk the Parkland