For several years I have been teaching with Betsy Warland through the Vancouver Manuscript Intensive – a cottage industry of mentors working with emerging writers in coffee shops, in our houses, over coffee and wine, keeping the connection simple and non-classroom-like. Betsy is a thought-provoking and unconventional teacher – I love teaching alongside her – and so I was particularly eager to read her new book about writing.

 Breathing the Page, Reading the Act of Writing invites us to experience the dangers, joys and metaphysics of marking the blank page. In Betsy’s hands the act of writing regains its luminous aspect (she quotes several times from Virginia Woolf, and you can feel the influence). 

 The book includes sections on the physical things we use or surround ourselves with: body, pencil, page, table, room, and computer. There are sections on form and process: line, ‘scaffolding,’ (what we put up in the first or second draft, only to take down later), and a section on ‘heartwood’ – this last being a bit like Annie Dillard’s ‘line of blood’ (puncture a good vein and you can write indefinitely). Heartwood is Betsy Warland’s term for the meat at the centre of a piece of writing  – the alive, bucking part you often encounter when you start a project, but which is all too easy to lose track of. She gives pointers for finding your way back to heartwood.

Among my favourite sections is the one on ‘scored space’, which is mainly an exploration of the role empty space plays in a manuscript. “White space,” says Betsy, “is the writers’ medium as much as the black lines of language.” This made me think of how brilliantly Alice Munro uses white space – and in such a non-showing off way – in order to set off vital moments in her stories, particularly her later ones. I found my copy of Open Secrets and turned to “Vandals,” the last story in the book.  “Vandals” is about a mother-like woman, Bea, who sees and doesn’t see the sexual abuse occurring under her nose to fifteen-year-old Liza, and who refuses to play the mother role Liza desperately needs. Munro sets the climactic words up this way:

What Bea has been sent to do, she doesn’t see.

Only Liza sees.

The white space around ‘only Liza sees’ could break your heart. And the implications – of utter, desolate aloneness -- would be quite lost if the two lines were stuck together.

Often I found myself inspired to get writing – and quickly – as I read Betsy’s book. Particularly, this examination of ‘scored space’ got me excited about using (that is, not using!) the empty parts of the page.   

This book also offers wonderful advice on living a writing life, sustaining yourself as a writer, taking possession of stories that others have told you are off limits, and the value of building community. Written with devotion and a Buddhist-like attention (Betsy is, among other things, a practicing Buddhist), Breathing the Page, Reading the Act of Writing  is an inspiring and thought-provoking exploration of writing.

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Excerpts from Breathing the Page, by Betsy Warland: