Julie R. Enszer

Since the events of January 6th, I have been struggling with how to respond. What should engaged citizens and residents do when democracy is under attack, particularly amid a global pandemic? Perhaps I have been struggling since quarantine began in March and April of 2020. Maybe I have been struggling since the election in November of 2016. Perhaps even longer. It is hard to pinpoint when the struggle began. Maybe you, too, have been feeling similarly? Through these struggles, I have been reading, particularly poetry. Recent books remind of one powerful aspect of poetry by queer and lesbian women: the call […]

Betsy Warland’s new book Oscar of Between: A Memoir of Identity and Ideas travels seven years, multiple countries, and three continents. Vibrant and pulsating with life, Oscar of Between, like Warland’s other works, demonstrates Warland’s multiple engagements with crucial—and contemporary—literary, political, and aesthetic questions. Warland is a prolific writer and formidable intellectual. Her oeuvre includes ten collections of poetry, two co-written with her then-lover and collaborator Daphne Marlatt. Warland’s memoir, Bloodroot: Tracing the Untelling of Motherloss, blends the narrative impulse of prose with a poetic sensibility like Oscar of Between. Her 2010 writing manual, Breathing the Page: Reading the Act […]

At a writers’ conference, Nancy Bereano, the publisher of Firebrand Books from 1985-2000, suggested that the current popularity of memoir as a genre could be traced to the work of feminist writers and feminist publishing. I agree. Feminist writers changed the memoir and creative non-fiction and Bereano’s Firebrand Books was on the cutting-edge of these changes. Bereano published Mab Segrest’s My Mama’s Dead Squirrel, Minnie Bruce Pratt’s S/HE, Beth Brant’s Food and Spirit, and Barrie Jean Borich’s first collection, Restoring the Color of Roses. Each of these books altered how readers understood story-telling, including what stories are worth telling. One […]