Mitchell: The Life of W.O. Mitchell: The Years of Fame, 1948–1998

Pauline Carey is an actor, playwright, and fiction writer. She is the
author of Magic and What’s in a Name?

This second part of a biography written by Mitchell’s son and
daughter-in-law covers the years after the success of Who Has Seen the
Wind. It is chockablock with activity in teaching; performing; writing
for radio, stage, and screen; and the creation of the novels that the
authors consider his greatest achievement. It completes the life story
of a hugely popular writer without stinting on his many struggles and
disappointments, and it embraces 50 years of Canada’s cultural
development.

Mitchell said his first love was playwriting, but Canada had few
theatres when he started out; what it did have was radio, where his
six-year series of Jake and the Kid proved to be a lifelong source of
income. In the 1960s, Mitchell’s much-loved solo stage performances
added another lucrative string to his bow, but also led filmmaker Robert
Duncan to suggest Mitchell had wasted his talent by performing when he
could have been writing. Doug Gibson (Mitchell’s editor) defended him,
Robert Fulford praised his contributions as a teacher, and Kildare Dobbs
saw no problem with a life spent telling stories as ancient bards did.

Mitchell not only told stories with heart and humour, he also was an
innovative teacher who encouraged students to start their work with the
senses rather than with technical criteria. As head of the Banff School
of Fine Arts writing program, he promoted the initial search for
“sensuous fragments and telling details” that became known as his
free-fall method. The young writer, he believed, must always start “in
very private sea caves.”

The book is replete with the authors’ personal memories and
professional critiques (Ormond is an English professor at Trent, Barbara
a freelance writer), descriptions of Mitchell’s works, and
contributions from friends, colleagues, students, and Mitchell himself
with his ever-supportive wife, Merna. It was a life of hard work and
hard play, exacerbated toward the end by ill health, but culminating in
the extraordinary output of several books in the last years of his life.
Through the well-told tale runs the humour, sometimes coarse, always
real.