Literary Arts - Alberta Foundation for the Arts

Last October, the Calgary literary community honoured its favourite son, W.O. Mitchell, with an evening of readings, appreciation, memories and, ultimately, love.

On the podium, telling tales to a full house that evening, was as unlikely a collection of nationally drawn figures as you're apt to find in these parts. There was his Toronto publisher and editor, Douglas Gibson, whose working relationship with W.O. spanned more than a quarter-century and two publishing houses.

Calgary singer/songwriter James Keelaghan offered a selection of prairie-inspired songs. Saskatoon author David Carpenter, who first studied with Mitchell at the University of Alberta in the '70s, told a W.O. lost taxi-driver story—complete with Mitchellian cackled voice and verbal hesitations—that brought down the house.

Acting as master of ceremonies for the whole event was unabashed W.O. fan Peter Gzowski, who throughout his tenure as host of This Country in the Morning and Morningside raised the radio profile of the author through interviews, readings and the occasional re-broadcast of Mitchell's radio series from the '50s, Jake and the Kid.

In Peter Gzowski's Book About This Country in the Morning, published in 1974, Gzowski wrote this by way of introduction to the author who brought the West to the rest: "When I grow up, I want to be Paul Hiebert. On the way to growing up, I want to be W.O. Mitchell."

On this night, he introduced the author, absent from the proceedings due to a progressively bad bout of prostate cancer, in a wonderfully graduated paean: "Some Canadian writers are more honoured. There are some who are richer, some who have sold more books and some who are better known around the world."

Then, after a pause for applause from the 800 in the house, he added: "But there is no writer in this country who is better loved than W.O. Mitchell."

Ending the evening was diminutive Merna Mitchell, W.O.'s self-described "creative partner" for more than 50 years, his wrangler, his first reader and listener on all things literary, and his wife. Merna read W.O.'s performance piece, Take One Giant Step, a rumination on old age and the blossoming of a boy into manhood. She had the author's pauses and idiosyncratic expression intact, and it was like watching a shorter version of the master spinning the yarn.

Afterwards, she was floating on air. "I always wondered what that would be like," she told me, a look of relief and the thrill of the chase on her face. "I should have taken that up long ago."

Actually, she had—for you have to know that whatever pauses W.O. had put there in the writing, Merna likely had counselled him on their location in the reading. Or perhaps it was the other way around, the Mitchells were that close and entwined.

W.O. Mitchell died on February 25, after a five-year fight with cancer. I learned of his death while on vacation in Quebec City, and like many in the Canadian literary "tribe," as the late Margaret Laurence was wont to describe it, I had expected his demise. We had long been hearing of turns for the worse, of pending arrangements, of a canned CBC Radio obituary being prepared as early as last October for the day when he would be taken from us.

Still, for those who knew him as our teacher, mentor and guide, it remained one of life's dirty tricks.

When I first met him in a creative writing class at the University of Alberta in 1973, I was well on my way to a career in law. Or so I thought. My parents had been dead-set against my following my muse to journalism. And as mathematics and science were alien worlds, they felt law was the only choice that paid for someone whose expertise leaned to literature.

In the end, I fooled everyone by teaching elementary school, and then moving to fiction writing and arts journalism.

W.O. changed my life. A lot of his former students say that now. He didn't so much teach us how to become writers and better readers as show us how not to ignore the tangents of life. He called his writing technique the "free fall approach." Others felt that "Mitchell's Messy Method" was a far better descriptor.

Whatever you called it, you were allowed a licence never offered in grade school. Rather than becoming ensnared in the standard progression of a story, with its reliance on beginning, middle and end, W.O. invited us to examine instead the twists and turns that presented themselves.

And so began our apprenticeship, a scary change of life that offered no guarantees, and took no prisoners. It was an invitation, too, that we write "every day, every week, every month, every year," explore our "private sea caves," and examine the "litmus years" of our youths.

It was a marvellously inefficient method of writing. Grammar and spelling fell by the wayside. Two-thirds of your work was utterly useless, but of the gold you mined at the end of it, how much would have been attained through a conventional digging?

This was "life lumber," as W.O. called it, the basic building blocks of fiction. And as one who studied at his feet at the U of A and the Banff School of Fine Arts, and then attempted to teach his method at the elementary school level, I can tell you it was not only a good approach for writing, but a prescription for life itself. Where else were you told that the side roads were the ones to honour the most? And where else were you told to consider—and trust—your inner life?

Not all of his students readily took to free fall. Some felt it was a waste of time, and that the rest of us were likely to turn into "Mitchell's mutants," never to publish an insightful word for the rest of our careers. However, it did work. From my class of 76 at the Banff School, three very different writers have gone on to highly successful careers: young-adult and historical fiction writer Joan Clark; the mystery writer L.R. Wright, she of the series featuring RCMP Staff Sergeant Karl Alberg—we knew her as Bunny that summer; and Diane Schoemperlen, shortlisted for a Governor General's Award for her 1990 book, The Man of My Dreams.

Others from the class of '76 also find themselves in careers earned by the pen: University of Alberta Press publisher Glenn Rollans, Calgary filmmaker Wendy Hill-Tout, and my predecessor as books editor at The Edmonton Journal, Lynne Van Luven, who now heads the writing department at the University of Victoria.

So many former students now litter the literary landscape that many observers have come to see W.O.'s major life's work was not necessarily the creation of a prairie fiction, as he did in giving the West a cantakerously poetic voice in 1947 with Who Has Seen the Wind. Rather, it was his active encouragement to do what he did: tell us stories about ourselves.

With W.O.'s passing, we have lost a teacher and mentor. His books certainly remain, a body of work that will no doubt be picked over by scholars and readers. W.O. arguably gave the West its first true foothold in the imaginations of other parts of Canada. Yes, he seemed to say, we do have characters out here— people who are our people—and landscape unlike the rest of the country. More than anything else, though, we have our own mythology, and here's a taste. But now missing is a fatherly voice of guidance at once strident, ribald and, yes, so very, very necessary.

This is why the $15,000 W.O. Mitchell Literary Prize was established and, indeed, announced on that evening last October in Calgary. The award has a double purpose in that it honours not only a skilled writer, but one who has given back to the literary community through the teaching and nurturing of new talent. Just like W.O.

And so, while W.O. the unique storyteller is gone, the stewardship of his mentoring has been handed over to writers like Jack Hodgins, Alistair MacLeod and Sharon Pollock, who served on the inaugural jury for the prize.

The effect of his work on younger writers is not to be discounted either. From my vantage point, at least two Alberta writers—and I'm certain there are more—create the kind of characters that would be near and dear to the heart of a writer like W.O.: Calgary's Fred Stenson (Teeth and Working Without a Laugh Track), and former Lethbridge writer Thomas King (Medicine River; Green Grass, Running Water; and CBC Radio's Dead Dog Cafe).

Those of us who can never forget the effect he had on our lives have some consolation regardless of whether we succeeded in publishing short stories, or whether we kept in touch with him over the years.

For the far-too-short period of my life when he showed me the vastness of what could be, it was like living the best fiction imaginable. I know that in speaking to other writers, I am not alone.

The morning after his death, I sent Merna Mitchell a card that read: "I hold him in my heart." It was the warmest place I could find.