Writer who has ‘thrived in Saskatchewan,’ saluted for his contributions to the arts
At the bottom of a thick file labelled “Mitchell, Ken,” from the Leader-post’s in-house library, there’s a yellowed “obituary form” dated May 1964.
In the event of a person’s death, this was the pertinent information. When a long-gone staff librarian created this typewritten page, there wasn’t much to note.
Ken Mitchell had nothing on his record by way of artistic endeavours.
That quickly changed.
Now 77, Mitchell has had a fivedecade career as a playwright and novelist.
He has published six novels and written about two dozen plays. He was the founding editor of Grain magazine in 1973. He taught English at the University of Regina and elsewhere. In 1993, he was in charge of the first-ever Cathedral Village Arts Festival.
He became a member of the Order of Canada in 1999; in 2001, he received the Saskatchewan Order of Merit, and in 2002 the Queen’s Golden Jubilee Medal.
But the latest accolade on his list he appreciates most: He will receive the lieutenant-governor’s lifetime achievement award at the Saskatchewan Arts Awards on Oct. 25.
“I’m just excited, happy that the Arts Board recognized what I’m doing in the province,” Mitchell said Tuesday morning at the Mackenzie Art Gallery, after an event announcing the nominees.
For a small audience that included a few other nominees, he recited his poem The Missouri Coteau, an ode to Saskatchewan from the perspective of a world-travelling “vagabond” named Ol’ Slim.
“If you seek a vista that will calm your achin’ eyes,
“Just come up here and stretch out on the Land of Living Skies.”
“Why I wrote that was to put a picture into what I felt about life,” Mitchell explained.
“I’ve expanded it in different ways with some of the books that I’ve done and whatnot, but this poem, which I first wrote about 20 or 30 years ago, was to centre on Saskatchewan.”
In books, plays, poems, film scripts, documentaries and oral presentations, Mitchell has told stories of this province — with cowboys in the mix often enough.
“I was a university professor, but I always talked about cowboys, you might say,” said Mitchell, who taught for 37 years at the U of R.
There was a country opera called Cruel Tears in the 1970s, which was set to music by Humphrey and the Dumptrucks. It premiered at Persephone in Saskatoon, and the Globe Theatre restaged it in 1999.
He wrote about Tom Sukanen, the immigrant who built a ship, hoping to sail back to Finland.
He wrote about Nicholas Flood Davin in The Politician, a play staged at the Globe and the Regina Little Theatre.
He wrote about Dr. Norman Bethune in Gone the Burning Sun.
In The Hounds of Notre Dame, a 1980 film, Rev. Athol Murray was his subject.
A couple on a railway platform, Gabriel Dumont, cowboy poet Bill Gomersall — Mitchell found inspiration in many a Saskatchewan character.
“There’s a play in everything,” he said in 1999.
But his favourite story has nothing to do with this province.
At the time his novel, Stones of the Dalai Lama, was released in 1993, he said: “I didn’t want to get pegged like that as the kid from Moose Jaw who didn’t write anything else. I felt I wanted to do this, felt I had something to say.”
The novel was based on his meeting with the Dalai Lama in India the decade before.
“That’s probably the one I’m most proud of. It may not be the best one, but I really liked going and doing that,” Mitchell said Tuesday. “I like to travel the world.” He added, “I was born in Saskatchewan, I lived in Saskatchewan, I thrived in Saskatchewan. I still do. I don’t plan to go anywhere else, but I like to discover what other countries do and other families do.”
I think the oral tradition of storytelling is often overlooked by writers in a rush to get into print.
Mitchell, who was raised on a ranch just south of Moose Jaw, said he has no plans to write more books. Poetry is his focus.
“It’s at the top of my mind now because it’s magic,” he said. Orating is a longtime love. “I think the oral tradition of storytelling is often overlooked by writers in a rush to get into print,” he said in 1973.
“To read or to tell a story to an audience is, on the other hand, to work with an added dimension … all of the oral elements of a story thatmaybemissedbyareader.it amounts to a performance of the work by the author, almost a threedimensional literature. It can be very exciting.”
Mitchell said his love of words dates back to university, when he “flunked out” of Ryerson in Toronto — too many parties — then studied English at the University of Saskatchewan, Regina campus.
During his early years in Regina, he worked as a “rewrite man” at the Leader-post.
He stopped by looking for a job on his way home from Toronto.
“I’d like to become a writer,” he told the boss.
“Yeah, well what can you do?” “I can do cowboy poetry and things like that,” Mitchell remembers replying.
“Start tomorrow.”
Those obituary forms, he says, he remembers well.