read the article on Mitchell’s induction into the Order of Canada
read Ken Mitchell’s “The Great Electrical Revolution”
read a review of Rebels in Time: Three Plays
return to Ken Mitchell
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Taken from Doris Hillis’ interview with Ken Mitchell in Voices & Visions:

Hillis: Has your family background influenced your writing in any way?

Mitchell: I don’t think I had many literary ancestors. My father was a grain-buyer and elevator agent in Moose Jaw. I have nine brothers and sisters and am the oldest in this huge family. During my early childhood we travelled around a lot in Saskatchewan and Manitoba before finally settling back at Moose Jaw, where my parents took up livestock farming. My family, on both sides, were of peasant stock from Scotland and Ireland, going back for a long time. However, there were two influences relating to literature which may have made themselves felt. One was an aunt of mine ,who was a teacher and encouraged me to read. I can remember her giving me a copy of W. O. Mitchell’s Who Has Seen the Wind and some of Ernest Thompson Seton’s nevels. Similarly, my mother was a prolific reader. She belonged to the Book-of-the-Month Club and received an avalanche of really trachy romantic novels. . . . But, among them wre a number of classics, and I realized later that I’d been reading Boccaccio, Conrad and Dickens when I was twelve years old. I read a great deal, and that made up for my high school education. I don’t think I learned very much in high school except to hate Shakespeare and poetry, which I never got over until I reached University.

Hillis: I wondered if your Scottish/Irish ancestry has been responsible for your love of telling stories?

Mitchell: Could be. But my family on both sides are farm people from the hills south of Moose Jaw and I think rural people do a lot of story-telling. They have social rituals – weddings, family picnics, reunions . . . and the communicate their attitudes about ther culture and the world in general through anecdotes and outrageous, exaggerated stories. They make jokes about each other. I think I learned story-telling at a very early age, sitting around in that informal family circle.

Hillis: From the oral tradition.

Mitchell: Yes. . . . And I think the strength of prairie writing comes from the rural, and essentially oral, tradition or story-telling. Almost alll the short stories I’ve written are tales in which a central character tells the story. In retrospect, too, I think I was quite fortunate in that I lived in two worlds when I was growing up. We lived on the edge of Moose Jaw, so that my experiences were both urban and rural. I went to school in the city and had an urban social life, but I also grew up with farm experience – riding a horse, butchering cattle, doing hard physical work. . . . After a while, I realized I didn’t like farm life and wanted to escape it. That prompted me to pursue an intellectual life.

Hillis: It is surprising that a great many writers – yourself, Jim McLean, Geoffrey Ursell, Barbara Sapergia, Gary Hyland and Robert Currie – are all from Moose Jaw, and many from the South Hill area. And you all write of your Moose Jaw experience.

Mitchell: An odd phenomenon, and I’ve no explanation for it, except that Moose Jaw is, and always was, a very interesting place. Moose Jaw was an anomaly in Saskatchewan . . . an industrial town in an agricultural setting. In its early years it was a “red light” city, and later, a union hotbed, long before there was union strength anywhere else in Saskatchewan. So, to grow up in Moose Jaw was to live with a lot of contradictions. Maybe that’s justifying the irrationalism of the place.

Hillis: Have you always been interested in English literature? Did you take an English degree at the University of Regina?

Mitchell: I was actually a sociology student when I went to University. Before that, I had worked in journalism for three or four years and discovered I had a facility for writing, but felt I lacked something without a University education. Sociology, for me, was a way of finding out about the world. Then, the first English class I took was from a great teacher, Les Crossman. He made me realize the importance of poetry, and why Shakespeare wrote those plays. His insights came as a kind of revelation. And it was my exposure to good writing, and being able to analyse it critically, that led me to study English and to consider creative writing.

Hillis: I see a close connection between your short stories and novels and the English “picaresque” tradition of Thomas Nashe, Henry Fielding, Tobias Smollett and Daniel Defoe. Was this a direct influence on your writing?

Mitchell: Yes. I can recall being introduced to the term picaro by Les Crossman. His model was Mark Twain – Huckleberry Finn, initially – and then Cervantes’s Don Quixote. Also, Crossman included the contemporary novel On The Road by Jack Kerouac in that discussion. I think, unconsciously, I used this pattern of comic writing, which is essentially satirical and full of social criticism, for Wandering Rafferty. My idea was to have Thomas Rafferty and Archie Payne go right across the country so that the different regional setting became part of the symbolism.

Hillis: When you mention Mark Twain I can see influences of the American pattern on your work – the use of two major characters, for instance, in both Wandering Rafferty and The Meadowlark Connection. I imagine it was the dramatic potential of that form that interested you – the playing off of one character against the other.

Mitchell: It’s all part of the picaresque tradition. There’s always the hero and the “side-kick” – Huck and Him, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. What’s fascinating is the way the relationship between the two main characters changes and develops through the course of their advertures.

Hillis: And do you think you achieve this growth in Wandering Rafferty?

Mitchell: Yes. That’s what makes it an interesting novel – the unexpected things that begin to happen in the relationship between Rafferty and Archie. The incidents in that story change the perceptions of the narrator. This dimension of time and travel through the distance affects the development of the characters.

Hillis: So many of your characters are great travellers. They’re wanderers, always moving from place to place. Do you think they reflect your own personality? Is there a lot of “Wandering Rafferty” in your soul?

Mitchell: I’m sure there is. That’s probably why I took up writing. My first love is travel. I like to be in other places to have experiences there. And I have this fantasy of being able to go wherever I want, taking the skills of writing with me, in my head, so that I can be an itinerant writer and story-teller and make my living wherever I go. I like to pick and choose my environment and not be restricted by economic conditions and obligations. In retrospect, I find it quite amazing that I have been able to do this, considering I’ve been married three times and have family and yet haven’t been nailed down! I take them with me and move around. I like living in other countries, discovering their culture . . . although I rarely write of these from an authobiographical viewpoint.

Hillis: Travelling, then, has become a way of life.

Mitchell: And it also helps me get a perspective of what’s going on in Canada . . . gives me greater insight.

Hillis: What was your connection with the Saskatchewan Summer School of the Arts at Fort San?

Mitchell: It was a revitalization job. The Summer School had started in the early 1950s, as I recall, but by 1970 the writing program had declined. I was chairman of the newly-formed Saskatchewan Writers’ Guild at that time and traveled round the province with Jean Freeman, the Literary Consultant of the Saskatchewan Arts Board, surbeying the situation. Then we set up one class for writers at the SSSA and it was successful, so we added more. During the five years I worked at he SSSA we instituted poetry and fiction classes, had many guest instructors, and some excellent students such as Gertrude Story and Lois Simmie, who have since made a name for themselves as writers.

Hillis: I would like to ask you about your poetry. Most of it is narrative poetry, isn’t it? Quite a bit comes from your boyhood memories of Moose Jaw. What interested me was the way you published these poems as broadsheets under the imprint Pile of Bones. My mind went back to the pamphleteers of Tudor and Stuart London – such writers as Thomas Nashe, Thomas Dekker and Robert Greene, writers who reflected and satirized the social milieu of their day. And those prose pamphlets were often sold for a few pence.

Mitchell: That was the model. It was an experiment. My wife Roula was the publisher of Pile of Bones, which had successfully published two books. We wanted to try something with the poems that was consistent with my attitude towards poetry, which is basically populist. I like poetry to be direct and in the oral tradition. That is, I work on them through telling them. I do them in performance mainly. Very few get published. So they generally refine themselves, not on the typewriter, but out of performance. And thus, it seemed an appropriate way to publish them as broadsheets, portable documents that could be given out after a performance and sold for two bits apiece. I very soon learned which poems were reaching people.

Hillis: When you started writing plays, did you work with Ken and Sue Kramer of the Globe Theatre?

Mitchell: Not in any formal way. Sue Kramer was interested in me because I was a local writer. But the first theatre piece I worked on was with them – an adaptation of Arnold Wesker’s Roots. I told them that to adapt it successfully, we’d have to put the whole play into a Saskatchewan dialect. So I made a kind of “translation,” and it turned out to be quite a successful production. I even got some reflected glory from Wesker’s play. More importantly, that experience helped me understand dramatic structure. And, secondly, I had a role in the production. One of the conditions of working on it was that I be there through rehearsals and make changes and adaptations –to see and feel how a play worked. I had already done some amateur acting and found this stage work very valuable in my development as a playwright . . . especially working with an audience. It’s difficult to write plays outside the theatre. And it’s been a great disappointment to me that I haven’t been able to develop a relationship with a theatre like the Globe . . . because I think that’s how the best plays are written.

Hillis: Well, I guess that’s the way Shakespeare did it. How about collaboration with other playwrights?

Mitchell: I have recently worked with Geoffrey Ursell and Barb Sapergia on a centennial celebration called Is There Anybody Here From Moose Jaw? I found that very satisfying. It was a show, not a play. Very much a celebration of that eccentricity and strange state of mind that is Moose Jaw.

Hillis: I notice that many of your plays are about lively, flamboyant men, some who are historical figures, almost legends, such as Nicholas Davin, the politician, Father Athol Murray of Notre Dame College, Wilcox, and Norman Bethune.

Mitchell: I found their lives made good stories because they were full of adventure. They were suitable material for drama. At first, I was rather reluctant to do work on father Murray for producer Fil Fraser, but after I researched him and talked to people who knoew him well, I became more interested in his character. I could see in it the sort of contradictions, dualtities and ambiguities that create good drama. I think it became a worthwhile screenplay. You need that kind of astringent personality. . . .

Hillis: All the plays I’ve mentioned are about astringent personalities.

Mitchell: Yes. They’re admirable for their strength, power, ambition. But they’re also flawed, usually by arrogance . . . and they’re somewhat eccentric personalities, if not actually rebels against established society. I rather like that defiant attitude. Grandad in my short story “The Great Electric Revolution” was a similar character to Athol Murray in the Hounds of Notre Dame: the little man ragin against “the powers that be,” taking on the whole universe. Well, I admire that – and I think the West in Canadian mythology is largely composed of that kind of character as hero . . . from Louis Riel onward.

Hillis: What should a play do?

Mitchell: I have a strong belief in the need to entertain. I think that is the first requirement of a playwright. The play must be intrinsically dramatic, interesting, funny, moving – all of those things. Only secondarily should a theme, a message or intellectual commitment present itself through te material . . . and I, personally, am less concerned with ideas than emotions.

Excerpt from Voices and Visions: Interviews With Saskatchewan Writers by Doris Hillis. Regina: Coteau Books, 1985. pp. 194-201
Used by permission.

read the article on Mitchell’s induction into the Order of Canada
read Ken Mitchell’s “The Great Electrical Revolution”
read a review of Rebels in Time: Three Plays
return to Ken Mitchell
return to Spotlights