W.O. Mitchell’s fictions are usually rooted in family, charged with some form of parent-child dynamic. It is appropriate enough, then, that the first Mitchell biography should be co-written by his son and daughter-in-law and that they recreate the father within a pattern of domestic tensions in which the biographers themselves emerge as the latest generation in the family narrative. The sense of Mitchell emerging from a family dialogue is reinforced by polyphonic narration, including the biographers’ shared authorial voice, the voices of Mitchell and others quoted at length in the text, and a separate, italicized, first-person “memoir voice” attributable variously to Orm or Barbara, or to both.
Barbara and Orm Mitchell, both published Mitchell scholars, enjoyed the advantage of access not only to published and archival sources, but also to family papers, years of lived experience with their subject, and more than 60 hours of personal interviews taped with their...
Dick Harrison’s writings about W.O. Mitchell include W.O. Mitchell and His Works (ECW Press, 1991), Intimations of Mortality: W.O. Mitchell’s Who Has Seen the Wind (ECW Press, 1993) and “Images of Transgression: The Threat of Sexuality in W.O. Mitchell’s Fiction” in Magic Lies: The Art of W.O. Mitchell (University of Toronto Press, 1997).
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