According To Jake And The Kid

Set in the forties and fifties, these stories take us back to a simpler, gentler world, the one we all like to think we grew up in. The Kid at the centre of the stories is a boy on a Saskatchewan farm “down Government Road from Crocus, which is on the CNR line between Tiger Lily and Conception.” Jake is the hired hand who helps the Kid’s mother run the farm (and who played a huge role in Canadian history, what with capturing “Looie Riel” and all), and who now keeps the Kid abreast of events in the greater world and in Crocus. This is no easy matter, for the stories reveal that Crocus is a town in constant ferment. The Kid’s teacher, Miss Henchbaw, is unfairly dismissed by the school board until her friends fight back in “Will of the People”; Chet Lambert of the Crocus Breeze is hauled into court for comparing George Solway with Malleable Brown’s goat in “The Face Is Familiar,” resulting in a courtroom confrontation unrivalled in the history of Canadian jurisprudence; and “Political Dynamite” shows the men terrified by women curlers threatening to vote en bloc in the upcoming town election to gain equal curling time. The town, of course, is rich not only in disputes but characters, from Repeat Golightly in the barbershop (“One ahead of you, Jake. I say there's one ahead of you”) to Old Man Sherry, the town’s Oldest Inhabitant, who wavers between tributes to Queen Elizabeth and Queen Victoria. Then there’s Old Man Gatenby, brought from death’s door by prolonged exposure to romantic purple prose in “Love’s Wild Magic.” Adding to this rich mixture are the entertainers who come through town: Belva Taskey, the sweet songstress (“Lo! The Noble Redskin!”) and her memorable poetry reading; The Great Doctor Suhzee, the hypnotist; and Professor Noble Winesinger, whose snake-oil remedies have been known to turn his customers black. There are also stories of prejudice against Indians, or against “foreigners” named Kiziw, that in the end remind us of the core of decency at the heart of this collection. Whether the stories are told by Jake or by the Kid, they always speak to our hearts, and provide us with W.O. Mitchell's usual magical mixture of tears and laughter.

Set in the forties and fifties, these stories take us back to a simpler, gentler world, the one we all like to think we grew up in. The Kid at the centre of the stories is a boy on a Saskatchewan farm “down Government Road from Crocus, which is on the CNR line between Tiger Lily and Conception.” Jake is the hired hand who helps the Kid’s mother run the farm (and who played a huge role in Canadian history, what with capturing “Looie Riel” and all), and who now keeps the Kid abreast of events in the greater world and in Crocus. This is no easy matter, for the stories reveal that Crocus is a town in constant ferment. The Kid’s teacher, Miss Henchbaw, is unfairly dismissed by the school board until her friends fight back in “Will of the People”; Chet Lambert of the Crocus Breeze is hauled into court for comparing George Solway with Malleable Brown’s goat in “The Face Is Familiar,” resulting in a courtroom confrontation unrivalled in the history of Canadian jurisprudence; and “Political Dynamite” shows the men terrified by women curlers threatening to vote en bloc in the upcoming town election to gain equal curling time. The town, of course, is rich not only in disputes but characters, from Repeat Golightly in the barbershop (“One ahead of you, Jake. I say there's one ahead of you”) to Old Man Sherry, the town’s Oldest Inhabitant, who wavers between tributes to Queen Elizabeth and Queen Victoria. Then there’s Old Man Gatenby, brought from death’s door by prolonged exposure to romantic purple prose in “Love’s Wild Magic.” Adding to this rich mixture are the entertainers who come through town: Belva Taskey, the sweet songstress (“Lo! The Noble Redskin!”) and her memorable poetry reading; The Great Doctor Suhzee, the hypnotist; and Professor Noble Winesinger, whose snake-oil remedies have been known to turn his customers black. There are also stories of prejudice against Indians, or against “foreigners” named Kiziw, that in the end remind us of the core of decency at the heart of this collection. Whether the stories are told by Jake or by the Kid, they always speak to our hearts, and provide us with W.O. Mitchell's usual magical mixture of tears and laughter.

Jake and his friend, the Kid, on their Saskatchewan farm are part of our history. By way of the pages of Maclean’s, through episode after episode on CBC Radio and later on TV, the lively boy and his cranky old yarn-spinning hero have found their way into the hearts of millions of Canadians. Margaret Laurence wrote about the impact on her: “These stories were among the first that many of us who lived on the prairies had ever read concerning our own people, and our own place and our own time. When grain elevators, gophers, or the sloughs and bluffs of the ‘bald-headed prairie’ were mentioned, there was a certain thrill of recognition. The same applied to the characters who inhabited Crocus. A prevalent feeling on the subject was, as I recall–that’s us; he writing about us.” Laughter and tears, a Christmas Eve blizzard, a lost puppy, and “The Day Jake Made Her Rain” are all to be found in these tales of Crocus, Saskatchewan, along with as richly eccentric a cast of small-town characters as you will meet in a month of Prairie Sundays.

On the eve of the admissions cycle for Manhattan's most exclusive private schools, Alex and Greg have high hopes for their son Jake, a precocious four-year-old who happens to prefer Cinderella to G.I. Joe. But as the process continues, Jake's behavior becomes erratic and perplexing, and other adults in his life start to wonder whether his fondness for dress-up might be cause for concern. The story of a husband and wife struggling to do right by their son, A KID LIKE JAKE is a study of intimacy and parenthood and the fantasies that accompany both.

W.O. Mitchell's "Jake & The Kid" captivated radio audiences in the days before television and enjoyed ratings that rivalled those for the radio broadcasts of the CBC's "Hockey Night in Canada." These homespun tales about the hired hand, Jake Trumper and his sidekick, The Kid, explored very human stories about life on the often cruel Prairies of Saskatchewan in a humorous vein that made a household name for the series across the breadth of Canada. Although he wrote many novels, most notably " Who Has Seen the Wind," featured during the ceremonies at the 2010 Vancouver Olympics, Mitchell was as well known for these folksy plays. They enabled him to hone his writing craft in a mass medium, when few other outlets were available; to tackle social issues of the day with a light hand, and to develop many of the themes he would explore in his later novels. This study analyzes these popular radio plays, their Prairie and literary roots, the production process and their contribution and critical reception.

“A tiny, Goth bike messenger and a high-powered lawyer get on the same elevator, then get each other off when it gets stuck between floors.”

Beginning in the 1890s, reaching its first full realization by modernist writers in the 1920s, and brought to its heyday during the Canadian Renaissance starting in the 1960s, the short story has become Canada's flagship genre. It continues to attract the country's most accomplished and innovative writers today, among them Margaret Atwood, Mavis Gallant, Alice Munro, Carol Shields, and many others. Yet in contrast to the stature and popularity of the genre and the writers who partake in it, surprisingly little literary criticism and theory has been devoted to the Canadian short story. This collection redresses that imbalance by providing the first collection of critical interpretations of a range of thirty well-known and often-anthologized Canadian short stories from the genre's beginnings through the twentieth century. A historical survey of the genre introduces the volume and a timeline comparing the genre's development in Canada, the US, and Great Britain via representative examples completes it. The collection is geared both to specialists in and to students of Canadian literature. For the latter it is of particular benefit that the volume provides not only a collection of interpretations, but a comprehensive introduction to the history of the Canadian short story. Reingard M. Nischik is professor and chair of American Literature at the University of Constance, Germany.