Conversations with a Dead Man

Mark Abley studied literature at the University of Saskatchewan and, after winning a Rhodes Scholarship, at St. John’s College, Oxford. Among his books are Beyond Forget: Rediscovering the Prairies, Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages, and The Prodigal Tongue: Dispatches from the Future of English. The author of a language column for the Montreal Gazette, he lives in Montreal.

“Mark Abley has undertaken a daunting task: reconciling the Duncan Campbell Scott whose pen inscribed the cultures of Canada’s First Nations in justly celebrated verse, and the same Duncan Campbell Scott who, as the overseer of residential schools and head of Indian Affairs, attempted to erase those same cultures from the pages of history. Abley, a fine poet himself, turns Scott, the bogeyman, into a man of flesh-and-blood, by—in a fine twist—making him into a revenant to be grappled with in regular visitations. The conceit works admirably. Reading ,i>Conversations with a Dead Man, I felt as if I had been waylaid, not by a dour Ottawa bureaucrat, by an Ancient Mariner with the most urgent of tales to tell.” —Taras Grescoe, author of Bottomfeeder and Straphanger“As Canadian biography deepens as a form, it will need books as intrepid, incisive, and compassionate, as this one, and before long Conversations with a Dead Man may be seen as pioneering.” —Charles Foran, author of Mordecai