12 or 20 (second series) questions with Sean Dixon

Sean Dixon grew up in a family of 12, including his 8 siblings, parents and a grandmother, through several Ontario towns, predisposing him to tell stories about groups of people thrown together in common cause. His debut novel, The Girls Who Saw Everything, was named one of Quill & Quire’s best of the year. His previous books include The Many Revenges of Kip Flynn, The Feathered Cloak, and the plays Orphan Song and the Governor General’s Award nominated A God In Need of Help. A recent children’s picture book, The Family Tree, was inspired by his experience of creating a family through adoption with his wife, the documentarian Kat Cizek.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

I had a big bereavement when I was a child. I lost my 15-year-old brother when I was ten to a swift, horrible factory accident. It was a defining moment for me and it governed my life choices well into adulthood. Some months after I published The Girls Who Saw Everything — I don’t know how else to describe this — I felt all that grief leave my body. I knew the Epic of Gilgamesh held this kind of power all on its own, and I do believe that’s why I became obsessed with it, but I didn't know that my embodying and retelling of it would have such a life-altering effect on me.

It wasn’t an entirely positive feeling either: I didn't know who I was anymore. I had always loved the unchanging, wise, sad child that had grown up inside of me. I had always felt I had known death and was not afraid of it. Now suddenly, unexpectedly, I was like every other life-loving fool. I was no longer Max von Sydow in The Seventh Seal, but rather just the strolling player with his family and his wagon. Faced with grieving people I was just as tongue tied, bewildered and stammery as any normal, well-adjusted person. And, worst of all, I was afraid of dying too. Just like everyone else.

It was awful. I used to have a kind of wisdom. Now it’s gone. Though I will add that the up side of offloading all that wisdom was I was finally able to contemplate raising a child of my own. What happens when you don’t think you’re about to leave all the time.

So I guess the answer is my first book changed my life because it made me less afraid to be a parent.

My daughter asked me to read my latest book to her. So I did. Then she asked me to read my last one — The Many Revenges of Kip Flynn. My impression, reading them back to back, is that my experience reading thousands of words to my daughter out loud over the last several years has paid off, it’s made me a better writer than I used to be. I don’t add unnecessary details anymore. I seem to have a better understanding of what to put in and what to leave out.

2 - How did you come to writing plays first, as opposed to, say, poetry, fiction or non-fiction?

I was trained as an actor at the National Theatre School. In our second year, my class made a project with a Canadian actor from Denmark’s Odin Teatret named Richard Fowler for which we were asked to create short physical scenes using text and props, etc, where the meaning could be entirely personal and did not have to be communicated to the audience. This was a liberating exercise for us, a particularly shy bunch of acting students.

Then I observed, with great fascination, as Richard took our scenes, ordered them, combined some of them, changed a few details, snipped a few bits, and created something resembling a narrative with them. He called it “a process in search of a meaning.” It gave me insight into how you could generate a practice of creating raw material without necessarily knowing how you were going to use it. Our physical bodies provided the raw material, but I realized that material could have been anything, could have come from anywhere.

When my class graduated, we formed a company, Primus Theatre, and made a collective creation called Dog Day that we had begun in third year, still working with Richard Fowler. While in school, I had written some material for Dog Day in a ‘storyteller’ voice that I wanted to expand beyond the parameters of that creation. While waiting for the Dog Day rehearsals to get underway, I wrote a monologue play called Falling Back Home that ended up being a sort of tragedy about a spinner of tales who suffers from the delusion that every story he dreams up is true, no matter how outlandish. By the time the Primus company got underway, I was feeling the pull of responsibility to the script of Falling Back Home so much that the new company felt like a distraction from my true priorities. So I quit the company. It was an interesting decision: I was leaving behind my best friends, great dinners, the opportunity to travel to Denmark and Italy and meet hundreds of passionate and interesting people because I wanted to have more time to sit in my room and write.

So that’s how I started, but the experience gave me the tools to create a larger work of any kind: plays were just my entry point. My father has always been a big novel-reader, so it was the great desire for me to do that but I was so, so afraid that I never would. When I finally started, adapting my oversized stage play The Girls Who Saw Everything, I spent eight months writing constantly, always fearing that I would quit at any moment. But I had the grid of the story-as-a-play to keep me going.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

I get an idea, an image, and I tell myself it’s never going to happen. (Currently I’m not going to write a modern version of Apuleius’s Golden Ass and I’m definitely not going to write a stage variation of Achilles sulking in his tent, standing in for all the grievances of men.)

I think my first drafts have a real shape. But they’re a mess on the sentence level. I dispute the idea that you have to build a work via one perfect sentence at a time — Donna Tartt writing The Little Friend. I’m more interested — to use an artist analogy — in sketching out the proportions of the full figure and then going back and filling in the details. If you don’t do that, I think it becomes very hard to throw things away, which is a necessary part of writing a larger work, and it can be very hard to tell a full story that feels proportionally satisfying to the reader. You’re reading and you feel you’ve passed the beginning and now you’re moving into the middle, and now you’ve hit the peak and now you’ve passed the peak. To use the artist analogy again: you haven’t committed to a nose too large and a forehead too small.

But then, once that is done, I think I really need some help from an editor saying now look this sentence here: it’s a mess. And this one, and this one.

4 - Where does a play or work of prose usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

I’ve always thought of a play as something I can write to inspire and challenge a group of people — something that would be fun for a little community of people to do. My impression is that most playwrights don’t start from this impulse. With a novel, the impulse is more private. I want to explore this world by myself.

With The Girls Who Saw Everything, I was initially challenged to write a play for the women of a repertory theatre company in Montreal that was concentrating on the classics and so there weren’t a lot of parts for them. All the great parts were for the men. So I set out to create a meaty part for every single one of them.

The younger founder of the company loved the play but the older one decided not to pursue it. I’m not sure, but my theory is that he misconstrued the heightened aspect of my characters for mockery. The play was doomed by that point, too large for Canadian theatres, although it did get a second life as a theatre school exercise.

Then, when I rewrote it as a novel, I dove in to what the Gilgamesh epic meant to me, all the personal stuff that came into my mind while I was working on the play but had no performative outlet. The last third of the novel — when the characters find themselves following the old Nindawayma ferry ship across the world to a scrapyard in the Persian Gulf — is a complete departure from the play, and I suppose it renders the play out of date. It provides a much more satisfying ending, at least. It made me realize that it can take a long time to find a really good ending for a story.

For my most recent novel, I suppose I set out to explore what had thwarted my teenage impulse to make visual art. I wanted to feel again the joy that I had felt when I used to do that kind of work.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

I love them. I think I’m good at them, but I also think that audiences who go to public readings are so super attentive (compared to theatre audiences, say) that they don’t ascribe a lot of value to whether the reader is a good performer or not. The entertainment value is just a side benefit. So my talent for it doesn't really stand out, it seems to me, except in the eyes of people who really care for that sort of thing. I remember once I tried to behave like a regular, mature writer at a public reading. An old friend admonished me afterwards for trying to behave like everyone else. Ever since then, I’ve stopped worrying about it.

My favourite public reading experience, though, remains a children’s reading at the Ottawa festival, in a packed space. A library, I think? I was promoting The Feathered Cloak, I think. I can’t recall who introduced me but they mentioned that I played the banjo. So all the kids were asking about the banjo. But I had not brought my banjo. I thought that would let me off the hook, but then, during the question period, someone asked me if I would sing a song without the banjo. I sang an old Scottish a Capella ballad called The Blackbird Song and then got mobbed. It was unbelievable. I felt like Taylor Swift.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

I think I’ve always held on to that idea from my youth of the process in search of a meaning. what that idea means to me now, is: I sense that, as a very dull person who only finds depth — gratefully, humbly — when I’m in conversation with a searching, thoughtful, charming, vibrant, observant person that is not me, I have no choice but to try to conjure such voices out of the world that surrounds me when I write. I try to be attentive to serendipities that provide the raw material and can then be sketched lightly into my work, and later hammered home. Perhaps that is gobbledeegook. I look for the questions. I don’t think they’re inside me. It has to be a conversation with the world.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

I do think the writer has a responsibility to cultivate alternative points of view. My alt pov has always been a celebration of the imagination, so I can see how that is not as important as explorations of culture and class.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

Not difficult. Certainly essential. But also: celebratory. I loved working with Liz Johnston on The Abduction of Seven Forgers. I recall a time when I was trying to convey something a little otherworldly, wherein my storyteller was catching a magician in the middle of a mind-boggling sleight of hand. Liz kept writing back that she didn't see it, she didn't get it. I think I rewrote that passage four or five times before I got it right. And I trusted her judgement 100%.

I also like to write about groups of people. My bio addresses that. It can be tricky to keep the reader’s comprehension when you have several names flying around. Liz was instrumental in helping me clarify and distinguish the introduction and follow-through of all those voices.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

I love the line from The Misanthrope (I think) that got retooled in a French Moliere biopic to be more pointed advice to the writer: “Time has nothing to do with the matter.”

And, along with it: do not hurry, do not wait.

How I interpret these fragments: you might come up with the essence of your work, the rosetta stone, in five minutes — but it’s a burning a nub that will warm your hands through a hundred thousand exploratory words. An image can drop so deep that whole chapters will pour out in joyful plumbing of it. Other times, you might spend days and days just trying to catch something that’s just around the corner. Time has nothing to do with the matter.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (playwriting to fiction)? What do you see as the appeal?

To summarize: I see playwriting as more of a social impulse and fiction as more of a private impulse. But Daniel Brooks once said that theatre is a young person’s game, and I’m finding this to be more and more the case. I know fewer and fewer people who are making theatre, which means eventually, inevitably, there will be no one left who wants to play with me. So I suspect, if I want to keep writing in a way that feels meaningful, it will have to be from the more private impulse.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

Every time I fall in love with a routine, I always mourn it when it’s over and it takes awhile before I realize that I’ve just started a new routine. But I don’t write at all when I’m worried about the basic welfare of my loved ones. And that catatonia can sometimes go on for months, during which time I start thinking I need to become a gardener, or a tree-pruner, or a teacher, or a plumber.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

Ovid. The Golden Legend. Pu Songling’s Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio. A lot of obscure classics like the first poems in English or the Carmina Burana. A series of poetry and photo collections that were published in the 60s and 70s that my educator father acquired, called Voices, edited by Geoffrey Summerfield, printed on durable paper. One day I will return to Gilgamesh. Zombie. Troy. Superstition. The first Rickie Lee Jones album never gets old. Get Out of My House from The Dreaming. Running Up That Hill. I aspire to write like those Kate Bush songs, which are rigorous in adhering to their own interior logic. Self-contained. AWOO by the Hidden Cameras. That first album by Joanna Newsom, which I have not heard in awhile because she doesn't stream.

Florence and the Machine. Lhasa. The Waters of March. Halo. Walking in Memphis. Tracy Chapman, HAIM.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Old pee in the panel-board, sadly. And pine needles.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

Yes. The Abduction of Seven Forgers was, for me, a joyful exercise in celebrating the influences of visual art.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

Is it okay if I link to this essay I wrote?

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

Honestly? I’d like to front a band as a vocalist. No instrument hanging off me. I want to dress up, ostentatiously, Prince-like, and dance and sing. If I woke up tomorrow in the body of a 20 year old, that is what I would do, no question.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

I’m often haunted by the fact that I looked into the architecture program at the university of Waterloo while I was a first year theatre student there, and realized that my course list from Grade 13 read like I had planned to enrol. But I was dissuaded by the seven year long program. Well and a theatre colleague of mine had suffered a nervous breakdown while attending that program. That scared me away too. It’s one of the reasons I set out to explore what it means to have a visual imagination as a writer with The Abduction of Seven Forgers.

When I was a kid I loved Farley Mowat and wanted to be a marine biologist. I’m recalling that because I’m currently reading some of his books to my daughter. I was dissuaded from marine biology when I heard you spend most of the time in a laboratory, not in the field. But I’ve come to realize that this is true about everything. As a writer, I spend most of my time in the laboratory too.

But if I were just coming of age right now, though, I suspect I’d want to go fight forest fires. Maybe I’d convince my backup band to fight forest fires with me, while we’re not doing gigs.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

Being a middle child in a very loud and opinionated family that drowned me out. The thought that ‘brainstorming’ inevitably meant going with someone else’s idea. The fact that my father has always been a voracious reader and always had a book at hand. The fact the my elder brother—five years senior to me, who was my mentor in all things—died when I was ten. I was trying to write a story that morning, before I learned that he had died. An SF story called ‘The Circle’ about a time-traveller who loops back to — well, I don’t even know because I never finished it.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

I loved Malicroix, by Henri Bosco. I loved The Corner That Held Them and Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner. I loved Tarka the Otter. I’d like to find another animal novel that consumes me as much as that one did.

I want to read that Canadian book about the forest fire fires. Western writer, yes?

I’m trying to read Pip Adams’ The New Animals. I am bridling against its rigorous realism despite admiring it greatly. What is wrong with me?

I read two blockbusters recently: Cloud Cuckoo Land and Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow. I admired them but did not love them.

I loved the film about the hawk-healers in India — All That Breathes. I am a sucker for the Guardians of the Galaxy movies — all of them, except maybe the one about the starlord’s dad.

20 - What are you currently working on?

I recently asked a local Toronto theatre to reconsider a three-hander from a few years ago that they rejected. The leadership there has changed so I thought I’d give it another shot. They have offered a reading in early Feb. But I’ve had a look at the script and it truly is a mess. So I’m currently trying to use the limitation of the theme and the actors I requested to write something wholly new.

(As of today I’m failing, though, because a 4^th character has suddenly revealed herself, foiling all my plans.)

12 or 20 (second series) questions;