CBC Book Club asks Sean Dixon about his musical influences

The CBC Book Club is celebrating Words & Music throughout March. And as part of the month-long event, they're asked eight writers to tell them what piece of music (song, artist, album or musical) has had the greatest impact on their writing.

Sean Dixon, author of The Girls Who Saw Everything, spoke about a song that had a great influence on his new novel, The Many Revenges of Kip Flynn:

I'm happy that I didn't know that Kate Bush's 'Get Out of My House' was inspired by Stanley Kubrick's film The Shining when I first fell in love with the song, since it rather seemed to me like an epic take on an old shape-shifting folk-tale or a story from Ovid I'd never heard before. And so it has always stuck with me in a way that might not have happened had I known it was instead a tribute to Jack Nicholson's scenery chewing, ax-wielding, mad novelist in that movie. A mad novelist. What a nightmare.

I'm especially grateful for my former ignorance in these cultural matters, since the song with its call/response structure, its shape-shifting imagery and brilliant characterizations (including Bush's ancient concierge and her amazing vocal transformation from soprano to mule, unprecedented in boldness and originality — in my humble opinion — in the whole history of music, classical or popular) was a crucial starting point and touchstone in the writing of my novel The Many Revenges of Kip Flynn, which has its own creaturely and architectural metamorphoses, as well as a sense of rising action that culminates very high in the air above a burning city.

Read about the songs that influenced seven other writers, including Sarah Selecky, Ian Orti, Alison Pick, Teri Vlassopoulos and more, at the CBC Books Club.