I just interviewed Neil Gaiman. It was one of those things where I was offered the interview and then went out to pitch it to someone, came back with a commission to do an entirely different story from the one I pitched (a sub-cultures story for Melbourne Magazine on fandom and the convention in general) and so my interview with Neil was somewhat schizophrenic: on one hand, I was asking him questions for the article and on the other, asking him fannish questions of my own with some future article on MirrorMask in mind.
And then we ended up talking about poetry because, well, I love his poetry and I think it’s rare that anyone talks with him about it and yesterday at the con I got him to sign the hand-written copy of my sestina about silence with the end words “dark, ragged, never, screaming, fire, kiss” that’s mentioned in Calliope, one of the Sandman comics. (I know I’m one of hundreds of angsty readers who saw that and went and wrote the sestina… but mine now has ‘Hurrah!’ written beneath it and Neil’s signature. marius_cale got Neil to sign his PhD thesis about black holes next to the quote about what comes out of the black egg from “Ramadan”, another Sandman comic.)
It’s bizarre doing an article on fandom as a fan myself. All those ideas of journalistic objectivity go flying out the window and I wonder whether I should still attempt to do a straight piece or whether I should risk a Tom Wolfe approach and do the fan-as-writer piece that exaggerates it all, the breathless fan anxious to meet Neil, Neil, *the* Neil, Neil of the dark hair and the long black coats, Neil of the blue sunglasses, Neil who is Dream incarnate and who Knows All, can discourse on contes des fées and the gods of the gap, Neil who gave me a wonderful quote about wanting MirrorMask to be the film that warps the childhoods of teenaged girls so that they approach him in his decrepitude years from now and confide in him that they were never the same, after.