Story Hour

Everyone’s favourite storyteller Neil Gaiman is working on what might be his magnum opus, adapting the cult-classic comic series The Sandman. And it’s making him contemplative about being a genre-defying writer today, finds Shahnaz Siganporia

- Shahnaz Siganporia

Interviews offer the magic of staged intimacy; one person questions and the other answers. When it gets good, the questions slip away and a conversation sneaks in. But when you’re on an hour-and-longer phone call with Neil Gaiman, storyteller, author and showrunner, it transforms into a space where parable meets memoir meets metaphor—a sort of grown-up story hour. He fits me in, between working on the second draft of a new script and making supper for his youngest, four-year-old Anthony, who will be back from school minutes after our scheduled call.

He tells me that his wife, the incredibly talented Amanda Palmer is currently on tour with her new album, so he’s a single parent right now. Almost on cue, he continues to explain how this “inside time” incubates creativity: “Art takes place in that wonderful grey zone between the me who gets to take my four-year-old son to school on the bus every morning and the me who gets to watch all of the other people on the bus. It’s the joy of listening to the other people riding the bus with you, the joy of riding the bus, the joy of my son’s excitement of just being on the bus—it is that certain joy that becomes the interface between the world outside and the world inside, where you become a writer. I could point to pretty much every book of mine and say, ‘Well, this is where it exists on the outside and this is where it exists on the inside.’”

ONCE UPON AN ADAPTATION