Manfred Werner
Neil Gaiman
Neil Gaiman was a shrewd choice to bring in for a reading during the extended celebration of the new Billings Public Library.
Appearing Friday night at the Babcock Theatre, courtesy of the Friends of the Library and the library foundation, he spoke lovingly of his own immersion in libraries as a boy and of their continuing importance in our culture.
But there is hardly better proof of the power of books, of writing and reading, than Gaiman himself. The Babcock was packed with 750 fans, and I would estimate that two-thirds of them were under 20.
Gaiman is the kind of writer who inspires passion among his readers, a passion that prompts them, particularly if they are young females, to punctuate his appearances with random shrieks.
There was more evidence in the lobby, where hundreds of copies of 15 or 20 of Gaiman’s books filled a long table. Readers were snapping them up before and after his appearance.
Adulation aside, Gaiman was unfailingly brilliant, even when he stopped reading from his works and answered questions submitted by the audience.
On how to be an author: “Write and finish things and start the next thing.”
On writing a book with Terry Pratchett: “I got to carve out a bit of marble with Michelangelo.”
On being a public figure in the Internet age: “There is nowhere you’ve never been before.”
He scoffed at the notion that we are living in a “post-literate world”: “Words are more important than they ever were. We navigate the world on words.”
Gaiman, a 53-year-old Brit who now lives near Minneapolis, has written books of poetry, science fiction, fantasy and horror, for children, young adults and adults. In addition to his reading Friday evening, he made an appearance Friday afternoon at the new library, which he described as “astonishingly beautiful.”
There he met with 125 lucky middle school and high school students to talk about the craft of writing, the power of imagination and his love of libraries.
I think one reason Gaiman strikes such a chord with the young in particular is that even at 53 he is not hard to picture as a gangly, insecure teenager. Tall and lanky with a mop of curly, graying hair, he projects an air of being surprised by his popularity, and of honestly caring more for his readers than his own success.
Speaking of that mop, here was one question read by Gaiman, selected from a thick wad of notecards submitted by members of the audience: “That hair. Tell us about the hair.”
He responded by telling a story about seeing himself reflected in a glass partition early in his relationship with Amanda Palmer, now his wife. He wrote a poem about his hair at the time:
It is too late
to do anything
about the hair
And when he was asked to describe perfection, he answered, “That’s a toss-up between sushi and Amanda Palmer.” Sushi with Amanda Palmer, he said, would probably be perfect.
He was most passionate when the questions turned to young children. He said children don’t need to be encouraged to be creative. On the contrary, “I think it’s something we knock out of them.”
When he spoke in China in 2007, he said, he was told that Chinese leaders, wondering why their highly educated engineers and technicians seemed to be lacking in creativity, made a study of American innovators. What they found, he said, is that all of them had read science fiction as children.
And he quoted Albert Einstein: “If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.”
