Jeremy TanThe Singaporean cannibal enjoys the occasional stuffed author, English writer Neil Gaiman believes.
This snack is prepared by “taking a visiting author, and feeding them good things until they can eat no more, and then cutting them up into delicious little slices”.
He said, “This explains why from the moment I arrive in Singapore till the moment I leave, people just come up to me and say, ‘Here, eat it’.”
This humorous, if somewhat morbid take on the locals’ passion for food was one of the many tales Gaiman treated a 900-strong audience in Singapore to.
The man who brought us tales of Stardust, American Gods, and the Sandman, was in town for the Singapore Writers Festival.
The writer who enjoys a cult following globally 3 meet-the-author sessions, each touching on different topics, the last of which – on graphic novels and fantasy – took place on a Sunday afternoon.
What was supposed to be a Q&A session with the author soon felt like an impromptu collective of little stories, as Gaiman’s gift for spinning a yarn took center stage.
With an easy charm, he shared various anecdotes to answer questions, bringing them to life with enthusiastic storytelling and a hearty dose of British humour.
The audience didn’t seem to mind that he hardly stuck to the theme of the talk, and that his narratives sometimes digressed beyond the questions.
“I actually preferred this as he had answered plenty of questions before on his own blog and other interviews,” said Seriously Sarah, a fan in the audience who enjoyed Gaiman’s anecdotes. “His little stories elaborated on the background of his answers, unlike what we’d be able to read in the papers or articles.”
When asked about turning 50, he recounted a particular flight he took in 1988:
He had just started on his would-be phenomenal comic series, Sandman, and was bringing extracts of a graphic novel he had co-worked on, Black Orchid, to America.
“I just remember thinking, if this plane goes down, nobody will see Black Orchid and the Sandman thing I started,” recalled Gaiman. “I just spent the entire flight, from England to America, working very hard to keep that plane afloat with my mind.”
“But if the plane goes down tomorrow, I’m in great shape,” he concluded, “I’ve done all this stuff I’ve set out to do, and you don’t get to say that very often.”
Another question about bees sparked a comedic account of his beekeeping; about his assistant Lorraine’s deathly fear of them, an old birdwatching-buddy-turned-fellow-beekeeper, and the accidental blue ribbons his bees have won for their honey.
Most of the hour went by with him answering more questions with such captivating anecdotes.
The 900 fans fortunate enough to have attended the session certainly must thank their lucky stars that organisers relocated the session, originally at a 200-seater site, to the Victoria Theatre, and released another 700 tickets. There were, of course, painful hours of queuing involved before finally laying hands on those tickets.
It was another 4-hour queue for the autograph session after the talk!
Image courtesy of seriouslysarah.com
“I just want to thank all of you for braving long queues, and braving heat, and braving whatever mysterious secret messaging system that let you know that tickets were available to actually get to be here,” said Gaiman to those present.
But to the fans, all that were a small price to pay for an afternoon with the man himself, listening to him doing what he does best – telling stories.