The Moth - 25 Years of Stories: Storytelling with Neil Gaiman

Episode Date: May 20, 2022

This week, we learn about storytelling from Neil Gaiman. This episode is hosted by Michelle Jalowski. Host: Michelle Jalowski Storyteller: Neil Gaiman Interviewer: Catherine Burns

Attention Houston! You have listened to our podcast and our radio hour, but did you know the Moth has live storytelling events at Wearhouse Live? The Moth has opened Mike's storytelling competitions called Story Slams that are open to anyone with a five-minute story to share on the night's theme. Upcoming themes include love hurts, stakes, clean, and pride. GoodLamoth.org forward slash Houston to experience a live show near you. That's theMoth.org forward slash Houston. Welcome to The Moth Podcast. I'm your host, Michelle Jalowski. At The Moth, the written word has a special place in our hearts. You might know as best from our live events,

our radio show, or even the podcast we're listening to right now. But ever since 2013, the Moth has published books, starting with 50 True Stories up to How to Tell a Story, which just released this April and is available wherever books are sold. For 2022, we've been marking our 25th anniversary by going back through each year of the Moth's existence. To celebrate 2013, the year we published our very first book, we'll be sharing a never-before-heard story from Neil Gaiman, all about the lengths he went to to become a writer. After that, well, we may hear a little bit more from him.

Neil Gaiman told this story in 2013 at a Boston Story Slam, where the theme of the night was office. Here's Neil, live at the mall. Applause When I told my dad, I wanted to be a writer. He thought I was going to starve. And suggested that instead, I got a sort of office job. I could show people around show homes. I was 22 and I was very poor.

And I said, no. I was going to be a writer. I was going to do it my way. So I started doing interviews and I sold two interviews. One to an incredibly respectable women's magazine, which paid me $80 and never published it. And one almost accidentally, to Penthouse, UK, who paid me $600 and published it the following month.

And I now had a profession. I was doing interviews for English men's magazines, providing them with the words that people didn't read. They knew that people read the letters columns, and they knew they looked at the pictures. And they didn't think anybody really read the letters columns, and they knew they looked at the pictures. They didn't think anybody really read the interviews with science fiction writers or pop stars or whoever I wanted to interview. So they just let me do it. Occasionally for Penthouse. After a while I settled down at two

rather sad little English men's magazines. Or one, really. It was called Nave, and it had a sister publication called Fiesta, which was famous for having readers' wives. It had invented the reader's wife, which were little polaroids of people standing proudly naked in front of their furniture. I kind of had a girlfriend. She was my cousin Laura's roommate. And we had both come to the independent conclusion

that if my cousin Laura noticed that I was sleeping with her roommate, this might be problematic. So I had a girlfriend. If my cousin Laura had gone off to see her mum for the night. I was 22. I would take what I could get. The money was not really very good. It was enough to pay for food, pay my meager rent, and I was saving up for an electric typewriter,

because this was a long time ago. So I was thrilled when Martin, who was the assistant editor on Fiesta, said, I'm going on holiday for a week, going caravanning in Devon. That's a kind of camper van if you're English. Would you like to just sort of sub for me? You could be a assistant editor. We'll pay you 120 bucks a day. And I went, yes. I would really like to do that, Martin.

That sounds wonderful. I didn't really know what it was going to entail. I turned up on Monday and was handed a box of readers letters. Lots of people think that the readers letters are made up by people who sit there and make them up. And there may well be magazines in which the readers letters are made up by people who sit there and make them up, and there may well be magazines in which the readers letters are made up. Fiesta, they were not made up. Mostly, they weren't typed either.

They were written in strange, wiggly handwriting. And it was my job to type them up. I was 23, just. I was not really O.F.A. with the beautiful rainbow-hued nature of human sexuality at that point. I'd only gone as far as the letters that they would print. I didn't understand that there were letters that they wouldn't print. And now I was reading them and typing them or deciding not to type them. Strange letters from girls who had incredible crushes on 70-year-old men and did very rude things with them. Written strangely enough in a peculiar wiggly handwriting, but I'd only ever seen before coming from very, very elderly men. Mae'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n gwaith yw'n learn how you move around a room slowly, just leaving a few drops there and a few drops. On Wednesday night, my cousin Laura was out of town,

and I went over to her place for my romantic trust with her roommate, Beverly. And I sat there and Beverly took off all her clothes. And I started explaining to her how I was starting to hope that human beings would begin to reproduce by splitting down the middle like Amoeba. And she told me she thought my office job was actually getting to me. And I told her that she was right. And the next morning, which was Thursday, I retired from the only office job I've ever had.

That was Neil Gaiman. You probably wouldn't be surprised to hear that retiring from that office job turned out to be a pretty good decision. In fact, our artistic director, Katherine Burns, chatted with Neil about his extremely eventful post office job career, and what it means to be a storyteller in 2022. Here's that conversation. I remember actually being offered a job back then as well. I was very excited because it was the first real job that I've been offered and it was feature-seditor of Penthouse. And I had to actually decide for myself.

And it was one of those moments where I could see the road and it bifurcated. Because on the one hand I could have been been featured editor of Penthouse, UK, and it would have been a real job. I would have had commissioning power. I would have had a weekly wage, as opposed to a freelance wage. But whatever, you know, I was writing things. I was writing short stories. Whatever I could do to support myself with my pen and my typewriter. And we even got to the computer point yet. Or if we had, I was just about to buy one.

But I just remember getting the call from them saying, you know, we'd like to be VTRAES editor. And I thought, okay, I have this mad career plan right now, where I am living freelance writing check to freelance writing check, doing interviews and articles and occasional short story and so on and I'm surviving. But I think this is a path that will take me if I keep walking it all the way to being the author that I want to be all the way to being the creator of fiction that I want to be. Or I can go over here on the other fork of the path and I can become this editor. And yes, I will have a art career and I probably won't be at Penthouse very long. I'd probably go from there onto something

like, you know, interfleet street, so for the Sunday Sunday times or whatever, that seems to be the career path or onto another magazine, but I will look around 20 years from now and I won't have been an author of all I've been doing all the other stuff and I'll still embrace the family and I'll still, you know, and I probably have made a lot more money. But I won't be the thing that I need to be. And I said no. And I look back at that moment. And there are enough points in my life where I go back and go, you made a really stupid decision there. That one time, I just wanna pat myself on the back and go, you did the right thing. I love that.

I definitely relate to it. I was offered at a critical point in my career to be an agent in LA. And people, a lot of people have thought I would make a great agent, not to, because I'm just so, like I pitch other people's stories. I'm very enthusiastic about the people I love.

But I remember calling the big agent I would work for and saying no. And I was getting a big break to do it and hanging the phone is shaking and crying. But it was because what I was doing instead was going off to New York for the summer to produce three independent films and couch surf. But that is what led me to being me. You know, it is the same exact thing. It is that weirdness where you have to choose. Are you going for some kind of financial certainty, are you going to safety or are you going to head out into the

water's where you may drown? But if you don't drown, the stuff you're waiting, the stuff you want is waiting for you on the other side. And I love, I love that you're doing this because I think the moth wouldn't exist in the form. It's in if you had been an agent. Oh, thank you. So the story we just heard was about your first job out of college working as a writer and an editor at the series of somewhat dubious publications. It ends with you with your sometimes girlfriend encouraging you to quit. So what happened next?

So that job, which was doing things like editing readers' letters and stuff, I really, I never did that again. That was a fairly early thing, and I was very glad to have not done that. But I continue doing interviews with authors, with directors, with film stars, with rock stars, with all sorts of people, but all sorts of very dubious publications for years afterwards.

That was how I could afford to feed my children. That was how I could afford to survive until one day. I looked around in about 1987, and I had a career writing comics. And also somewhere in there, my journalistic career had become more respectable as well. I was doing a lot more work for publications like Time Out and a lot less work for publications like Naive or Penthouse or whatever. That's beautiful.

So you're currently on tour in the US. Will you tell me about that? I'm on tour right now. It's basically two delayed tours. Back in 2020, I was meant to go out for a couple of weeks in April and for a couple of weeks in October. And talk at a few festivals and various college events and things like that and everything obviously got postponed and got pushed. And now here we are

two years later. I mean, there are people who bought tickets for these events in December 2019. And we are having this conversation right now in May 2022. And really, what I'm doing is figuring it all out to say go along. There's lots and lots of questions from the audience. All of them submitted on stacks of cards, which is just nice because that way I'll read something and then I'll do a question or two from a card and then I'll read something else and do another question or two from a card. And I'm loving doing that and I'm doing stories that I've been doing for so long that I have retired them. And you know, there are things I've

been reading that I haven't read for 15 or 20 years because I felt like I was done. And now because of the strangeness on being to on tour sort of post pandemic shutdown, it felt really good initially to go back to things that I let go because they were familiar. And then because I realized that it's very different reading a story that you wrote when you're 30, when you're in your 60s. And sometimes, especially because, you know, looking at one of the stories that I've loved reading is the story called Shibblery. It's about a little old lady who buys the Holy Grail in a charity shop.

What happens when Sir Gala Head. And now, in my early 60s, I identify absolutely with Mrs. Whitaker. And it's just a lovely experience reading that story again. So Neil, you have been around the math for quite some time now. And how, what have you seen as far as how the math has grown and changed over the years? For me, I think, I got involved in the math in 2006 or 2007, I got involved in them off in 2006 or 2007 back then for a...

It was a Penn, New York event, a book festival and I... Backed into them off. I didn't even know it existed. It was just down on my schedule as something I had to go and do. And I did it and it was like finding my people in a weird kind of way. It was like, oh, I love this thing. I didn't know this was a thing and it's magical and it's special. And at the time, it felt very secret. You know, I was plugged in and I didn't know about them all. So one of the things I've seen in the intervening, I guess, 15 years, is people know about them all. The growth of the podcast, the growth of the radio, the growth of the podcast, the growth of the radio,

the growth of the Moff in schools as well. For she does so much in support and in her church, thank you. I've been so proud to be able to do that. I think the biggest thing is the idea that we are our stories watching the Moff turn into books has been an absolute delight watching the presence of the Moth grow because one of the things that I love most about the Moth is that the stories that work best, the stories you learn the most from, sometimes have small triumphs in, but they're always about the places we screwed up. They're always about the mistakes that we made. They're always about being vulnerable and they're always about,

at the end of the day, just being human and being human comes with the screw ups. That, I feel, has in its own kind of strange way, started to permeate society. Just the idea that we can be less perfect, just the idea that our stories are these magical things that continue. And what's important is being vulnerable, being open, carrying on. Amen. Neil Gaiman is the award-winning New York Times bestselling author of novels such as Neverware, American Gods, and Coraline.

The Sandman series of graphic novels and the story collection, Sm' Marrors, Fragile Things, and Trigger Warning. He's a member of the Moth's Board of Directors and a many-time Moth Storyteller and host. If you'd like to learn more about Storytelling, our latest book, which just released on April 26th, is called How to Tell a Story, and it features lessons from people like Hassan Minhaz, Rosanne Cash, Elizabeth Gilbert, and yes, Neil Gaiman. Just go to themoth.org slash books and we'll have all the links. That's all for this week. We hope you'll come with us as we continue to take a look back at some of our favorite stories from the Moth's 25-year history. From all of us here at The Moth have a story-worthy week. Michelle Jolowski is a producer and

director at The Moth, where she helps people craft and shape their stories for stages all over the world. This episode of The Moth Podcast was produced by Sarah Austin-Jones, Sarah Jane Johnson, and me, Mark Salinger. The rest of The Moth's leadership team includes Kathryn Burns, Sarah Haberman, Jennifer Hickson, Meg Bowles, Kate Tellers, Jennifer Birmingham, Marina Cluche, Suzanne Rust, Inga Glodowsky, and Aldi Kaza. All Moth Stories are true, as remembered by their story tellers. For more about our podcast, information on pitching your own story, and everything else,

go to our website, themoth.org. The Moth Podcast is presented by Pierre Axe, the public radio exchange, helping make public radio more public at PRX.org.