As part of the St. Louis Literary Award series of programs honoring the 2023 award recipient Neil Gaiman, the Saint Louis University 2023 Campus Read primarily focuses on two of his most memorable works, The Graveyard Book and Stardust. The book talks also feature conversations about other aspects of Gaiman’s multifaceted work, including film, graphic novels and comics, poetry, music and television.
2022-2023 Campus Book Talk Series
“Catch a Falling Star and Put It In Your Pocket: Stardust in Context”
This Neil Gaiman Book Talk presentation provides a brief overview of the background and publication history of Stardust as well as close analyses of the genre, style, and key scenes in this deeply beloved novel.
Dr. Tara Prescott-Johnson is a Continuing Lecturer in Writing Programs and a Distinguished Teacher at UCLA, where she teaches an Honors seminar on the works of Neil Gaiman. She is the editor of Neil Gaiman in the 21st Century (McFarland) and co-editor of Feminism in the Worlds of Neil Gaiman (McFarland). Dr. Prescott-Johnson has also served as a consultant for “Neil Gaiman Teaches the Art of Storytelling” for MasterClass and wrote “Diving into the Ocean” for the official program for the National Theatre’s stage adaptation of Gaiman’s The Ocean at the End of the Lake. Her TEDxUCLA talk, “Hike Your Own Hike,” is available on YouTube. The first books by Gaiman that she picked up were Sandman and Good Omens, and she is currently editing a collection of essays on the first season of Sandman.
“Enter Sandman”
Martin Casas, owner of Apotheosis Comics, and Drew Kupsky, Saint Louis University Digital Resources Librarian, walk attendees through the history and themes of comics as they parallel American history. The discussion traces the origins of comics through the decades and how they speak for each generation therein., culminating in the late 1980s as young comics writer Neil Gaiman enters the genre and redefines comics for the decades to follow. This discussion provides comic artwork from important works.
Martin Cases is the co-owner of Apotheosis Comics & Lounge, which is Missouri’s only comic book store lounge. Drew Kupsky is the Digital Resources Librarian at Saint Louis University. He has a Master of Arts in Applied Analytics from Saint Louis University and an Master of Library Science from the University of Missouri-Columbia. He has been at SLU since 2006 and has curated several exhibits on comics and graphic novels for Pius Library. He has been an avid reader and collector of comics for over 20 years.
“Memory, Nostalgia and Memetic Children's Literature in The Graveyard Book”
Each time a ghost appears in The Graveyard Book, their gravestone epitaph is announced. As readers, we are constantly being pulled into the story to imagine not only the present story, but past stories. The Graveyard Book presumes a familiarity with stories of its type, and as Neil Gaiman has said repeatedly, it draws inspiration from the works of Rudyard Kipling. Understanding the book’s tonal nuances also relies on a nostalgic familiarity with broader memetic circulation of folklore and children’s literature. The interplay of multiple types of memory makes the book resonate with readers of all ages.
Shiraz Biggie is a Ph.D. candidate in Theatre and Performance at the Graduate Center, CUNY. She currently teaches classes in Children’s Literature at Brooklyn College and Theatre History at NYU. Her wide-ranging research interests are broadly linked by ideas of cultural memory and production. Her dissertation research looks at Jewish and Irish theatre, touring, diaspora and the use of folklore for national identity. She has published in Studies in Musical Theatre and The Palgrave Handbook of Musical Theatre Producers and presented at many conferences including the Children’s Literary Association, the Association of Theatre in Higher Education and the American Conference for Irish Studies. In her first of many seasons in the production department of New York’s New Victory Theatre, she had the pleasure of working with the National Theatre of Scotland’s production of Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean’s The Wolves in the Walls.
“A Tale Told, and Retold and Told Again…for Very Good Reasons: Stardust as Neil Gaiman's Traditional English Faerie Story...Just with a few Modern Sensibilities”
When you wish upon a star, so the song goes, your dreams come true. However, when Tristran Thorn spies a star fall while walking the beautiful Victoria Forester home one evening, he endeavors to collect it for the young lady in exchange for her hand in marriage, as one does…at least in a fairy tale. Mind you, this fairy tale comes from the pen of Neil Gaiman, and while he may have grown up on stories such as these from his youth, when he chose to write his own version, he decided to update it with slightly more modern sensibilities…and certainly more modern young women. In this talk, Joseph Michael Sommers will discuss Gaiman’s love of faerie stories and how these faerie stories might and can continue… with young women of a strength and substance instead of servitude and silly romance.
Joseph Michael Sommers (Ph.D., University of Kansas) is a Professor of English at Central Michigan University, where he teaches coursework in children's and young adult literature, popular culture and comics. As such, he has published essays, articles and miscellaneous other things on topics in YACL literature and culture, comics, movies, video games...and just an absolute ton on Neil Gaiman. The author, curator and/or editor of seven books, he has published three titles on Gaiman thus far: Critical Insights on Neil Gaiman [2016, Salem/Grey House], Conversations with Neil Gaiman [2018, UP-Mississippi] and The Artistry of Neil Gaiman [2019, UP-Mississippi]. His new biography of Gaiman and his seminal work, The Sandman, is due in 2023 from the University Press of Mississippi, and it is tentatively entitled: Biographix: Neil Gaiman and The Sandman. He is the editor of the academic journal Children’s Literature Quarterly and an Editorial Board member of the comics journal INKS.
“A Teen and Teacher Talk: Neil Gaiman's Graveyard Book”
This presentation is a lively and engaging conversation between Naomi Farkas, a high school student in Los Angeles, and Dr. Tara Prescott-Johnson, a lecturer in Writing Programs at UCLA, about The Graveyard Book and its impact on young and seasoned readers alike.
Tara Prescott-Johnson is a Lecturer in Writing Programs and Faculty in Residence at UCLA. She has a Ph.D. in English, specializing in twentieth-century American literature, from Claremont Graduate University, and an M.A. from The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of Poetic Salvage: Reading Mina Loy (Bucknell University Press), editor of Neil Gaiman in the 21st Century (McFarland Press) and co-editor of Gender and the Superhero Narrative (University Press of Mississippi) and Feminism in the Worlds of Neil Gaiman (McFarland Press). She performed "Hike Your Own Hike" for TEDxUCLA.
Naomi Farkas (15, she/they) is a sophomore in high school and book enthusiast. Her poetry has been published in a few publications, including The Los Angeles Press, Stone Soup, Young Poets 2021, Unum e Pluribus and Gaia Lit. She’s served as a guest speaker in Honors 87W: The Worlds of Neil Gaiman at UCLA and deeply enjoys spending time in cemeteries.
“Stardust: The Art of Music Composition” Live from London
Ilan Eshkeri, the famed British composer of the film Stardust based on the Neil Gaiman novel of the same name, is an award-winning composer, artist, songwriter, producer, and creator whose work is performed in concert, theatre, film, television and video games. His eclectic body of work is linked by his love of narrative. In Mr. Eshkeri's talk, he will discuss the creative process in composing music for a wide array of media. Amongst his extensive catalog of film and television scores are multiple Oscar and BAFTA-winning films such as Still Alice, Stardust and Shaun The Sheep. He has also been nominated for an Ivor Novello for The Young Victoria and a BAFTA for The Snowman and The Snowdog. Eshkeri also continues his work on The Sims 4 video game, which remains one of the most successful video games of all time.
“Neil Gaiman’s Dreaming”
When “making sense of the world is somewhere between difficult and impossible,” to use Gaiman’s own words, we might need to rethink what making sense even means. This talk considers how Neil Gaiman’s stories (particularly his fairytales) encourage readers to envision models of knowing and meaning-making that depart from the standard analytic, reason-based or empirical models we are encouraged to apply in our day-to-day lives. Dreaming is one such alternate meaning-making tool— Gaiman treats dreams and the act of dreaming as something dead serious (as in, death and dreaming are two peas of the same pod)—but so are divination, sign interpretation and all things magic. This talk considers how Gaiman’s stories help us “make sense” (in the original meaning of the word, which is “to feel”) of our inner and outer worlds.
Associate professor of English at Saint Louis University, Madrid, Olivia Badoi is currently working on her first book, Arboreal Modernism and the Woodcut Novel, an ecocritical examination of the woodcut novel, a type of wordless book that was widely popular in both Europe and the United States throughout the first half of the twentieth century. The book proposes an original framework of "arboreal modernism" to illuminate how artists used nonhuman networks such as trees and forests as a model for interconnectivity and a corrective for a broken social system. Crafted out of wood, with pages densely populated with trees, the woodcut novel embodies a living relationship between nature and culture.
“A Child Adopted by a Graveyard Might Grow Up Slightly Spooky: Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book as a Reminder that the Scariest Thing in the Cemetery… might be you.”
There are far scarier things in the graveyard than the ghosts who haunt it. One of the great tropes of the scary story (Besides children. Who are just terrifying!) is the idea that amongst the many oogy boogies that a writer might populate a narrative with, by far and away the scariest monster in the pantheon of ghouls might just be… people. Humans being. Us. And, in telling the story of Nobody Owens, a boy raised amongst the dead and otherwise in the Graveyard as a result of his family being slaughtered by The Man Jack, Neil Gaiman crafts a deceptive set of short stories, a sort of sequential Bildungsroman, in the humanization of young Bod. However, as Bod learns more about humanity from the inhuman who raise him, vampires, ghosts, were people, et al., we, like he, come to discover that those who we traditionally perceive to be the most monstrous, devote their afterlives to try and educate the boy into not becoming the most monstrous thing of all: a living, breathing human being. The results of their tutelage are mixed at best, but this talk will focus on Gaiman’s reorientation of the scary and the filial and how a nobody becomes a somebody and at what cost.
Joseph Michael Sommers (Ph.D., University of Kansas) is a Professor of English at Central Michigan University, where he teaches coursework in children's and young adult literature, popular culture and comics. As such, he has published essays, articles and miscellaneous other things on topics in YACL literature and culture, comics, movies, video games...and just an absolute ton on Neil Gaiman. The author, curator and/or editor of seven books, he has published three titles on Gaiman thus far: Critical Insights on Neil Gaiman [2016, Salem/Grey House], Conversations with Neil Gaiman [2018, UP-Mississippi] and The Artistry of Neil Gaiman [2019, UP-Mississippi]. His new biography of Gaiman and his seminal work, The Sandman, is due in 2023 from the University Press of Mississippi, and it is tentatively entitled: Biographix: Neil Gaiman and The Sandman. He is the editor of the academic journal Children’s Literature Quarterly and an Editorial Board member of the comics journal INKS.
An Evening with World-Renowned Illustrator, P. Craig Russell
The acclaimed illustrator and painter P. Craig Russell will discuss his career and his long collaboration with writer Neil Gaiman.
P. Craig Russell is a Harvey and Eisner award-winning illustrator of graphic novels and comics, including Coraline, The Graveyard Book, The Giver, Nevermore, American Gods and various issues of The Sandman, Star Wars and Batman, among many others. He is considered one of comic art’s most well-respected and pioneering artists, known for bringing to life fantasy and magic.