SATA
ENTRY TYPE:
WORK TITLE: Cress Watercress
WORK NOTES: Common Sense Media
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://gregorymaguire.com/
CITY: Concord
STATE:
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
LAST VOLUME: SATA 289
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born June 9, 1954, in Albany, NY; son of John (a journalist) and Helen Maguire; married Andy Newman (an artist), June, 2004; children: (adopted) Luke, Alex, Helen.
EDUCATION:State University of New York—Albany, B.A., 1976; Simmons College, M.A., 1978; Tufts University, Ph.D., 1990.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and educator. Vincentian Grade School, Albany, NY, English teacher, 1976-77; Simmons College, Center for the Study of Children’s Literature, Boston, MA, faculty member and associate director, 1979-87; Children’s Literature New England, Inc. (nonprofit educational charity), Cambridge, MA, founder and codirector, ca. 1987-2012, consultant. Resident at Blue Mountain Center, 1986-90 and 1995-2001; artist-in-residence, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 1994, Hambidge Center, 1998, and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, 1999.
AVOCATIONS:Painting in oils or watercolors, song writing, traveling.
AWARDS:Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference fellowship, 1978; One Hundred Best Books of the Year citation, New York Public Library, 1980, for The Daughter of the Moon; Children’s Books of the Year citation, Bank Street College Child Study Children’s Books Committee, 1983, and Teachers’ Choice Award, National Council of Teachers of English, 1984, both for The Dream Stealer; Best Book for Young Adults citation, American Library Association (ALA), and Cooperative Children’s Book Center (CCBC) Choice designation, both 1989, both for I Feel like the Morning Star; Parents’ Choice Award and Children’s Books of the Year citation, Child Study Committee, both 1994, both for Missing Sisters; ALA Notable Children’s Book citation, 1994, for Seven Spiders Spinning; Books for the Teen Age selection, New York Public Library, 1996, for Oasis; One Hundred Best Books citation, Young Book Trust (England), 1997, One Hundred Best Books of the Year selection, New York Public Library, 1999, and Notable Social Studies Trade Book designation, National Council for the Social Studies/Children’s Book Council, and CCBC Choice designation, both 2000, all for The Good Liar; Books for the Teen Age selection, 2000, for Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister; Notable Books designation, New York Times, 2014, and ALA Best Fiction for Young Adults designation, 2015, both for Egg and Spoon; honorary doctorates from University at Albany and the College of Saint Rose.
POLITICS: Democrat. RELIGION: Roman Catholic.WRITINGS
Contributor of short fiction to anthologies, including Am I Blue? Coming Out from the Silence, edited by Marion Dane Bauer, HarperCollins (New York, NY), 1994; A Glory of Unicorns, edited by Bruce Coville, Scholastic (New York, NY), 1998; I Believe in Water: Twelve Brushes with Religion, HarperCollins (New York, NY), 2000; A Wolf at the Door and Other Retold Fairy Tales, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers (New York, NY), 2000; Half-Human, edited by Bruce Coville, Scholastic (New York, NY), 2001; The Green Man: Tales from the Mythic Forest, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, Viking (New York, NY), 2001; The Faery Reel: Tales from the Twilight Realm, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, Firebird (New York, NY), 2004; Click (collective novel, with David Almond, Eoin Colfer, Roddy Doyle, Deborah Ellis, Nick Hornby, Margo Lanagan, Ruth Ozeki, Linda Sue Park and Tim Wynne-Jones), Scholastic (New York, NY), 2007; How Beautiful the Ordinary: Twelve Stories of Identity, edited by Michael Cart, Harper Teen (New York, NY), 2009; and The Chronicles of Harris Burdick: Fourteen Amazing Authors Tell the Tales, illustrated by Chris Van Allsburg, Houghton Mifflin Books for Children (Boston, MA), 2011.
Author or forewords to The Wind in the Willows, by Kenneth Grahame, Penguin Classics deluxe edition, Penguin Books (New York, NY), 2012; The Little Prince, by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, translated by Richard Howard, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (Boston, MA), 2013; Tuck Everlasting, by Natalie Babbitt, 40th anniversary edition, Square Fish/Farrar Straus Giroux (New York, NY), 2015; and The Book of Merlyn: The Conclusion to “The Once and Future King,” by T.H. White, University of Texas Press (Austin, TX), 2018. Reviewer for Horn Book, School Library Journal, and Christian Science Monitor.
Wicked was adapted as a musical by Winnie Holzman, book by Stephen Schwartz, and produced on Broadway, 2004. The first of a two-part film adaptation of Wicked was slated for release in 2024. Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister was adapted as a film airing on The Wonderful World of Disney, ABC television. Several of Maguire’s novels were adapted for audiobook, including Egg and Spoon, read by Michael Page, Brilliance Audio, 2014.
SIDELIGHTS
A versatile writer for children, teens, and adults, Gregory Maguire pens books in a variety of genres, from science fiction and fantasy to realistic problem novels and rhyming picture books. He is especially well known for his elaborations, backstories, and spin-offs of classic children’s literature–by authors including L. Frank Baum, Hans Christian Andersen, and Lewis Carroll–for adult readers. Not one to shy away from complex themes in young-adult novels such as Egg and Spoon, Maguire also has a lighter side that he shares in such stories as Seven Spiders Spinning and What-the-Dickens: The Story of a Rogue Tooth Fairy. While Maguire gained a measure of celebrity as the author of Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, an adult novel set in Baum’s famous land of Oz–and adapted as an immensely successful Broadway musical–much of his output is geared for young readers.
[open new]Reflecting on the roots of his identity as a writer with Melissa Taylor for Imagination Soup, Maguire related: “I suppose I am a curious blend of revolting earnestness and absurdism. My father was something of a humorous writer and a well-known raconteur and journalist around town (Albany, NY) and the Irish side of that largely Irish city was replete with good storytellers. Certain inanities appealed to me from childhood—‘Rocky and Bullwinkle’ (esp. the Fractured Fairy Tales!); Alice in Wonderland. The hums of Pooh. …” Maguire recalled teaching himself to write stories between the first and fourth grades. About his persisting interest in fairy tales, he told Katie Tamola of Shondaland: “There is something about fairy tales that resonated in me. Even in fifth and sixth grades, whenever I would go to the library, I would bring a stack of books to the desk that included an Andersen or a Grimm collection, or some other anthology, among other choices. I would camouflage it between red-herring material. … I suppose I realized that being seen reading fairy tales after third grade was suspect—suspect of what, I didn’t know, but I wasn’t that clueless not to take care.” Maguire went on to remark, “I suppose what fairy tales gave to me then was a sense of the holy possibilities of life. I looked for those moments of heart-stopping wonder … and I began to think: If I could provide readers with some of that comfort and delight … that would be a life of some small kind of merit, anyway. And it would be fun—as I always liked to make things up.”[suspend new]
The Lightning Time, Maguire’s first published book, tells the story of young Daniel Rider, whose mother is hospitalized. While staying with his grandmother in the Adirondacks, Daniel meets a mysterious female cousin and together the two struggle to keep Saltbrook Mountain free from development. Plot elements include magic lightning that allows animals to talk, a villainous developer, and plenty of eerie effects. A contributor to Publishers Weekly wrote that Maguire handles his first novel “with professional aplomb,” and Ethel L. Heins concluded in Horn Book that the debut writer “creates tension successfully, and writes with conviction and style.”
Maguire followed up the success of his first fantasy with The Daughter of the Moon, a sequel featuring Daniel Rider’s twelve-year-old cousin Erikka. Searching for more refinement in her life, Erikka is drawn to a local bookshop as well as to a painting an aunt has left with her. The framed work of art proves to be a magic portal and Erikka soon escapes into it, encountering the long-lost lover of the Chicago bookshop owner. In Horn Book, Mary M. Burns maintained that readers will enjoy the “fascinatingly complex heroine and … rich collection of adult and child characters” in The Daughter of the Moon. A third novel featuring Daniel Rider, Lights on the Lake concludes Maguire’s loosely knit trilogy.
Set in a post-atomic-war underworld, Maguire’s science-fiction adventure I Feel like the Morning Star focuses on three rebellious teenagers who want to break out of their prison-like colony. Jane Beasley, reviewing the work for the Voice of Youth Advocates, deemed I Feel like the Morning Star compelling, adding that the “suspense builds to a ‘can’t-put-it-down’ threshold.” Missing Sisters, set in the 1960s, tells the story of a hearing-and speech-impaired girl who loses her closest friend—a Catholic nun—but ultimately finds her own missing sister. “The storytelling is sure and steady,” wrote Roger Sutton in his Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books review of Missing Sisters , while a Horn Book contributor called the novel “an unusual and compelling picture of life in a Catholic home.”
In his young-adult novel Oasis, Maguire again explores the effect of losing a loved one. When the father of thirteen-year-old Hand dies of a heart attack, Hand’s mother returns from the West Coast, where she had moved three years earlier. Hand believes that his mother abandoned him and also suspects that his uncle Wolfgang may have had something to do with his father’s death. However, when the teen models his father’s compassionate behavior by assisting two immigrants and then discovers that Wolfgang is dying of AIDS, he rethinks his suspicion and comes to terms with his grief. According to a reviewer for Publishers Weekly, in Oasis “Maguire steers clear of the earnest tones that often characterize YA bereavement stories,” and Debbie Carton wrote in Booklist that “complex, believable characterizations are Maguire’s forté.”
Maguire’s “Hamlet Chronicles” are set in the town of Hamlet, Vermont, and concern the students in Miss Earth’s fifth-grade class. Divided by gender into warring factions—the Tattletales (girls) and the Copycats (boys)—the children repeatedly do battle in plots that involve everything from mutant chickens and ghosts to rampant cupids and mysterious disappearances. The first book in the series, Seven Spiders Spinning, finds a group of Siberian arachnids encountering the Tattletales, whom they decide to adopt as their mothers. When Miss Earth falls victim to a spider’s bite, the girls must join forces with the Copycats to save her life. There are humorous subplots galore in Maguire’s “high-camp fantasy-mystery,” noted a Publishers Weekly critic, while a Kirkus Reviews critic dubbed Seven Spiders Spinning “a lighthearted fantasy that, while easily read, is as intricately structured as a spider’s web.”
Other works in Maguire’s “Hamlet Chronicles” include Five Alien Elves and Three Rotten Eggs. Reviewing A Couple of April Fools, Booklist critic Gillian Engberg observed that Maguire’s “witty, absurd farce and spot-on portrayal of the social pecking order of middle-graders [is layered] with larger questions,” and a Kirkus Reviews contributor described One Final Firecracker as a “winsome, bittersweet celebration of love and loss and loyalty.” Another Kirkus Reviews writer recommended the “Hamlet Chronicles” series as “relentlessly edgy and smart … and … a breath of fresh air.”
In addition to the “Hamlet Chronicles,” Maguire’s books for younger readers include Leaping Beauty and Other Animal Fairy Tales and What-the-Dickens. In the humorous fractured fairy tales he includes in Leaping Beauty, he puts a spin on a well-known classic; in Maguire’s hands, for instance, “Goldilocks and the Three Bears,” becomes “Goldifox and the Three Chickens.” The title story, a play on the familiar “Sleeping Beauty” legend, features a cursed tadpole. In Booklist, Kay Weisman called Leaping Beauty “a delightful collection” that is “sure to be popular with sophisticated readers.”
What-the-Dickens finds three siblings—Zeke, Dinah, and Rebecca Ruth—isolated in the wake of a tremendous natural disaster. With them is older cousin Gage, a mild-mannered English teacher, who tries to calm the children with a story about an orphaned skibberee (better known as a tooth fairy) and the adventures this creature encounters while learning his trade: granting wishes to humans. A Kirkus Reviews contributor praised the author’s prose for its “precise, delightful turns of phrase and a conversational tone that perfectly enhances the subtext on the importance of storytelling.” Also citing Maguire’s “flair for language” in What-the-Dickens , Beth L. Meister added in School Library Journal that “the immediacy of the story and combination of fantasy and reality will grip even reluctant readers.”
Another of Maguire’s stand-alone works, Egg and Spoon combines elements of Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper and Slavic folktales featuring the cannibalistic witch Baba Yaga. In an impoverished Russian village, young Elena Rudina cares for her dying mother. When an opulent train makes an unscheduled stop near her home, Elena makes the acquaintance of one of its passengers, a wealthy girl named Ekaterina (known as Cat) who plans to meet the tsar’s godson. Through a series of mishaps, the girls switch places, with Elena traveling on to St. Petersburg while Cat has a fateful encounter with Baba Yaga.
Erinn Black Salge, writing in School Library Journal, described Egg and Spoon as “full of magic and promise, yet checkered with the desperation of poverty and the treacherous prospect of a world gone completely awry.” Horn Book critic Nina Lindsay praised Maguire’s “rich and consistently surprising prose,” and a contributor in Publishers Weekly noted that the “descriptive language will reward readers who like to sink their teeth into a meaty story.” A number of critics cited the multilayered narrative as a highlight of the work; a Kirkus Reviews writer called Egg and Spoon “an ambitious, Scheherazade-ian novel … that succeeds in capturing some of the complexities of both Russia and life itself.”
[resume new]Cress Watercress is a children’s animal novel with full-color artwork by David Litchfield. Young bunny Cress’s life changes dramatically when her father goes out one day and never returns. Cress, baby brother Kip, and their mother end up moving to a hollow-oak apartment tree called Broken Arms, owned by Mr. Owl. There, bunnies, mice, squirrels, and songbirds all cooperate to keep the community orderly and safe from the likes of Monsieur Reynard the fox and a snake fearsomely dubbed “the Final Drainpipe.” There is no shortage of activity as squirrels go over a waterfall, Cress comes face to face with Tunk the Honeybear, and imposing skunk Lady Agatha Cabbage threatens the bunnies’ freedom.
A Publishers Weekly reviewer appreciated the inclusion of classic animal-story elements—like the “cozy family,” “treacherous woodland,” and “ growing pains”—and observed that Maguire’s “exuberant tale revels in the performative and the flavor of language.” A Kirkus Reviews writer delighted in the “wry puns, rich vocabulary, and entertaining dialogue” and found a “perfect seasoning of domesticity, adventure, and contained peril.” Adding that the woodland society “feels true” to the animals’ natures, this reviewer hailed Cress Watercress as “warmhearted and utterly charming.”[close new]
Maguire has earned his greatest fame for his adult novels, in particular his “Wicked Years” series. In Wicked, the author presents a “fantastical meditation on good and evil, God and free will,” according to a Publishers Weekly reviewer. The witch in Maguire’s story, whom the author names Elphaba Thropp, is a feisty, green-skinned idealist from a dysfunctional family who challenges the authority of the dictatorial Wizard of Oz. Although Wicked ‘s rise in readership was slow, it eventually became a cult hit, and in 2003 a musical stage adaptation by Steven Schwartz and Winnie Holzman was launched on Broadway and received three Tony awards.
Maguire returns readers to Oz in both Son of a Witch and A Lion among Men. The former work focuses on Liir, who believes he may be the son of the now-dead Elphaba. In Booklist, Paula Luedtke praised Son of a Witch as “complex and multilayered in plot and meaning, thought-provoking, and unforgettable.” The life of the Cowardly Lion is the subject of A Lion among Men, a story set against the backdrop of a war between the Munchkins and the emperor of the Emerald City. A Publishers Weekly contributor noted that in this work Maguire “mixes some relatively weighty existential themes—the search for self, faith, redemption—into his whimsical story.”
Maguire concludes his four-volume “Wicked Years” saga with Out of Oz, “a revealing and satisfying end to the layered tale begun in Wicked,” according to a Publishers Weekly critic. Shell Thropp, Elphaba’s brother, has been crowned emperor of Oz as the city descends into civil war. The fate of the region now falls upon Rain, Elphaba’s granddaughter, who has magical talents. Applauding Out of Oz in Booklist, Margaret Flanagan stated that the “twisted fairy tale is a worthy conclusion to an imaginative and emotionally searing cultural phenomenon.”
Other adult fantasy novels by Maguire include Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, a melánge of mystery, fairy tale, and fantasy that he sets in seventeenth-century Holland; Lost, a supernatural thriller about a writer visiting London to research a novel about Jack the Ripper; and Mirror Mirror, a retelling of the Brothers Grimm tale of “Snow White” set in seventeenth-century Italy.
Although he continues to explore the possibilities of adult fiction, Maguire enjoys the challenge of writing for younger audiences. “For me it is more striking to write for children because of their position in their life experience,” he told School Library Journal interviewer Shelley Diaz. “They’re innocent and untried and they brook no nonsense. They don’t want to waste their time when they’re reading a book. Writing for children is the most demanding exercise.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Advocate, October 17, 1995, Peter Galvin, review of Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, p. 56; December 25, 2001, Robert Plunket, review of Lost, p. 67; September 27, 2005, Regina Marler, review of Son of a Witch, p. 72.
Booklist, September 15, 1994, Hazel Rochman, review of Seven Spiders Spinning, p. 136; September 15, 1996, Debbie Carton, review of Oasis, p. 232; April 15, 1999, Carolyn Phelan, review of The Good Liar, p. 1530; December 1, 2000, GraceAnne A. DeCandido, review of Four Stupid Cupids, p. 706; October 15, 2001, Kristine Huntley, review of Lost, p. 383; April 1, 2002, Kay Weisman, review of Three Rotten Eggs, p. 1328; September 1, 2003, Hazel Rochman, review of Mirror Mirror, p. 57; June 1, 2004, Kay Weisman, review of Leaping Beauty and Other Animal Fairy Tales, p. 1726; July, 2004, Gillian Engberg, review of A Couple of April Fools, p. 1844; September 15, 2005, Paul Luedtke, review of Son of a Witch, p. 6; October 1, 2007, Gillian Engberg, review of What-the-Dickens: The Story of a Rogue Tooth Fairy, p. 48; September 15, 2009, Michael Cart, review of Making Mischief: A Maurice Sendak Appreciation, p. 16; September 1, 2011, Margaret Flanagan, review of Out of Oz, p. 46.
BookPage, November, 2017, Lonna Upton, review of Hiddensee: A Tale of the Once and Future Nutcracker, p. 38.
Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books, February, 1982, review of Lights on the Lake; May, 1989, Roger Sutton, review of I Feel like the Morning Star, p. 230; June, 1994, Roger Sutton, review of Missing Sisters, pp. 327-328; January, 1998, review of Six Haunted Hairdos, p. 167; March, 1999, review of The Good Liar, p. 247; November, 2014, Kate Quealy-Gainer, review of Egg and Spoon, p. 166.
Commonweal, April 19, 2002, Daria Donnelly, “Illuminated Manuscripts,” p. 22.
Horn Book, October, 1978, Ethel L. Heins, review of The Lightning Time, pp. 517-518; June, 1980, Mary M. Burns, review of The Daughter of the Moon; April, 1982, Mary M. Burns, review of Lights on the Lake, pp. 167-168; October, 1983, Ethel L. Heins, review of The Dream Stealer, pp. 576-577; July-August, 1994, review of Missing Sisters, pp. 454-455; July, 1999, review of The Good Liar, p. 471; January, 2000, review of Origins of Story: On Writing for Children, p. 105; September-October, 2014, Nina Lindsay, review of Egg and Spoon, p. 115.
Kirkus Reviews, July 15, 1994, review of Seven Spiders Spinning, p. 989; August, 15, 2001, review of Lost, p. 1154; March 1, 2002, review of Three Rotten Eggs, p. 339; September 5, 2003, review of Mirror Mirror, p. 1147; April 1, 2004, review of A Couple of April Fools, p. 333; July 1, 2004, review of Leaping Beauty and Other Animal Fairy Tales, p. 632; May 1, 2005, review of One Final Firecracker, p. 542; July 15, 2005, review of Son of a Witch, p. 759; October 1, 2007, review of What-the-Dickens; September 15, 2010, review of The Next Queen of Heaven; November 1, 2011, review of Out of Oz; July 15, 2014, review of Egg and Spoon; September 1, 2015, review of After Alice; August 15, 2017, review of Hiddensee; September 1, 2021, review of The Brides of Maracoor; January 15, 2022, review of Cress Watercress.
Kliatt, January, 2007, Nola Theiss, review of Son of a Witch, p. 28.
Library Journal, September 1, 1999, Francisca Goldsmith, review of Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, p. 234; October 1, 2001, Margee Smith, review of Lost, p. 141; September 15, 2011, Katie Lawrence, review of Out of Oz, p. 69.
Lightspeed, May, 2013, John Joseph Adams and David Barr Kirtley, interview with Maguire.
New York Times, October 24, 1995, Michiko Kakutani, review of Wicked, p. C17.
New York Times Book Review, November 26, 1995, review of Wicked, p. 19; December 12, 1999, Gardner McFall, review of Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, p. 28; December 26, 1999, Malachi Duffy, review of Wicked, p. 19; August 22, 2014, Leigh Bardugo, review of Egg and Spoon, p. 9; November 1, 2015, Joe Hill, review of After Alice, p. 21.
Publishers Weekly, June 5, 1978, review of The Lightning Time, p. 89; September, 1978, Pam Spencer, review of I Feel like the Morning Star, p. 143; September 28, 1990, review of Lucas Fishbone, pp. 101-102; August, 1994, review of Seven Spiders Spinning, p. 80; August 21, 1995, review of Wicked, p. 45; October 28, 1996, review of Oasis, p. 82; March 22, 1999, review of The Good Liar, p. 93; August 16, 1999, review of Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, p. 58; September 10, 2001, review of Lost, p. 60; September 15, 2003, review of Mirror Mirror, and Ben P. Indick, interview with Maguire, both p. 42; August 30, 2004, review of Leaping Beauty and Other Animal Fairy Tales, p. 56; October 3, 2005, James Piechota, “Oz Struck,” p. 37; July 18, 2005, review of Son of a Witch, p. 179; November 5, 2007, review of What-the-Dickens, p. 64; September 1, 2008, review of A Lion among Men, p. 37; August 23, 2010, review of The Next Queen of Heaven, p. 30; September 5, 2011, review of Out of Oz, p. 27; July 7, 2014, review of Egg and Spoon, p. 70; June 28, 2021, review of The Brides of Maracoor, p. 52; January 31, 2022, review of Cress Watercress, p. 77.
School Librarian, winter, 2014, Louise Ellis-Barrett, review of Egg and Spoon, p. 232.
School Library Journal, May, 1980, Marjorie Lewis, review of The Daughter of the Moon, p. 69; February, 1984, Helen Gregory, review of The Dream Stealer, p. 75; May, 1989, Pam Spencer, review of I Feel like the Morning Star, p. 127; December, 1990, Heide Piehler, review of Lucas Fishbone, p. 84; May, 1996, Judy Sokoll, review of Wicked, p. 148; November, 1996, Renee Steinberg, review of Oasis, p. 108; May, 1999, Linda Greengrass, review of The Good Liar, p. 128; October, 2000, Eva Mitnick, review of Four Stupid Cupids, p. 164; March, 2002, Connie Tyrrell Burns, review of Three Rotten Eggs, p. 234; March, 2004, Susan H. Woodcock, review of Mirror Mirror, p. 249; August, 2004, Eva Mitnick, review of Leaping Beauty and Other Animal Fairy Tales, p. 126; May, 2005, Carly B. Wiskoff, review of One Final Firecracker, p. 133; March, 2006, Matthew L. Moffett, review of Son of a Witch, p. 255; November, 2007, Beth L. Meister, review of What-the-Dickens, p. 130; November, 2013, Shelley Diaz, interview with Maguire; July, 2014, Erinn Black Salge, review of Egg and Spoon, p. 106.
Voice of Youth Advocates, June, 1989, Jane Beasley, review of I Feel like the Morning Star, p. 117; February, 1997, review of Oasis, p. 330; February, 2002, review of Lost, p. 447; February, 2005, review of Leaping Beauty and Other Animal Fairy Tales, p. 496.
ONLINE
Broadway World, https://www.broadwayworld.com/ (October 10, 2020), Chloe Rabinowitz, “Interview: Gregory Maguire Talks 25th Anniversary Edition of the Wicked Novel, Dream Casts the Wicked Movie and More.”
Gregory Maguire website, https://gregorymaguire.com (June 10, 2023).
Imagination Soup, https://imaginationsoup.net/ (February 9, 2022), Melissa Taylor, author interview.
Lightspeed, https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/ (May 1, 2013), author interview.
New York State Writers Institute website, https://www.nyswritersinstitute.org/ (October 17, 2022), “A ‘Wicked’ Interview in Advance of Thursday’s Gregory Maguire Event.”
NPR website, https://www.npr.org/ (October 25, 2015), Rachel Martin, “‘After Alice’ Gets Lost in Wonderland, Sensible Bestie Comes to Her Rescue.”
Polygon, https://www.polygon.com/ (November 2, 2021), Tasha Robinson, “The Brides of Maracoor Continues the Story of Wicked, after a 10-Year Cliffhanger,” author interview.
Portalist, https://theportalist.com/ (October 4, 2020), Carolyn Cox, “Interview: Wicked Author Gregory Maguire Believes in the Universal Truth of Fairy Tales.”
Publishers Weekly Online, http://www.publishersweekly.com/ (September 4, 2014), Sue Corbett, author interview.
Shondaland, https://www.shondaland.com/ (October 5, 2020), Katie Tamola, “With ‘A Wild Winter Swan,’ Gregory Maguire Ushers in a New World of Magic,” author interview.
Gregory Maguire
USA flag (b.1954)
Gregory Maguire is an American author, whose novels are revisionist retellings of children's stories (such as L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz into Wicked is an American author, whose novels are revisionist retellings of children's stories (such as L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz into Wicked). He received his Ph.D. in English and American Literature from Tufts University, and his B.A. from the State University of New York at Albany. He was a professor and co-director at the Simmons College Center for the Study of Children's Literature from 1979-1985. In 1987 he co-founded Children's Literature New England (a non-profit educational charity).
Genres: Children's Fiction, Young Adult Fantasy, Fantasy, Literary Fiction
Series
Hamlet Chronicles
1. Seven Spiders Spinning (1994)
2. Six Haunted Hairdos (1997)
3. Five Alien Elves (1998)
4. Four Stupid Cupids (2000)
5. Three Rotten Eggs (2002)
6. A Couple of April Fools (2004)
7. One Final Firecracker (2005)
thumbthumbthumbthumb
thumbthumbthumb
Wicked Years
1. Wicked (1995)
2. Son of a Witch (2005)
3. A Lion Among Men (2008)
4. Out of Oz (2011)
thumbthumbthumbthumb
Another Day
1. The Brides of Maracoor (2021)
2. The Oracle of Maracoor (2022)
3. The Witch of Maracoor (2023)
thumbthumbthumb
Novels
The Lightning Time (1978)
The Daughter of the Moon (1980)
Lights on the Lake (1981)
The Dream Stealer (1983)
I Feel Like the Morning Star (1989)
Missing Sisters (1994)
The Good Liar (1995)
Oasis (1996)
Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister (1999)
Crabby Cratchitt (2000)
Lost (2001)
Mirror Mirror (2003)
What-the-Dickens (2007)
Click (2007) (with David Almond, Eoin Colfer, Roddy Doyle, Deborah Ellis, Nick Hornby, Margo Lanagan, Ruth Ozeki, Linda Sue Park and Tim Wynne-Jones)
The Next Queen of Heaven (2009)
Egg & Spoon (2014)
After Alice (2015)
Hiddensee (2017)
A Wild Winter Swan (2020)
Cress Watercress (2022)
thumbthumbthumbthumb
thumbthumbthumbthumb
thumbthumbthumbthumb
thumbthumbthumbthumb
thumbthumbthumbthumb
Collections
Leaping Beauty (2004) (with Chris Demarest)
thumb
Picture Books
Lucas Fishbone (1990)
thumb
Novellas
Matchless (2009)
thumb
Non fiction
Origins Of Story (1999) (with Barbara Harrison)
Making Mischief (2009)
thumbthumb
Anthologies containing stories by Gregory Maguire
A Wolf At the Door (2000)
thumb
Short stories
The Seven Stage a Comeback (2000)
Gregory Maguire
Article
Talk
Read
Edit
View history
Tools
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Gregory Maguire
Maguire in 2007
Maguire in 2007
Born June 9, 1954 (age 68)
Albany, New York, U.S.
Occupation Novelist
Genre Fantasy, children's literature
Spouse Andy Newman (m. 2004)
Children 3
Website
gregorymaguire.com
Gregory Maguire (born June 9, 1954) is an American novelist. He is the author of Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, and several dozen other novels for adults and children. Many of Maguire's adult novels are inspired by classic children's stories. Maguire published his first novel, The Lightning Time, in 1978. Wicked, published in 1995, was his first novel for adults. Though unsuccessful at first, it was adapted into a popular Broadway musical in 2003.
Maguire is married to American painter Andy Newman, in one of the first same-sex marriages performed in the state of Massachusetts. They have three children.[1]
Biography
Born and raised in Albany, New York, Gregory Maguire is the youngest of four children born to Helen and John Maguire. His mother died from complications suffered giving birth to him, which prompted his father to send him to live with an aunt. His aunt relinquished him to a local orphanage when he was six months old. He was reclaimed from the orphanage at age two, after his father's remarriage. Maguire has three half-siblings from his father's second marriage.[1]
Schooled in Catholic institutions through high school,[2] he received a BA in English and art from the State University of New York at Albany, an MA in children's literature from Simmons College, and a PhD in English and American literature from Tufts University.[3] His doctoral thesis was on children's fantasy written from 1938 to 1989.
In 1978, at the age of 25, Maguire published his first novel, The Lightning Time. Around the same time, he began to realize he was gay.[1] He was a professor and co-director at the Simmons College Center for the Study of Children's Literature from 1979 to 1986. In 1987, Maguire co-founded a nonprofit educational charity, Children's Literature New England, Inc., and was co-director for twenty-five years. He has lived in Dublin, London, and the greater Boston area.[3]
In 1995, Maguire published his first adult novel, Wicked: the Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West. Though the novel was initially unsuccessful, it sold 500,000 copies by the time the Broadway adaptation opened in 2003. In 2005, ten years after its publication, Wicked spent 26 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.[1]
Maguire met American painter Andy Newman in 1997 at the Blue Mountain Center art colony. Within a month of meeting, they had fallen in love. They adopted three children: Luke and Alex, originally from Cambodia, and Helen, originally from Guatemala. Maguire and Newman were married in June 2004, shortly after same-sex marriage became legal in Massachusetts.[1] They have lived in Concord, Massachusetts since 1999.[4][5] On April 13, 2009, Maguire and his family were featured on Oprah.[6]
Bibliography
For children
The Lightning Time (1978)
The Daughter of the Moon (1980)
Lights on the Lake (1981)
The Dream Stealer (1983)
The Peace and Quiet Diner (1988)
I Feel like the Morning Star (1989)
Lucas Fishbone (1990)
Missing Sisters (1994)
Oasis (1996)
The Good Liar (1997)
Crabby Cratchitt (2000)
Leaping Beauty: And Other Animal Fairy Tales (2004)
The Hamlet Chronicles:
Seven Spiders Spinning (1994)
Six Haunted Hairdos (1997)
Five Alien Elves (1998)
Four Stupid Cupids (2000)
Three Rotten Eggs (2002)
A Couple of April Fools (2004)
One Final Firecracker (2005)
What-the-Dickens: The Story of a Rogue Tooth Fairy (2007)
Missing Sisters (2009)
Egg and Spoon (2014)
Cress Watercress (2022)
For adults
The Wicked Years:
Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West (1995)
Son of a Witch (2005)
A Lion Among Men (2008)
Out of Oz (2011)
Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister (1999)
Lost (2001)
Mirror, Mirror (2003)
The Next Queen of Heaven (2010)
Tales Told in Oz (2012)
After Alice (2015)
Hiddensee: A Tale of the Once and Future Nutcracker (2017)
A Wild Winter Swan (2020)
Another Day:
The Brides of Maracoor (2021)
The Oracle of Maracoor (2022) ISBN 978-0063094017
The Witch of Maracoor (2023) ISBN 9780063094086
Short stories
Scarecrow (2001), published in Half-Human edited by Bruce Coville (Note: This is the life story of the Scarecrow from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, but is not a part of The Wicked Years.)
Fee, Fie, Foe et Cetera (2002), published in The Green Man: Tales from the Mythic Forest
The Oakthing (2004), published in The Faery Reel: Tales from the Twilight Realm
Chatterbox, published in I Believe in Water: Twelve Brushes With Religion
The Honorary Shepherds (1994), published in Am I Blue?:Coming Out From The Silence
Beyond the Fringe (1998) published in A Glory of Unicorns
The Seven Stage a Comeback (2000) published in A Wolf at the Door and Other Retold Fairy Tales
Matchless: A Christmas Story (2009)
The Silk Road Runs Through Tupperneck, N.H. (2009), published in How Beautiful the Ordinary: Twelve Stories of Identity
In That Country (2012), published in Parnassus Literary Arts Magazine
Non-fiction
Innocence and Experience: Essays and Conversations on Children's Literature (ed., with Barbara Harrison) (1987)
Origins of Story: On Writing for Children (ed., with Barbara Harrison) (1999)
Making Mischief: A Maurice Sendak Appreciation (2009)
Gregory Maguire is a writer of several dozen crossover books for adults and children. His best-known work is Wicked.
He also helped found and for 25 years codirected Children’s Literature New England, Inc., a nonprofit that raises awareness of the significance of literature in the lives of children.
Biographical information can be found at Gregory Maguire, Wikipedia.com.
FAQ: https://gregorymaguire.com/faq/#toggle-id-2
Interview: Gregory Maguire
by THE GEEK’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY
PUBLISHED IN MAY 2013 (ISSUE 36) | 5812 WORDS
Gregory Maguire is the author of The Wicked Years, a four-book cycle including Wicked, Son of a Witch, A Lion Among Men, and Out of Oz—all New York Times bestsellers. Wicked: The Musical is soon to celebrate its tenth anniversary on Broadway, and is one of the top dozen longest-running shows in Broadway history. Maguire has written five other novels for adults and two dozen books for children, and has written and performed pieces for National Public Radio’s All Things Considered and Selected Shorts. His novel Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister was an ABC film starring Stockard Channing.
This interview first appeared on Wired.com’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast, which is hosted by John Joseph Adams and David Barr Kirtley. Visit geeksguideshow.com to listen to the entire interview and the rest of the show, in which the hosts discuss various geeky topics.
***
The first thing that I wanted to talk about is that I live in New York, and I saw you at an event years ago at a Barnes & Noble in Union Square where you read sections from the novel Wicked and then members of Broadway cast performed the songs that had been adapted from those sections. I thought it was one of the best book events I’d ever seen, and I was just curious whose idea that was and how that came about.
Well, I have to say my publisher, HarperCollins, and the people who make the play, the Broadway theater people, have worked hand-in-glove all the way along in order to make sure that there’s as much generosity of spirit about this shared material as they possibly can. It never hurts the play for me to go out and talk about my work, and it certainly never hurts me, as a writer, to have a fourteen-million-dollar advertising budget behind my book. While I can’t remember whose idea it was exactly, I do know that there was no coercion needed. There were no greased palms, everybody was happy to help out together.
You said something I thought was really funny, if I’m remembering right. You said that when you first went out on tour, one of your friends said something along the lines of, “You’re not so cute that groupies are going to be a huge problem, but you’re cute enough that they might be a slight problem.”
[Laughs] That was the writer Alice Hoffman, who said, “Never leave a bookstore with somebody you’ve just met.” I didn’t want to ask her, “Why, Alice? Do you have any interesting stories you want to tell me about? I’m all ears.” I just said, “Thank you for your advice. I’m a babe in the woods; I’m a novice. I’m not stupid, but I’m a novice.” She gave me, for protection, a kind of hand puppet of the Wicked Witch of the West. She said, “What you must do, if you are going out and you happen to go to a café across from the bookstore, take this Wicked Witch of the West puppet out, order yourself a bottle of wine, do not drink it, just put the puppet on the bottle of wine, and put the Wicked Witch of the West across from you at the table, and that will scare off all pretenders.” That was good advice, except, of course, the Wicked Witch of the West invites lunatics out of the woodwork, and so it didn’t quite work in quite the fashion she had imagined it would. But I did carry that puppet around with me for years and told that story often.
So obviously the Broadway play has been a big success, and I understand there’s a feature film in development. What’s the status of that?
There is a feature film in very slow development. I have not heard any updates recently. I think I did see over the past summer that there was a director who was considering being attached to the project. But Universal Studios is the main bankroller for the play, and they are still making money on Broadway and on four continents on every night the curtains go up, and so they’re not in any big hurry to turn this into a feature film just yet. Why kill the goose that’s laying the golden eggs? The eggs are still good-sized, and eventually the movie will come to be, but only I think when the play has finally gotten to be completely passé and either needs a little boost or is done, and therefore can be reinvented once again.
The reason Oz is in the news right now is that there is this new movie coming out called Oz The Great and Powerful. Have you been following that at all?
I have seen the trailers for it. I saw the truncated one last fall that I liked quite a bit. I saw the expanded one that goes out to a minute, and I wasn’t quite as impressed with that one. It began to look as if it were verging on Tim Burton territory. Nothing wrong with that, except that that’s not my personal picture of what Oz is like.
How would you say your take is different from a Tim Burton take on it?
Tim Burton’s worlds are fascinating, and I love them, but they crawl toward the baroque and the macabre, let’s say—even his Alice in Wonderland. My take on Oz is sinister in some ways, but it is no less capable of salvation at the same time. In other words, my world is just as corrupt and just as redeemable as the real world in which we live. At least that’s my artist’s attempt.
I’ve heard you say that one of the things that makes Wicked strike a chord with people is it is concerned with doing the right thing and being good versus being bad and that that’s kind of become almost passé in literature. How do you think we got to this place where questions of doing the right thing are not fashionable?
One can certainly understand that when the bad becomes so immense, the last hundred [or so] years has not been a very noble period for the human race, and so we have some choices just for self-protection. We can choose to ignore the problems, which is the most common way human beings have of severing themselves from the pain of fecklessness, or we can say we’re going to fight as hard as we can, and we’re going to lose. Or we can say it’s all beyond us, no one person can change the history of the Holocaust, no one person can turn back global warming, no one person can impound all the guns that threaten all the schoolchildren in every school in the nation, and so to say that I have the capacity for good is to indulge in a kind of hubris that is outsized to my real capacities. So I think we have stepped back from the belief that we could change the milieu in which we live.
You said that one of your goals with writing Wicked was to encourage people to not be so hasty in demonizing other people and the book has sold millions of copies—I think seven million copies—the play has been this big Broadway hit: Have you gotten any feedback that suggests that message is sinking in to people who are enjoying the story?
Yes, I have. Mostly from young people who are not scared of saying what they think about something. We should all be that young. I am very pleased that Elphaba particularly as a character, but also the story of Wicked in general has been such as to make people want to write to me and say, “I identify with this character of Elphaba because she is going up against it; she knows she has so little chance of success, but she won’t give up.” And, personally, between you and me and anybody else [listening to] this podcast, I identify with her too. I take my own set of courage from the story of Elphaba. I admit it’s a bit onanistic to think I can admire as a hero somebody I made up from some part of my own brain. It’s a little bit of a closed system there, isn’t it? But nonetheless, I do. I don’t quite say to myself, “What would Elphaba do?” But in a way, knowing that there’s a character like Elphaba out in the world—it doesn’t matter that I helped shape her—what matters is that I can take an impression from her strength and her vivacity, and it can make me decide how I’m going to approach my teenage kids when they come home today.
Do you ever get letters from kids who say, “There was this green-skinned girl in our class, and we used to be mean to her, but having read the book, now we realize we should be nicer to her.”
No, because every letter that I get from every kid says, “I am the green-skinned girl. They should be nicer to me.” Boys and girls alike.
Let’s talk about the world of Oz. Since this is a show for fantasy and science fiction fans, I think one that one thing that was really interesting about the way that you approached creating this world of Oz is you said that you actually consulted with a cultural anthropologist to create the societies. Do you have lessons that are generalizable for fantasy writers in terms of creating those kinds of worlds?
I think about this a lot in almost every work that I do, regardless of the audience. If it’s an audience of kids who are eight or if it’s an audience of adult readers, I try to think, “What are the minimum details that I need to supply in order to make this world seem coherent?” Now, in a short story, you may only need one or two crispy phrases or surprising iterations of the layout of the world in order to make the whole thing snap into being and leap up before the eyes of the reader like a pop-up book. But, in a large world, especially a world like Oz, which already existed, I felt I needed to be on the money for every single aspect of the life and culture and history that’s provided. But, of course, L. Frank Baum did not provide a whole lot of that. The history of Oz is very sketchy, and I wanted to deepen it and to enrich it, and I wanted to be able to have some sense of how the entire society had worked and was working and might work in the future, depending on how people behaved. To that end, I made a list of the things that any cultural anthropologist going out in the field might actually consider upon finding a new population. What are the inheritance structures? What are the class divides? How do the people in any particular part of the clan relate to clans outside and to differences within the clan? What is the attitude toward gender? And then what are some of the processes? The marriage processes? The birth processes? What is the relationship of fable and faith in that particular society? The more I delved in, the more I got my hands dirty, the more I felt I could find answers either in myself or in some turning over of the ground that L. Frank Baum and MGM had left us.
You did have to make some changes to L. Frank Baum’s world—what have been the most impassioned reactions from L. Frank Baum purists that you’ve gotten to changes that you made?
The initial response to Wicked from the world at large, the world of literary critics, was generally very good. There was one particularly nasty response from the New York Times, but almost all the other reviews were quite flattering. They were better reviews than I ever expected to get in my life, and I was really pleased. The Oz purists were slower to come on board. I think I was considered something of a heretic at first, for the following reasons: I allowed a certain kind of joyful inanity to seep out of Oz, that is to say, while there’s cause and effect in the story of Dorothy in Oz, there really is very little cause and effect in Oz without Dorothy there. The populations all throughout Oz that Baum began to embroider and then continue to embroider were all self-contained and hardly knew or cared about each other even if their territories were contiguous. There was very little sense of how they’d come to be there or what made them be unique, one from another. When Dorothy lands in Munchkinland, nobody in Munchkinland has ever been to the Emerald City, it’s just hearsay. They’re farmers out in the sticks, so I felt that I needed to explain a little bit about that, about why the populations were so different, and that suggested to me that there was a lot more antagonism among the populations than Dorothy was aware of when she got there. So most of my inventions were based on apprehensions from clues that had been left on the ground by Baum—and by MGM, I consider them co-parents, as it were, of the Oz that we all feel that we know. The diehard Oz enthusiasts, the L. Frank Baum clubs, etc. were not all that happy, but I’ll tell you this: I was out in Wichita or in Kansas City or Omaha or someplace on tour for Wicked, and at the end of my reading when I had talked about the Wicked Witch of the West, and I had made it clear that I had no intention to have written a Saturday Night Live parody of The Wizard of Oz, I intended to take it all very seriously as if it were a nineteenth-century moral tale. At the very end, when I was signing books, a woman came up to me. She was very tall, she had a trench coat, a brim-snapped hat on, and she came to me, and she peered down into my face, and she said, “I have a confession to make.” I said, “Yes?” She looked this way, she looked that, she said, “I’m from the official International Wizard of Oz Club, and I’ve come to spy on you and report back to our minions, but I’ve become a convert!” And then she threw off her hat and bought three books and had them all signed for her mother and her husband and her children. I think that’s sort of what happened. It took the Oz people a little bit longer to realize, yes, I was playing around with sacred material, but not in any way to disgrace the original material, just actually to make it seem richer and to make its richness make more sense.
There’s this whole thing about in the Wizard of Oz that the Scarecrow is the symbol for the farmers, and the Yellow Brick Road is a symbol for the gold standard, and the whole thing is a political allegory. What do you think about that and did you do anything similar with your Oz books?
I stayed away from using any of those characters as allegorical elements, I mean, the most famous characters. And I have come around to thinking that, what I’ve heard a few other people write, is that it’s quite possible that the images of the Yellow Brick Road and the Scarecrow and the Tin Man, particularly, occurred to L. Frank Baum as a result of political cartooning. He was, after all, a newspaper journalist in the years before he wrote The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and so he was familiar with how political cartoons were beginning to use symbols like that and characters in order to demonstrate certain segments of the population and their attitudes toward cultural, social, political, and historical changes. On the other hand, it’s been suggested that the images themselves are so strong, that they actually didn’t have to mean anything. The cow jumping over the moon doesn’t have to mean anything, but, boy, there’s a cow jumping over the moon, that in itself. Blake famously said about the “Tyger! Tyger! burning bright” in his poem, when asked, “What does the tiger stand for?” he said, “The tiger stands for the tiger.” And so, in a sense, the Scarecrow and the Tin Man stand for who they are in the story; their origins may have been political, but once Baum started to use them as characters, they shucked off their origins, I do believe. And so I don’t believe anybody would waste his time writing an allegory about the foundations of fiscal policy in a book intended for eight year olds.
You have said that Wicked was inspired by the US involvement in Iraq. Were the later books in the series similarly intertwined with contemporary politics or did it kind of go off on its own after a while?
Well, they were. Son of a Witch, the second in the series, was the most directly inspired by contemporary events, and here’s where I break with what I said as an answer to the previous question, the book Son of a Witch was intended as a response of mine to the Second Gulf War, and to the pictures of people coming out of Abu Ghraib, especially the one of the man with the hood and he’s on a box wired up supposedly to electrodes. Those pictures came out and were all over the front of the Boston Globe and they were so horrendous that I felt physically sick, and I thought if I don’t write something about somebody making an attempt to break someone out of prison, then I’m just going to go bonkers. I’m going to have to sign myself into McLean’s [psychiatric hospital] and spend the rest of my life there because I find this so offensive, so horrible to consider. Now when I came to read the book Son of a Witch for an audio book, books on tape, I found to my surprise that the character playing the new ruler of Oz, the new Emperor of Oz, had a distinctly Texan twang, which I don’t believe he had any right to have. So I suppose I was betraying my own political attitude in my performance of some of the characters once I came to do the book on tape.
You’ve described yourself as a pacifist. How hard is it to be a pacifist given contemporary politics when there doesn’t seem to be much support for that kind of idea?
I’m a pacifist by inclination; it’s not a religion. I would prefer in almost all instances for people not to be put in danger, but I was also raised a Christian, and I have read the essay by Thomas Aquinas on the moral justifications for a just war, and I know that there are times when one must pick up guns and try to right a wrong or to defend yourself. I know that. But I just always hope that’s always used as defense and as a last resort rather than an immediate kneejerk reaction. It is hard. It’s a hard position to hold, and like any position that any thinking being holds, I wobble on it back and forth all day long as well as in any given conversation.
Can you talk about how you went down to Nicaragua on sort of a peace mission?
Yes. It was in the late eighties, right before the Iran-Contra revelations, but there was certainly money coming in, flooding in from the United States, to arm one side of the struggle, to arm the right side of the struggle. By “right” I mean not the progressive side, not the leftist side, but the other direction. And I knew that there was, because I knew people who lived there, that there was a really commendable effort by American citizens who didn’t believe in the arming of rebels in another country to want to go to Nicaragua, and to stand, to want to link arms with the peasantry [ . . . ] as a way of saying even if the American government is funding these guns, not everybody in America, in the United States, feels the same way. So we’re going to come down and just be another voice, another presence, and stand [ . . . ] in solidarity with the movement. I was very happy to do that, I was very scared to do that, and I’ve never done it again. But it was a real education, and it was an attempt for me to stand up for what I believed.
You talked about using storytelling to comfort children there.
Yes. Boy, you’ve done your research well. The fact is that I didn’t speak much Spanish, but I found that I have a little bit of a Pied Piper sort of presence sometimes among children, and I was able just with the tiniest bit of toys or sticks or stones and making animal noises, I was almost always able to bring the children together and to engage with them. I was staying one night in a house that only had one door. It was in the farthest highland place that we were going on this trip, and about nine o’clock at night the lights in the town went off, the entire lights of the whole little mountainside village went off, and one of the Americans said, “Oh, they may be cutting the power in order to attack the town at night. We all better go inside our homes.” I was staying with a minister whose wife had been killed and had left him with three children, and when the guns went off, the children came and nestled under my arms, like little chickadees coming for safety, to a person who didn’t have any Spanish and certainly didn’t know what to do if somebody burst through the door with a gun, and I just started singing and rocking and making funny noises, and indeed it was some sort of gun episode, outside in the street outside our house. Nobody was hurt, eventually everything was silenced. I never did find out what it was, but I felt that I was able, at least in that moment, to give comfort in the way that I could, by singing and being a lunatic.
I think it’s really interesting that you said that your parents didn’t really let you watch TV and that The Wizard of Oz was basically the only TV that you were allowed to watch, that it was like Christmas that it was on TV once a year and you were allowed to watch it.
Well, the story as you put it out is a little extreme. We actually were allowed to watch TV, but not much. We had to vote as a family of seven children which half hour the TV was going to be on every week. We could watch it every week, we just couldn’t watch it all that regularly. But, yes, you’re right, once a year my parents relented, they gave up their harshness and their restrictions and they said, “Oh, The Wizard of Oz is a great family film, every child should see it.” It was part of our annual festival, it was in the liturgical calendar, really: There was Christmas, there was Easter, there was The Wizard of Oz. [ . . . ] Because of that, I think the story of Oz got into me, I don’t say more deeply than it did to other people of my generation, who didn’t live in the video mesmorama in which children and adults live now, but it certainly did get in deep to me as the first instance of a filmic impression. This was one of the few stories that I got through the movies first, and then went back and started trying to find the books afterwards.
I saw that your father wrote a humor column. What kind of effect did that have on you?
Yes, you might say he was a kind of early and localized Garrison Keillor, not with the kind of extended metaphor with which Garrison Keillor has been working for forty years or so, but he collected funny stories from around town and told them in a column that ran four days a week in our local newspaper. He was also a stringer attached to Time and Newsweek and the New York Times to report on any news that was happening out of upstate New York—the Albany area where I was born and where I was raised. So I grew up thinking, “Oh! I don’t think too much of my father, I don’t like him, he’s a bore, I’m going to do anything other than what he does in my life, I’m going to be a different person than he is,” but my whole life I’ve been a writer, exactly the way he has, and incidentally so too are three of my brothers writers, so despite the fact that we thought what he did was not terribly interesting, we must have been raised in that hothouse atmosphere of love for words, love of story, and love of sharing whatever it was that was good by writing about it.
What do you think about that, being raised with such limited access to television? What kind of effect did that have on you? I know you have kids now. I can’t even imagine trying to limit kids’ access to the Internet and so on today. What do you think of that sort of approach of limiting children’s access to media?
I think it’s a lost cause, and I think it’s important to lose it. That is to say, I think it’s important to try, and I think you’re going to lose. Our children are now fifteen, thirteen, and eleven, and we won the battle for ten years in a row. From the time they came to us, they’re all adopted, until they were about eleven, and then, in the last couple of years, as they’ve come up into high school and middle school, we’ve pretty much lost a good part of the battle, they are on screens an awful lot of the time, but not all the time. I still collect the iPad, the iPod, the phone, and the computers every night around eight thirty, quarter to nine, and that’s it ’til the next morning. They are supposed to read, and most of them do, the older one does homework, and the younger two read every night. They are not being raised in the world in which I was raised, and I couldn’t raise them there even if I wanted because it doesn’t exist anymore. I’ve had to relax a little bit and remind myself they need to be able to be functional in the world in which they find themselves. Just as I’ve found a way to be functional in my own [ . . . ] universe.
I saw on your Facebook page that you went to a symposium on dystopias last May. What was that and what things were discussed there?
It was run by a group called Children’s Literature New England, which is a group I actually helped to start about twenty-seven years ago. That group had as its aim to enliven the mission of telling people about the significance of literature in the lives of the children. To do that, it used to hold weeklong conferences once a year at which a stellar band of writers and illustrators, teachers and librarians, would come together. We had people like Ursula Le Guin and Maurice Sendak, Philip Pullman, Neil Gaiman, just pretty much anybody who was alive and could move across the floor accepted our invitations to come and speak. But as I have gotten older and have pulled back from doing that kind of organizing work in order to raise my own family, the group too has gone through a transition, and last fall we’d been meeting in smaller groups, and we did have a three-day symposium on dystopian fiction. We read some older material, we talked about Tobin Anderson’s work. We talked about The Hunger Games work. Some of the names of the books escape me at the moment. There’s a wonderful new anthology by Datlow and Windling called After. I don’t know if you’ve seen that. I have a story in that. And that’s a whole set of new and original dystopian fiction written for children.
Do you want to tell us about your story from the anthology?
Yes, it’s called “Hw th’Irth Wint Rong by Hapless Joey @ homeskool.guv.” And it is a six- or seven-page story that pays a tip of the hat/homage to Russell Hoban in his famous and wonderful dystopian novel called Riddley Walker. What most characterized that novel is that, in addition to the world being broken, even language was broken. The laws of grammar had all been forgotten. In order to read Riddley Walker, pretty much you have to read it out loud the way you find if you read Shakespeare out loud or Chaucer, who actually realized that your ears are hearing things and understanding it, doing just as much of the work as your eyes are doing. You read Riddley Walker and you read it out loud phonetically like a child learning to read and you remember how every child learning to read is trying to unriddle the universe. I took that plan and I wrote about a boy who was trying to write an essay about what happened to the world. He sees photographs of what the world used to be like when planes flew through the air, and everybody was clean and lawns were cut and everything seemed to be bright-colored, but in the time since he was born, half the world plunged into shadow, my suggestion as to why that happened is that something has gone wrong with that high speed particle collider halfway underneath France and Switzerland and that it generated a particle that began to change the nature of molecules. This is actually built out of a fear of mine of the Large Hadron Collider. People talked about the fact that nobody really knew what was going to happen if two particles collided and made a third particle that had never existed. Well, I always have to have something to worry about when I go to bed. First, it’s whether or not I’ve flossed correctly, and then it’s whether or not the universe is going to change its nature before I get up and brush my teeth. So that’s really where that story began, it was built out of that anxiety.
You’re best known for writing fantasy but I saw you wrote at least one young adult science fiction novel; I don’t know if there are others. Just what is your relationship with science fiction?
I read science fiction when I was fourteen or fifteen in the way that I read everything. So I read my Robert Heinlein, I read my Isaac Asimov, and I read my Ray Bradbury. There are some science fiction writers I really do admire a huge amount. There’s somebody who writes for teenagers, H. M. Hoover; she wrote with particular literary style that was very appealing to me. I’ve liked some of the work that Doris Lessing . . . and at the moment names escape me. I admire almost everything of Ursula Le Guin’s.
I hear you’re working on a new novel called Egg and Spoon. You want to tell us about that?
Yes, it’s on a table in the back of my study here. It is, in a little bit of a sense, a dystopian novel. It is set in the past, in roughly 1905 in czarist Russia. And despite the fact that it’s set back then, it’s really a meditation on some things that we are facing right now in our dystopian 2013, which is the threat of climate change, floods, and droughts, and weather that won’t sit in the month in which it belongs, and its implications for human suffering and the human need to begin to find new ways to share resources. I purposely set it in the past so that it won’t be too extreme and too science fiction, and it allows me to dabble in the kinds of things that I like to, but it nonetheless is intended to respond to readers, to young readers, right in the world in which they live. In which we see these storms, and we can worry about things like colony collapse of bees and about drought and about what it’s going to mean if our chain of food supply really is as drastically interrupted and revised as seems to be quite possible even within our lifetimes.
Do you have any idea when it will be released into the wild?
I would like to think that there is still a wild for it to be released into by the time I’m finished, and I would like to say probably fall of 2014.
Interview with Author Gregory Maguire
This post may contain affiliate links.
By Melissa Taylor
Posted on
February 9, 2022
Updated on
December 28, 2022
Share
Pin
Tweet
Gregory Maguire is the author of Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, which inspired the Wicked musical. He is also the author of several books for children, including the forthcoming Cress Watercress as well as What-the-Dickens, a New York Times bestseller and Egg & Spoon, a New York Times Book Review Notable Children’s Book of the Year.
author interview with Gregory Maguire
His next book, Cress Watercress, arrives in bookstores on 3/29/22. It’s a stunningly beautiful story about a fatherless rabbit named Cress who is on a journey to understand her inner world, reflected by her outer world and its stories, with delicious figurative language and precise word choice with characters who are immensely lovable. (It’s my favorite book of the year!)
I am thrilled to share a recent interview with Gregory Maguire about his new book, writing process, and favorite children’s books.
Interview with Author Gregory Maguire
Melissa: I love your use of language and imagery in Cress Watercress. (“The setting sun was a lumpy clementine…“) Can you tell me about your process? Do you walk through the world differently than non-writers?
Gregory: This is the kind of wonderful question that creative people ask themselves and can’t know the answer to. (Is the blue you see in the sky the same blue I see? Experiential miasmas…) I once asked Maurice Sendak what he pictured when he read THE ILIAD, but I had subtly asked the wrong question, and never rephrased it, and then he died, so I don’t know the answer. What I was TRYING to get at was did he picture what he was reading as non-artists might (this, then that), or as a film-maker might, in black and white or Technicolor, or—and this is what I was really curious about—did he picture great stories in terms of Maurice Sendak drawings? Was his imagination a free-floating endless scroll of unpublished Sendakiana? I wish I knew. I suspect it wasn’t, that Sendak drawings came out of his pen and brush after being fed through his hand onto the paper—but I’ll never know.
But to answer your question. I suppose I am a curious blend of revolting earnestness and absurdism. My father was something of a humorous writer and a well-known raconteur and journalist around town (Albany NY) and the Irish side of that largely Irish city was replete with good storytellers. Certain inanities appealed to me from childhood—“Rocky and Bullwinkle” (esp. the Fractured Fairy Tales!); Alice in Wonderland. The hums of Pooh. As I got older, skits from the Carol Burnett show.
The earnestness is a dreadful liability. I think about serious things all the time. I think that I cast off nonsequiturs and try to use language as a way to surprise and delight is, in some ways, a deflection from a slightly morbid tendency that all Irish Catholics come by honorably and that my own family situation institutionalized deep down. (I spent part of my infancy in an orphanage.)
But the truth about looking through the world for what it shows you is that you have to interpret what you see, and I find that the ability to play with language—to twist and tweak it just a hair’s-breadth—it’s like making something funny. You arrest the attention of the reader just this side of drawing attention to yourself as a writer. (That is a tricky metric to honor and I’m sure I fall over the edge all the time.) “A lumpy clementine.” I don’t want readers to think, “Oh, what a clever writer!” I want them to think, “Oh, yes, I’ve seen that sun! But never thought of it like that, and next time, I might. Now to go on.”
Gregory Maguire Interview
Final about process. Since I taught myself to write stories between first and fourth grades, my method has not evolved a scrap. I start with the first sentence and keep going until I reach the last one. I admire and envy people who write in bursts of inspiration and sort out the order later. I’m much more plodding. Though I do hold off beginning until I’m ready. (I realized after the fact I could have started: “In a hole in the ground there lived a rabbit.” But there she would be, stuck in that hole. I had to wait to see something happening. “Is everyone ready?” are Mama’s words at the end of the first paragraph. She’s talking to me, too. I nod, and push on to the next paragraph.
Melissa: With growing (kid) writers, what is the top piece of advice you give them — either with your children or students at schools you visit?
Gregory: The TOP advice? Well, it would have to be Ben Shahn’s in The Shape of Content: Close nothing off. Read everything. Though you can’t say that to kids. So just READ READ READ.
And don’t let the bloodsucking maw of the internet sink its incisors too deeply in your skin. Well, that’s a lost battle, and for me too. Never mind.
Here are very brief pieces of advice I give to fledgling writers of every age:
1) read
2) write every day—if not fiction, then in a journal, or in a letter (or a post I suppose). It doesn’t have to be much—a few lines. But something. Writing is like exercise, and you have to do it every day to keep in shape.
3) if you get blocked, put the work on the side of your desk.
4) note I didn’t say “put it in a drawer.” DON’T put it in a drawer. Leave it out where it can stare at your reproachfully, balefully, until you come back to it.
5) if you’re blocked, go for a walk. You don’t need to think about your project, but you will be working things out subconsciously.
6) if you’re DEEPLY blocked, pose a question to your dream mind on a piece of paper and leave it by the side of your bed when you turn off your lamp. Something like “Why did Squinchy happen to have a set of jumper cables in her Sunday go-to-meeting purse?” Whatever it is you need to know. When you wake up, there is a very good chance that the elves of your subconscious, like the minions in a deposit library, will have been mining for ideas all night and will have delivered something to your inbox in the morning. I’m not kidding about this. I rely deeply on my subconscious to keep the circuits sizzling while I am asleep. They’re the night shift and they do the important work.
Gregory Maguire advice for writers
Melissa: Some of my readers are aspiring children’s book writers. Can you share a bit about how you find your story ideas with them?
Gregory: I wish I could remember who first told the old joke, “I tell people who ask me where I get my ideas: at Woolworth’s.”
But there’s truth to this as to any joke.
An idea is, I think, a manifestation, or you might say a mestastasization (auto-correct don’t like that word), of some perceived reality, be it a reality about an appetite you have or perceive others have, or an image, or a setup, or a specific character, as wrought through the discriminating fine-mesh sieve of your imagination. The novelist Jane Langton once put it in a six-word proposal: “What if? Then what? So what?” She was talking about fantasy for children—what if a baby elephant saw his mother shot by a hunter and ran away to Paris, etc.—but it’s a similar stratagem for any kind of story-telling.
One can back into a story in any number of ways. The idea of Cress as a fatherless rabbit came second. The earlier impulse was thinking about one of my kids, and how I wasn’t sure that the notion that strong emotions aren’t merely instances to survive and to grow from, but are cyclical, and the important lesson I didn’t think this child had yet taken on is that they will return. Bibliotherapy only gets you to the last page in a book, but in real life, flashes of old anger, love, regret, fear, wash over us constantly. The older we get, the more we know we are going to survive their return, and get beyond them, too. The young don’t yet have the time to know that. That was the start of CRESS, and I worked backward to find a character who would be properly situated to have to deal with these matters.
Melissa: Do you have a favorite character in this story, and why?
Gregory: Hmmm. I love Cress herself because she is so emotionally volatile. I was like that as a kid (“sensatif!”). I liked writing nearly all the characters, though. Lady Agnes Cabbage appears in nearly all my books in one way or another. The chinchilla was a happy surprise. When she mentioned she had a chinchilla I didn’t know it was going to speak until the next line.
I have a secret affection for Tunk the Honeybear, too, because he means well but is too lumbering to do anything delicately. I know people like that. I am people like that.
Melissa: What were your favorite children’s books that you read to your children when they were younger? Or, what are your five favorite children’s books?
Gregory: Aha! Now we had some REAL favorites in childhood that belong to our household and don’t necessarily mean too much to others. But who knows? They include the Gaspard and Lisa books, which are originally in French I think; Father Fox’s Pennyrhymes. The two Rosemary Wells books of Mother Goose rhymes. (I didn’t think I was going to like them but they’re absolutely classic totems in this household.) A very simple story about a new duckling called Little One-Step. Several Sendak books.
My favorites in childhood? I won’t talk about picture books because I remember those more from reading them to my baby siblings. The Golden Age of childhood reading for me—fourth through eighth grade—brought me to C S Lewis’s Narnia, to Harriet the Spy, to The Diamond in the Window by Jane Langton, to A Wrinkle in Time, Pretty standard fare for someone who would grow up to write fantasy (Harriet being the exception, though she taught me how to be honest and to keep a journal, and everything else descends from that). And for a fifth, since you asked for five, I’ll mention a transitional book for me, read in high school: The Once and Future King. Transitional in that the first volume, The Sword in the Stone, was published for children (as I understand it, though maybe not—I’ve never had full clarity on that). But it was a bildungsroman of the young King Arthur, so about a child). That wonderful, funny, dear, complicated novel gave me both the template and the courage to consider writing Wicked some 25 years later. A very important book in my life.
About Gregory Maguire
GREGORY MAGUIRE is the author of the incredibly popular books in the Wicked Years series, including Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, which inspired the musical. He is also the author of several books for children, including What-the-Dickens, a New York Times bestseller, and Egg & Spoon, a New York Times Book Review Notable Children’s Book of the Year. Gregory Maguire lives outside Boston.
About Cress Watercress
Penguin Random House
Amazon
Bookshop
From the publisher:
A lavishly illustrated woodland tale with a classic sensibility and modern flair—from the fertile imagination behind Wicked.Gregory Maguire turns his trademark wit and wisdom to an animal adventure about growing up, moving on, and finding community. When Papa doesn’t return from a nocturnal honey-gathering expedition, Cress holds out hope, but her mother assumes the worst. It’s a dangerous world for rabbits, after all. Mama moves what’s left of the Watercress family to the basement unit of the Broken Arms, a run-down apartment oak with a suspect owl landlord, a nosy mouse super, a rowdy family of squirrels, and a pair of songbirds who broadcast everyone’s business. Can a dead tree full of annoying neighbors, and no Papa, ever be home? In the timeless spirit of E. B. White and The Wind and the Willows—yet thoroughly of its time—this read-aloud and read-alone gem for animal lovers of all ages features an unforgettable cast that leaps off the page in glowing illustrations by David Litchfield. This tender meditation on coming-of-age invites us to flourish wherever we find ourselves.
From Gregory Maguire:
Some of David Litchfield’s artwork for Cress Watercress seems to me like Aesop’s fables done in stained glass. Other pieces are scattershot windmill art, breezy and incidental as a summer’s day. Homespun, handsome, and as full of feeling as any child. In fact, it is the child’s life of feelings that I was eager to capture in Cress Watercress. When young, we are lovingly shown by our parents and teachers that feelings are real and that they are valid, but we’re given little guidance as to their schedule or life cycle. We’re expected to learn of the timetable of moods all on our own. If we’re traumatized—and who isn’t?—we can be strengthened when we understand that dark moods may often return, but they will lift again. Cress Watercress, through its lighthearted adventures, portrays this dawning realization in a young creature.
Interview: Wicked Author Gregory Maguire Believes in the Universal Truth of Fairy Tales
The New York Times bestselling writer is inspired by the omnipresence of childhood stories.
By Carolyn Cox | Published Oct 4, 2020
postimage
Gregory Maguire harnesses the power of childhood stories to spin unifying tales for adults.
The bestselling author had his breakout success with Wicked, a retelling of L. Frank Baum's The Wizard of Oz, told from the perspective of the Wicked Witch. The success of Wicked led to a book quartet called The Wicked Years, as well as a musical adaptation of the same name that is now the second highest-grossing Broadway musical ever.
Maguire has gone on to spin adult retellings of iconic tales like Cinderella (Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister), Snow White (Mirror, Mirror) and now a New York-set adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen's magical story "The Wild Swans."
The Portalist spoke to Maguire about his new novel A Wild Winter Swan, and the power of childhood fantasies to speak to divided adults.
I have to imagine that due to covid, the lead-up to releasing A Wild Winter Swan probably feels very different than it has with previous books. What has that experience been like?
Some books stamp into the world with the tintinnabulum of current events to broadcast its arrival. Isabel Wilkerson’s new book, which I haven’t read yet, called Caste, seems both on its merits and in its fortuitous timing to be that sort of arrival.
Other books are brought in by hand, cherished because of their nature and their quirky individuality. I have experienced both. (My Son of a Witch came out about a year after Wicked opened on Broadway, so hit the stalls with bigtime fanfare.) I thought of A Wild Winter Swan as a kind of wintery valentine to things we used to cherish when we were younger: A simplicity of expectation, a circumscription of arena, an investment in the social and actual weather of our neighborhood, our week.
My novel takes place over the course of a week in late winter, 1962, and almost all the action occurs within a few square blocks of the Upper East Side. I had wanted it to appeal to our sense of a long ago and less complicated moment. Now, I think it has the chance of an even richer welcome, for we are all sequestered and uncertain of our future as my 15-year old character, Laura Ciardi, is in her own 200-some pages of A Wild Winter Swan.
Interview: Gregory Maguire Talks 25th Anniversary Edition of the WICKED Novel, Dream Casts the WICKED Movie and More
The 25th anniversary edition of WICKED will be published on October 13th.
By: Chloe Rabinowitz
Oct. 10, 2020
BroadwayWorld 20th Anniversary Celebration
Vote Now for the 2023 BroadwayWorld Theatre Fan's Choice Awards
POPULAR
WGA Won't Picket Unscripted Tony Awards; Broadcast Set For June 11th Photo 1WGA Won't Picket Unscripted Tony Awards; Broadcast Set For June 11th
Photos: First Look at MJ's New Michael Jackson, Elijah Rhea Johnson Photo 2Photos: First Look at MJ's New Michael Jackson, Elijah Rhea Johnson
SOME LIKE IT HOT, LEOPOLDSTADT & More Win 2023 Outer Critics Circle Awards Photo 3SOME LIKE IT HOT, LEOPOLDSTADT & More Win 2023 Outer Critics Circle Awards
Photos: First Look at Brightman, Iglehart, McClure, Urie, and More in SPAMALOT at The Kenn Photo 4Photos: First Look at SPAMALOT at The Kennedy Center
WICKED
Click Here for More on WICKED
Photos: First Look at Brightman, Iglehart, McClure, Urie, and More in SPAMALOT at The Kennedy Center
Wicked has been leaving its mark on pop culture for 25 years, inspiring millions as people all around the world continue to discover and rediscover this story that is both classic, and unmatched in its originality and impact. The novel, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire was first published in 1995, and was further cemented into the fabric of our history when it was made into a global phenomenon of a musical in 2003.
More than two decades after the original publication of the novel, a 25th anniversary edition is being released by HarperCollins on October 13th.
You can pre-order the 25th anniversary edition of Wicked HERE!
We spoke with author Gregory Maguire about the impact of Wicked, why the themes in the book are more relevant now than ever, who he would want to star in the Wicked film, and more!
What can you tell us about the 25th anniversary edition of Wicked?
00:07
06:23
Interview: Bernadette Peters Talks 'Irreverent'...
Video: 'Theatre Saved Me' Says Tony Nominee...
Video: Tony Nominee Ben Platt Thinks the World is...
Video: Tony Nominee Sara Bareilles Is Having...
Video: Jodie Comer Is Coming for Her Tony Award
Video: Tony Nominee Audra McDonald is Back...
Video: SHUCKED's Alex Newell Is Celebrated,...
Shucking Around with Ashley D. Kelley: Inside a Two-Show...
Video: Sean Hayes Reflects on the 20-Year Passion...
Photos/Video: Rita Moreno Visits THE SIGN IN SIDNEY...
The main thing is that I have provided an extensive afterword to be included at the end of the novel, which is a consideration, I think, of my beliefs about the value of children's stories and how they carry, coded and coiled within them, material that not only is suitable for children when we first get it, but actually continues like radiation to give off useful nutrition for the whole of our adult lives.
What was your first experience with The Wizard of Oz? Was it the movie? Was it the book?
I am from a very bookish family. We were kind of like a librarian version of the Von Trapp family, we didn't sing together, we read together. So, for most stories, I knew the book version first, but for The Wizard of Oz it was a rare exception. The Wizard of Oz started to be broadcast annually on CBS I think it was, in the late 1950s when I was about five, and then was broadcast annually until the beginning of what I call "the video mesmorama", where you could get them 365 days a year at-will, on demand. So, because it was one of the few movies I saw in young childhood and I saw it repeatedly, it took on the kind of appeal of almost a bible story, it was like the nativity, it was like going to church at Christmas and Easter. There was Christmas, there was Easter, there was The Wizard of Oz.
Where did you first get the idea to write this sweeping backstory to the Wizard of Oz, and why did you decide to make the Wicked Witch of the West the heart of the story?
Photos: First Look at Brightman, Iglehart, McClure, Urie, and More in SPAMALOT at The Kennedy CenterIn a way, there are at least two beginnings to my decision to do it. There was the unconscious beginning and the conscious. The unconscious beginning was back in childhood, because after the film was shown, I would gather together my brothers and sisters and neighborhood kids who didn't have a scrap of imagination among them, and I would say, "Okay gang, listen up, here's what we're going to do today!" And I would arrange a kind of troupe of improv players to act out The Wizard of Oz after it showed.
But, fast forward another, maybe, twenty five years, at the beginning of the Gulf War in 1991. At the time, there was so much worry about Saddam Hussein, and I remember seeing a newspaper article that said, 'Saddam Hussein, the next Hitler?' and when I saw the word Hitler, my blood began to run cold because there can hardly be a word that is scarier in the English language, if you're a person who tends toward dread, than Hitler. And even I, who am fairly pacifist, if not very pacifist, found myself thinking, "Well, who among us wouldn't have picked up arms against Hitler if we could have known the damage he was going to do to the world?" I began from there to think about how we seem to need to use words of degradation in order to dehumanize our enemies, in order to be able to pick up sticks and stones and go to battle against them. We have somehow to believe that they are less human than we are in order to get the courage to kill them. I began to think then, really, "What does make somebody wicked? What is evil, and how do we use it socially and culturally? How do we use the concept as a legitimization of our inclination toward greed and self-involvement and self-rationalization?"
I began to cast about for a way to write about evil, and up to that point I had only written books for children. So, I remembered the rubrics that say, 'write about what you know' and I think, "What do I know, Catholic church music? The only other thing I know is children's books, and there's no evil in children's books by dint of the fact that they're for children. And then I had my one great revelation of my life. The scales fell from my eyes as they did for Saint Paul on the road to Damascus and I saw that there are villains in children's books, and I thought, "Well, of course there are, and of course they're stock villains, because otherwise we couldn't hate them," and, "Who's the worst of them?" And coming down from the sky on a cloud, approaching me in a heavenly vision, was not the Virgin Mary for whom I've been waiting for most of my adult life, but the Wicked Witch of the West, saying, "I'll get you and you're little dog!" And I thought, "Jesus, Mary and Joseph I've had a religious vision, and it's Elphaba."
Let's talk about the musical! Wicked is one of the most successful shows in Broadway history, what were your thoughts when you first found out someone wanted to make it into a musical?
I will say that all the time, writing the novel, I thought to myself, "This is a really good idea. If I can pull it off even to a minimum level-I mean I would like it to be a great novel-but even if I can pull it off to a minimum level of success, it's such a good idea that it will likely get some movie or TV interest." I even cast a film in my head as a way to help me visualize it. I had the young Antonio Banderas in my mind as Fiyero, when he was about 25. Elphaba was played in my mind by the young k.d. lang, who, a). she could sing, and b). she had a very pointed and spiky kind of individual beauty that was really beautiful, but was not like anybody else. And Angela Lansbury played Madame Morrible in my mind. Melanie Griffith played Galinda.
So, when the book was published it almost immediately got optioned by Demi Moore and a production company she ran, which had a relationship with Universal, and there was a chance for it to be a big budget film almost right away, but the film never quite crystallized. And then Stephen Schwartz, the magnificent Stephen Schwartz was out snorkeling, as I understand the story, with Holly Near. Holly Near and Stephen were friends and they were on holiday together or had at least run into each other in Hawaii someplace, and Stephen said, "What are you reading these days?" And she told him, "I'm reading Wicked, this book about the Wicked Witch of the West" and Stephen said, "Sounds like my return to Broadway,"
We met in Connecticut, we went for a walk, and he told me some of the ideas he had regarding the play. He told me that the thing about my novel is that it was built on a 19th century belief in the moral universe, and that the characters had great, deep, pre-Freudian instincts and emotions that were pre-modern and would not do very well on the big screen, but they would do very well when sung. And he went on and he said, "Gregory, I'm so convinced that you're going to see the correctness of my vision, that' I've already conceived the first song. It's going to be called 'No One Mourns the Wicked,'" And with the phrase, 'No One Mourns the Wicked' he said to me without quite saying it, "I catch the nub of why you wrote this book. I understand it." And, at that moment, though he didn't find out for about a year, until my agent and lawyers were through with negotiation, he had finished selling the job to me. I came home and I said to myself, "I'm going to let this happen, I don't care about the money. This is far more in line with why I wrote the book than the movie scripts I've read so far about Wicked,"
What is it like for you knowing that your work is a part of something so huge, that has had this massive effect on not only theater history, but on all of popular culture?
I think that if I hadn't begun adopting my children at just about the time that Wicked was beginning to be developed for Broadway, it might have made me unbearable with pride and with self-admiration. But the truth is, if you've got little kids screaming for Cheerios, it doesn't matter what Broadway websites say about you, you've got to get the damn Cheerios on the table! I have been aware of it as a kind of life change for me, it certainly has made my life less fiscally perilous, there's no doubt about that. But, in terms of it changing who I am as a writer or as a citizen or as a parent or as a creative person, it has perhaps had less effect than you might think by virtue of the fact that my parental duties came first, especially at that point.
When the Broadway cast recording was first coming out in roughly December of 2003, there was a recording reveal party in the lobby of the Gershwin, and I was invited to come down from Boston to sit in the line with other cast members and sign albums as they were passed along. I kept watching Idina Menzel at the other end of the table. And at roughly every seven or eight persons, she would get up from her folding chair and lean across the table and give somebody a hug. And I got interested, I went, "What's going on over there?" And I eavesdropped on, the next time it happened, there was a young woman... and she came up and she leaned over to Idina and she said, "I need to tell you, I have been living in this country for eight years, and this Elphaba is the first time I have ever seen myself in this country."
And I thought, "I have heard from so many people that Elphaba is them and they are Elphaba," that I am staggered with gratitude that I was able to key into some combination of personality that was both fragile and strong at the same time, and that speaks to all of us... I was able to use what I had and give something to somebody else. That's all we ever hope to do in life, isn't it? It legitimizes our time on this earth a little bit. And so, I've legitimized mine, and I have given people comfort, at least a few, a least a little, and that's enough for me.
The themes of your book, why do you think- or do you think- that they are more relevant now than ever?
When it came out I was afraid it would be found very retro and a little obvious, and then when I did ink the contracts to let the theater people begin to go to work on a play, 9/11 happened. I thought, as Alan Bennett, the English playwright would say, 'That puts paid to this project', because who is going to want to look at a play now that questions how we legitimize our aggression against our enemies, when we've just been attacked by Bin Laden? I thought that would really quash the project forever, but in fact, the opposite happened. The moral question that the play and the book ask became more urgent since the day that it was published in 1995. The world has become more dangerous and despotism has become more apparent, not just in the Middle East, but in Europe, and our own Western Hemisphere as well. And so, it shocks me and saddens me that I think the story is more urgent now than it was twenty-five years ago, but I think it is.
What is your favorite scene in the book?
That's a really good question! It's funny because the scene that the play memorializes as the song Popular, where Elphaba and Galinda both put down their guard for the first time and become willing to consider that each other as human, was a scene that I loved writing because it gave me a chance to highlight Elphaba's intellectual side. Up to that point, Elphaba had only been weird and dangerous and green, but here, in college, it was the first time I was able to write a scene in which she could talk about how she thought. She was thinking about the nature of evil, and she was thinking about whether evil exists, in her bedroom, and Galinda comes in and wants to try on a hat. And in the interest of starting to make fun of Elphaba by giving her a too-weird hat that she imagines she is going to laugh at with her friends and say how Elphaba couldn't even see that she was being made fun of, she accidentally notices that Elphaba is beautiful, and she realizes she has been being talked to like a real person and not just a bubble head for the first time. So, the moment that their friendship begins in the book was deeply gratifying to me to write because it allowed me to explore both of those women's strengths and vulnerabilities.
Before the pandemic, there was a lot of talk about the Wicked movie. If you could dream cast the movie, do you have an idea of who you would want to do it now?
I have had a dream cast that has to keep changing every couple of years because the time goes on and people get too old for the roles. I know I've heard Kristin Chenoweth say, "They better hurry up and make this movie, Wicked, or I'm going to have to play Madame Morrible!" And indeed, she and Idina Menzel are too old for the roles of ingenues at this point. Their voices are just as good, if not better, than sixteen years ago, but they are too womanly, they're not girlish enough.
I sure was thrilled with Ariana Grande singing 'The Wizard and I' at that fifteenth-anniversary TV special. She just really knocked it out of the park, I thought she was great. For the characters who are a little bit older, I mean, Angela Lansbury is still around, it's not too late for her to be Madame Morrible! I loved Miriam Margolyes when she played Madame Morrible, and I loved Carol Kane when she played Madame Morrible. I used to wonder about whether they could even get somebody like Meryl Streep to play Madame Morrible, and I would love to see that. There was a time a few years back when I thought Darren Criss might be a good Fiyero, partly because he's part Filipino, and in fact, when I wrote Fiyero, I had Southeast Asians as part of my inspiration for what he looked like. But, he too, I mean, people get older. Now that Norbert Leo Butz is an older person, maybe he'd be a good Wizard!
Is there anything the musical does that you wish you had thought of?
People have sometimes said to me, "The musical changed your book and they made much more of a romantic competition between Elphaba and Galinda over Fiyero than your book did, and furthermore x, and furthermore y." I'm very happy with the way Winnie Holzman and Stephen Schwartz chose to tell the story. It made efficient, economic, and narrative sense for them to make the story choices that they chose to do, and I applaud it completely. The play is a little less subtle than the novel in some ways. And I wanted the novel to be more ambiguous because that's the nature of how I was trying to tell my story.
To be ambiguous was my intent in the novel, partly because I wanted to pose the question, "How do we know what evil is and how do we know when we see it?" I wanted to pose the question, but I did not want to answer it, I wanted that answer to have to be the job of the reader. And so, to follow that along, I also pose lots of possibilities. What was it about Elphaba and the fact that at the beginning they couldn't determine her gender? What was it about Elphaba and Galinda and their strong association for which neither of them really had the words or the experience to name? Why did Glinda turn away from Elphaba in the Emerald City when the notion of Fiyero came up? Again, there was an embedded suggestion on my part that, even though it doesn't seem to come up in the book, that Glinda did hold a candle for Fiyero and always had, and I just put the tiniest little suggestion there in one or two scenes. I wanted people to think, "Oh, what is that about?" And not be able to think, "I'll find out on page 412. No, I just have to think about it." Because all human behavior is mysterious and ambivalent, and it is our job to look at contradictory information and come to the best conclusions about it that we can. And I wanted the novel to seem, even though it was a fantasy, more like life than life itself.
NYS Writers Institute
Oct 17, 2022
4 min read
A "Wicked" interview in advance of Thursday's Gregory Maguire event
In advance of our Thursday, October 20, conversation event with Gregory Maguire, we're sharing freelance writer Jack Rightmyer's interview with the novelist published in Sunday's Times Union.
EVENT DETAILS
Gregory Maguire, in conversation with Jo Page
7:30 p.m. Thursday, October 20, 2022
Page Hall, UAlbany Downtown campus
135 Western Avenue
Albany NY 12203
Free and open to the public. Free parking.
Books will be for sale at the event.
A signing will follow the conversation.
More information.
Albany native Gregory Maguire on Wicked success, fantasy escapism
By Jack Rightmyer
Oct. 12, 2022, Albany Times Union. Reprinted with permission.
Albany native Gregory Maguire, author of more than 20 books including Wicked, which became the source for the enormously popular Tony Award-winning Broadway musical, believes writing has allowed him to keep his sanity.
“While Oz for most of us is the archetypical story of a lost child who finds her way home, for me it has been a stand in for how I look at the real world, which I find much more mysterious and incomprehensible than Oz,” Maguire said.
As a writer Maguire loves that he can control and create his own worlds. “It’s a type of therapy. The world today is not only mysterious, but it’s very frightening. Without Oz to inspire me and allow me to use my creative imagination I’d probably be lost in my anxieties.”
The Oracle of Maracoor by Gregory Maguire
Maguire's most recent book The Oracle of Maracoor is volume two of the Another Day Trilogy, and the seventh book he’s written related to Oz. It continues the story of Elphaba’s green-skinned daughter, Rain, as she travels through the mysterious land of Maracoor across the ocean from Oz. She and some companions are in search for the fabled Oracle of Maracoor with the hope of finding her way back to Oz.
“In March 2020 we didn’t know how many people in the world would be dead in a year, if the economy was going to flatten out, and if we were heading into another Great Depression," Maguire said. "The world had shut down. I could no longer travel. I couldn’t even leave my house. I had three children, and I needed to stay functional and keep myself strong. That’s how I ended up writing about Maracoor. That was my psychological escape hatch.”
As his characters journeyed through Maracoor, Maguire went along with them not sure where they were taking him and what would happen. “I was walking with them in this act of creation, and that was so much fun because for a few hours every day it took me out of the reality of COVID,” he said.
Maguire will feature in two upcoming local events: A reading and conversation at Page Hall at the University of Albany on Thursday, Oct. 20, via the New York State Writers Institute, and as the keynote speaker at the Saratoga Book Festival at the Saratoga Springs City Center the following Saturday.
Maguire has always loved reading and writing stories of fantasy, and has found himself in good company. “The popularity of fantasy has come and gone in waves. When Wicked was published in 1995 it was the beginning of this great era of fantasy writing. It was published the same year as the first book of The Game of Thrones and just before the first Harry Potter book. Fantasy has maintained its popularity even today with all the Marvel movies.”
He sees fantasy as a way to see our own homeland a bit more clearly. “We look through the lens of some foreign place to see who we are. Most fantasies are often about the weak, the abandoned, and the cursed, so fantasy allows us to cheer on the underdog.”
Maguire often feels like a parent to the characters he has created. “The final job of parenting is to let your child go. That’s your obligation. I have grown to like the character of Rain very much. I want her to fly free and live her own life and not her grandmother’s or her father’s. It’s the same thing I hope for my three children who are all quickly becoming adults.”
He published his first book in 1978, and one of the big surprises for him is that in the last 44 years he’s developed a large readership. “Writing is more enjoyable today than it has ever been. I’ve been very frugal and today I no longer rely on the money I receive from my book sales. I also feel I’m writing as well as I ever have maybe because I don’t feel such pressure to write a bestseller. I love language, and I love to surprise my readers which makes writing such fun.”
Maguire attributes much of his good fortune as a writer to an extraordinary book review Wicked received in 1995 in the Los Angeles Times. “That review was on the front page of the book section, and the very next day all the Hollywood people wanted to buy it. That’s how it first became a play.”
He has now seen the play 61 times in the last 20 years, and he’s never short of breathless when Elphaba flies up into the heavens just before intermission. “I always feel electrified watching that scene. This is my character. She is one aspect of my personality.”
The first time Maguire saw the play with an audience was a preview production in San Francisco. “I was sitting in row H and had no idea how the show was going to go. I had read the script, heard some of the songs, but I had not seen the costumes, the staging, or the special effects.”
As the play began and the audience was laughing as Glinda, the good witch, came down in her bubble, he wondered if the production was intent on making fun of the story he had written. “I was feeling a bit uneasy about that, but then eight minutes in Elphaba strides on stage all dressed in green, and the audience went wild. What occurred to me was how much they liked the wicked witch. They were welcoming her back. They were on her side, and that’s what I had hoped for.”
The film version of Wicked starring Cynthia Erivo, Ariana Grande, and Jonathan Bailey will begin filming in London in the next four months with an expected release date of December 2024.
“I’m excited for the movie, and I hope to be present at some of the filming," Maguire said. "It’s going to be a big budget film, and even if it’s a disappointment like the movie ‘Cats,’ it won’t change the effect ‘Wicked’ on stage has had throughout the world where over 100 million people have seen it.”
'After Alice' Gets Lost In Wonderland, Sensible Bestie Comes To Her Rescue
October 25, 20156:03 AM ET
Heard on Weekend Edition Sunday
By
NPR Staff
6-Minute Listen
Download
Transcript
After Alice
After Alice
by Gregory Maguire
Hardcover, 273 pagespurchase
Lewis Carroll's Wonderland is a singular place. It's a place that symbolizes the beauty and strange, illogical nature of childhood; a place that has captivated children and adults for 150 years. This year, the anniversary of Alice in Wonderland has been celebrated in museums, and it's also being marked in literature.
Author Gregory Maguire has retold Cinderella and Snow White, and he showed us another side to life as a witch in Wicked. Now, he's written a kind of parallel narrative of Alice in Wonderland called After Alice. Maguire tells NPR's Rachel Martin what drew him to Carroll's classic story.
Interview Highlights
On the conceit of After Alice
It's a simultaneous story. It's happening on the same day, at the same time, both in Wonderland and also above ground in Oxford[, England]. So Ada, who is Alice's best friend, is on her way to visit Alice when she too tumbles down the rabbit hole. She's either right before Alice or right after, but either way, she knows that Alice is too curious and perhaps a little bit too young to find her way out alone.
On the difference between Ada and Alice
Ada is afflicted with a deformity of the back, which means that when the story starts she is wearing an iron spine that comes from her hips up to her chin. So Ada, in coming into Wonderland, has a lot she has to cast off in order to be able to function, whereas Alice is equipped only with her innocence and her curiosity. That's the difference between the two girls and that's, in effect, why Ada, who knows more about sadness and hardship in the world, realizes Alice has to be rescued.
Sponsor Message
On what drew him to Carroll's story
I think what Lewis Carroll did in giving us this portrait of Alice is give us perhaps the most modern picture of a child that has ever been put on the page of a children's book. ... If you pick up Alice in Wonderland today and read it, you will find that ... every single sentence she says could be said by a contemporary child in 2015. ...
The Mad Hatter's Secret Ingredient: Math
The Mad Hatter's Secret Ingredient: Math
The world of childhood is always confusing and it always needs to be unpuzzled. Alice is, in a sense, our first emissary saying that childhood can be survived. This is why we keep going back to childhood, I think, even as adult readers, because we know we have survived it and the stress and the tension and maybe the sadness of being grown up is wearing on us. To go back to a children's book as a writer, as a reader, is in some ways to recover the lost paradise from which we too were exiled.
On why Alice in Wonderland scared him as a child
I was used to the kinds of Wonderlands or magic stories — we can say Oz, we can say Neverland — where there was a kind of instant analogue with the bedroom in which I was reading, let's say. I could make the cross references easily enough. And I also knew the strategy of story — the hero's there-and-back-again journey.
Through The Looking Glass: Alice In Fact And Fiction
BOOK REVIEWS
Through The Looking Glass: Alice In Fact And Fiction
But in Wonderland, no one ever seems to give Alice advice. She has to find her own way. In fact, they're too busy being angry at each other and at [her] to even notice that she is a child who is lost in a wilderness. Just like ... Dante in the Inferno. So I found Wonderland aptly terrifying until I was old enough and realized, "Oh gee, I am grown up! Now I can go back and read that children's book and not cry myself to sleep."
The Brides of Maracoor continues the story of Wicked, after a 10-year cliffhanger
Read an excerpt from Gregory Maguire’s new novel, and an interview explaining why he finally returned to Oz
By Tasha Robinson@TashaRobinson Nov 2, 2021, 2:51pm EDT
Detail from the cover of The Brides of Maracoor, with a green-skinned, brown-haired teenage girl standing by the sea
Image: HarperCollins Publishers
If you buy something from a Polygon link, Vox Media may earn a commission. See our ethics statement.
Share this story
Share this on Facebook (opens in new window)
Share this on Twitter (opens in new window)
SHARE
All sharing options
wBackwBack in 2018, Playbill estimated that more than 30 million people had seen the Broadway production of Wicked. The Stephen Schwartz/Winnie Holzman musical takes a sympathetic behind-the-scenes look at The Wizard of Oz’s Wicked Witch of the West, and it’s become an enduring stage sensation, with a John M. Chu movie adaptation on the way, and a long, long cultural tail, inspiring endless copycat works. Among other things, you can draw a straight line between Wicked’s billion-dollar-plus earnings and Disney’s recent mania for villains-reimagined stories like Maleficent, Cruella, and the Villains book series.
Broadway’s version of Wicked ends with the supposed death of the Wicked Witch, whose actual name is Elphaba, and whose real motives have little to do with wickedness. Author Gregory Maguire, who wrote the bestselling 1995 novel that the Broadway show adapted, continued the story in the Wicked Years series, with 2005’s Son of a Witch following Elphaba’s child Liir, 2008’s A Lion Among Men going deeper into the Cowardly Lion’s life, and 2011’s Out of Oz bringing in Elphaba’s granddaughter, Rain. Out of Oz ends on a cliffhanger, with Rain flying out over the ocean, intending to destroy Elphaba’s most magical artifact. The book’s closing line mirrors the opening line of Wicked, bringing the series to a clearly bookended halt. But it still left Rain’s fate and future unclear.
Maguire has written many fairy-tale-derived books outside of the Wicked Years series, including the Hans Christian Andersen-inspired novel A Wild Winter Swan and the Alice In Wonderland-inspired After Alice. But he finally returns to his most famous series with 2021’s The Brides of Maracoor, a novel that opens in a new country and a new setting. On the island of Maracoor Spot, seven women known as the Brides of Maracoor enact a timeless ritual. All seven are all orphans or foundlings, each one brought to the island in infancy to replace a previous Bride who died. When Rain washes ashore on the island, her presence disrupts their rites and upends the fragile balance of power, particularly between the oldest Bride, Helia; her waspish would-be successor, Mirka; and the youngest Bride, 10-year-old Cossy. The story opens up considerably from there, taking in new characters and new nations with an interest in Rain.
Below, read an excerpt from The Brides of Maracoor, and a Q&A with Maguire about how Wicked’s success affected his writing, where he sees his own children in Rain, and what’s next for his re-imagining of Oz.
A detail from the cover of The Brides of Maracoor: the title of the book, in illuminated-manuscript style
Image: HarperCollins Publishers
Why are you returning to Rain’s story after 10 years? Did you always plan to continue that story?
Gregory Maguire: No, I did not plan to continue it. In fact, by the title of the last book of The Wicked Years, Out of Oz, I was trying to signal both to my subconscious and to my reading public that just as one can be out of Cheerios and out of Scotch, I was out of ideas. I’d finished everything I could find out about this story, and I wanted to leave my central character at that point young, full of doubt, and full of liberty, which is where we feel most alive, I think.
So why go back after 10 years, when that was what my subconscious and my conscious mind had determined? It had partly to do with the pandemic. Once I realized we were all going to be in sequestration for an unidentified amount of time, I realized that for my own mental health, I needed to see a landscape wider than the one I could see outside my window. Furthermore, because my own children had had grown up in those 10 years, and are now about the age of Rain, I found I have a newfound concern for people of that age. Sure, it’s great if they’re free and full of doubt, but they’re still endangered. They’re still people. So my fatherly instincts took over, and I began to worry about it.
This book ends in a pregnant place, just as Out of Oz did. Are you planning to continue this story from here?
It’s definitely the first of three. The other two, I’ve already written. I gave myself about 10 days off, then went straight from the last chapter of The Brides of Maracoor to the sequel, which will be called The Oracle of Maracoor. It will take Rain from the coast of Maracoor deeper inland, in a search to try to find somebody wise enough to tell her what to do with her personal troubles, but also tell the nation of Maracoor what to do with the dangerous material it has been saddled with.
You’ve talked in the past about how you wrote Wicked to make people think about the causes behind bullying, and how they judge other people. Does Rain’s story have similarly specific intentions?
I would say I’m less full of hubris than I was when I was 38 and wrote Wicked. I didn’t really believe I knew the answer to anything back then, but at least I felt I knew some interesting questions. And those are what I wanted to pose to myself, and to readers. Now, I’m not even sure my questions are that interesting. But I am sure that each individual soul — if you want to call it that, and often I do — each individual soul is worthy of attention, and is fascinating if you look hard enough. Rain is never going to be Elphaba. She comes from Elphaba’s stock, but she has a different trajectory in life. And how she discovers what her powers are and what her limitations are to me just as vital, in the same way.
As a parent, you look at your children and say, “Each one of them has a different set of hurdles to overcome.” And most of them are invisible to you, but that makes them fascinating. Sure, Rain is interesting because she’s green, and because she has some nascent power, the way most 17-year-olds do. She just doesn’t know what it is yet, or how to use it.
The 25th anniversary cover of Gregory Maguire’s novel Wicked
Image: HarperCollins Publishers
It feels like one of the big questions in this book is about morality. There’s an ongoing question about the nature and use of power, and who’s to blame when things happen, especially if some one person has the power and one person doesn’t. Are those among the questions you’re asking?
That certainly is true. I can’t deny that I think as we as we stare, astonished, at the manifestations of political power in our own nation, for harm and also for good, it really behooves us as citizens not to lose focus on how power is used, and how it is abused. I am not making a particular political stand here. I am simply saying that to bury one’s head in the sand and say, “Oh, well, I don’t really pay attention to that” is, I think, no longer an ethical choice.
The central power struggle in this book is very important to everybody who’s participating, but you repeatedly zoom out to show how petty and ridiculous it is from a distance. Is the pettiness of power also part of the story here?
I wouldn’t have chosen that lovely word, but I’m glad you did. [Laughs] It’s the pettiness of power, but also the lure. Its sexiness, its addictive quality, must be grappled with. Many say it’s impossible to go into positions of power, without having an oversized ego. You have to be slightly ill-made for normal human congress in order to take the reins of power and to use them, either wisely or poorly, beneficently or maleficently. I don’t know that I believe that, but I think it’s an interesting question. But those who are in charge very often seem really petty, as if they’ve lost connection with the roots of what it means to be a common citizen, caring about common things.
Speaking of not caring about common things, in the opening chapters, Cossy sees a mouse drowning in a bucket of rainwater, and doesn’t help it, because she wants to see what it looks like when it’s dead. It’s such a striking failure of empathy.
Absolutely. You caught exactly what I wanted. It’s also, I hope, an image of exactly how impoverished she is, not just by the ways in which she’s being raised, but by the fact that being imprisoned into this island life, without her consent, she’s really bereft of common experiences that might help her think outside herself. That’s part of the crime perpetrated against all of those women, that the full panoply of life has been stolen from them against their will.
And we really see the outcome of that. What else went into drawing her? She’s such a complicated, conflicted character.
I don’t want to say she’s a picture of anybody I know. But I have three adopted children. The youngest is now 20. The oldest was no older than 15 months at the time of adoption, and the youngest was eight months. And I brought them into our family home and looked at them, and thought, “Now, you have to do a lot of the work of unpacking yourself.” All children do, but people who come from family stock about which nothing can be known, there’s deep, deep mystery there. My job as a parent is to help them grow safe, well, strong, and beloved, but also to stand aside and let each one discover who they are. I didn’t know, I just knew that I loved them.
And in a way, I take that same attitude toward my characters, but especially toward a person like Cossy, who comes into her life with exactly the same deficits that my own children did. She has to experience, and make mistakes, and draw conclusions, and learn from her mistakes, if she is to grow up at all functional.
Given the success of Wicked as an adaptation, when you’re writing a book now, do you ever consider how it might look onscreen, or onstage?
Not precisely. But I will say, I’ve always had a histrionic bent. For a quiet, mealy-mouthed, balding man of a certain age, I’ve always had a flair for the dramatic in my own mind. A Walter Mitty, I suppose you might say. So when I write anything, part of my instruction to myself is to say, “All right, if Steven Spielberg had this chapter, what would he need to see and know, in order to make this work?” That involves pacing and a lot of visual, especially when you’re writing about a land nobody else can imagine. It’s one thing if you’re writing about midtown Manhattan. We all know what that looks like. It doesn’t need page after page of description. But when I’m writing about a land nobody else, including myself, has ever been to, I really do need to be precise. You need to give the set designer the cues to make it precise, particular, independent, and memorable.
The same goes for characters, how they look, how they sound. And the same goes with movements through the pages. There are very few chapters or pages where someone is just standing, thinking, because the camera doesn’t like to just stand and look. It wants to be moving, it wants to be panning. It wants to be going back and forth between characters. It wants to be seeing details that are going to be important later on, and storing them away in the reader’s subconscious mind.
Speaking of which, are you at all in the loop on the Wicked movie? Do you hear anything about it?
I just heard from one of my Hollywood agents that they finally have determined when they are going to film, and where. I haven’t been told this a secret, so I don’t see why I shouldn’t tell you. I think they’re going to begin shooting next summer in London, of all places. Universal Studios, I think, is building a whole new film lot for itself over there, and I believe it’ll be one of the first things shot on that lot.
How much emotional investment do you feel in these adaptations of your work?
More than I let on, but not a whole lot! I have the virtue of being easily distracted. To go back one more time to my children — when Wicked was published in 1995, I did not have any children. And by 2003, when the Broadway musical opened, I had my three children, and they were all under the age of 6. So as exciting as Broadway was, and remains, my obligation is with my family. It’s all very well and good to have CBS or NPR or The New York Times or Oprah swarming around with a camera, which they all did.
But in the end, grilled cheese is grilled cheese, and lunch is lunch, and children need to be fed. I didn’t arrange the timing like this, but having taken on the obligation to raise motherless children, I accidentally preserved myself from getting too wrapped up in the green glory that was draping from heaven upon me. I think that’s been my salvation. Others may say, “Are you kidding? He’s nuts. He’s deranged.” But I think I’ve managed pretty well, precisely because I kept my priorities front and center.
With 'A Wild Winter Swan,' Gregory Maguire Ushers in a New World of Magic
The author of "Wicked" — celebrating its 25th anniversary — brings readers yet another journey that feels musical and special.
BY KATIE TAMOLAPUBLISHED: OCT 5, 2020
gregory maguire, author of "a wild winter swan"
COURTESY OF HARPER COLLINS
Gregory Maguire has been bringing magic into our lives for over 25 years. The author of dozens of novels — both YA and adult — short stories, and non-fiction works is perhaps best known for giving the world Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West. That seminal work would go on to be made into Wicked, the musical, which is now the fifth longest-running musical in Broadway history.
As Wicked, the novel, commemorates its 25th anniversary of publication, Maguire — who has long been committed to literacy and literature education alongside his creative work — is also celebrating another moment: his new novel, A Wild Winter Swan, is yet another journey that feels mystical and special.
In A Wild Winter Swan, we meet a sarcastic teenager named Laura who, in her young life in 1960s New York, has experienced more loss than most. Currently living with her grandparents, Laura is a young woman who vacillates between spitfire wit and being someone who walks with a quiet loneliness. After getting into some trouble at school, Laura’s grandmother expects her to be on her best behavior for the upcoming holidays which will see the arrival of family members who demand to be impressed. Laura tries her best, but her life is turned upside down when, all of a sudden, Hans, a half-teenage boy, half-swan appears in her home.
A Wild Winter Swan
A Wild Winter Swan
$28 AT BOOKSHOP
CREDIT: WILLIAM MORROW & COMPANY
Advertisement - Continue Reading Below
Ahead of both Wicked’s anniversary and A Wild Winter Swan's release, we spoke with Maguire about what 25 years of Wicked means to him, fairy tales, the question of what makes a love story, and what art is currently bringing him joy.
KATIE TAMOLA: Congratulations on the 25th anniversary of the publication for Wicked! This is such a beloved piece of art. What has been one of your favorite things about watching people accept Wicked into their lives?
GREGORY MAGUIRE: I wrote Wicked for the reader who felt marginalized by certain heady exercises in story-telling that were being favored by postmodernists and experimental writers. Not that I don’t read that stuff with great pleasure myself — but I felt it shouldn’t “cancel”—word of the year! — traditional storytelling. In 1995 I expected Wicked to have a small but loyal following among the type of college kids who once had been devoted to Tolkien and who in time would come to take up Harry Potter. I didn’t expect the book to hit a nerve in mainstream culture. What this says to me is that we all feel marginalized, not just me or you or Elphaba. Understanding this is a kind of liberation for me. I am less ostracized in my own mind.
gregory maguire, norbert leo butz and idina menzel at the opening night of "wicked" on broadway
Gregory Maguire, Norbert Leo Butz and Idina Menzel at the opening night of "Wicked" on Broadway.
BRUCE GLIKAS//GETTY IMAGES
KT: In all of your work, your storytelling has a beautiful element of magic. Did you always know these were the kind of stories you wanted to write?
GM: There is something about fairy tales that resonated in me. Even if fifth and sixth grades, whenever I would go to the library, I would bring a stack of books to the desk that included an Andersen or a Grimm collection, or some other anthology, among other choices. I would camouflage it between red-herring material like Frontier Bob and the Canyon Rustlers and Tight-End Bob and the Fighting Chickadees or Minuteman Bob and the Battle for A Parking Space At Lexington and Concord. I suppose I realized that being seen reading fairy tales after third grade was suspect — suspect of what, I didn’t know, but I wasn’t that clueless not to take care.
Advertisement - Continue Reading Below
I suppose what fairy tales gave to me then was a sense of the holy possibilities of life. I looked for those moments of heart-stopping wonder — what Tolkien called “arresting strangeness” — and I began to think: If I could provide readers with some of that comfort and delight that other writers have provided me, especially while I am young, that would be a life of some small kind of merit, anyway. And it would be fun — as I always liked to make things up, even from long before I could read or write.
KT: In A Wild Winter Swan, Laura is such a spitfire. She has a tough exterior with brilliant and sarcastic wit, but she also seems to feel things deeply. What was your inspiration for this kind of character?
GM: I am always plundering my own experience as a child for ways to understand things now that I didn’t get then. For instance, in the lower-middle-class milieu in which I was raised, being smart in school was highly prized and not mocked as “nerdy.” Success in school was our one way up and out. But I have come to realize that those kids who didn’t have the zeal and capacity that I was lucky to have, or the supportive atmosphere of intellectual curiosity my parents provided, weren’t less complicated or less emotionally subtle than I was. I was blind to their struggles. An unseemly oversight on my part — but we’re all young once, right? Therefore I like writing about young people who aren’t the fleetest arrow in the quiver; I like to linger with them. In imagining their interior lives I make up for the ways I was dismissive of those I didn’t “get” when I was young. I like to think I wasn’t ever cruel — but not seeing someone for whom they are is still a wretched mistake.
KT: Although Laura always has a retort and has put some of her classmates in their place, there is a palpable loneliness to her character. Would you say that loneliness is one of the central themes of this novel?
GM: You’ve got it in one, as my English friends say. Some of us are lonely simply by feeling “different” — which goes back to Elphaba in Wicked. Others are lonely because their social situations really are impoverished. Laura is bereft of both parents and of her only brother, and her well-meaning grandparents are so busy trying to keep their household intact that Laura is left with only the cook to consort with once in a while, and no one else. Her lack of closer family and good friends makes the entry of the swan boy a kind of “opportunistic infection” — her comorbidity is loneliness.
Having one’s adult loneliness alleviated for the first time in one’s life is, or can be, one of the chief joys of the life we may be lucky enough to get. Writing about this for Laura filled me with relief, too, by association.
instagram icon
View full post on Instagram
Advertisement - Continue Reading Below
KT: Hans makes quite the entrance into Laura’s life and his physical presence is the antithesis of subtle. It seems as though he is the angel that her heart said a prayer for, however. Would you say that their story is a love story?
GM: In a way, this is the novel’s one big question, and I am a little loath to answer it. What do you think? But I suppose like all initial romances, the actual experience between Hans and Laura raises more questions than it answers. Is this what people mean by love? Will this be a definition to serve me for my life, or is this merely an opening apprehension that will be corrected, again and again, as I get older, until I don’t even remember what and how I felt at this moment, when the boy with the one wing has folded it around my shoulder? Ultimately, I just wanted to write a story in which innocence and romance still seemed possible.
KT: The way you describe Manhattan still bears similarities to Manhattan in 2020. Why did you think it was important for this story to take place in this city?
GM: Laura in the early 1960s would have been older than I at that point — I would have been her 6-year-old younger brother had she had one — but I can remember the magic of the city then. I was taken by my mother on a train trip to New York during Lent of 1961 or 1962. Times Square! Hotels! Crowded sidewalks! Central Park! The automat! Broadway! The Rodin exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art! My lived sense of a real-world larger than the one I knew to date, of my Catholic grade school, parish, and down-market Irish immigrant neighborhood, began with that trip. I am actually realizing this for the first time in answering your question!
So I wanted to honor that memory, honor the innocent trust in the world I still had before the assassination of JFK less than a year after the end of A Wild Winter Swan. For balance, I was picturing the world of Harriet the Spy — a book I adored in sixth grade— of Marlo Thomas in That Girl, even of Tony and Maria in West Side Story. Now I suppose I would also add the New York City of Mad Men. Manhattan was at the other end of the train line from Albany’s Union Station. The magic of possibility was available for the price of a train ticket. Sometimes magic is found through a wardrobe; sometimes through the 5:47 Delaware and Hudson express.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Cress Watercress
Gregory Maguire, illus. by David Litchfield. Candlewick, $19.99 (224p)
ISBN 978-1-5362-1100-9
Maguire (Egg and Spoon) interweaves familiar elements of the animal story--a cozy family, a treacherous woodland, mourning, and growing pains--into a surreal episodic narrative. Grieving the loss of Papa Watercress, who "went out and didn't come back," rabbit child Cress, her little brother Kip, and their mother abandon their warren for new digs in "an apartment tree" known as the Broken Arms, where landlord Mr. Owl demands rent paid in moths. Upstairs are superintendent mice, boisterous squirrels, and songbirds alert for predators such as legendary snake "the Final Drainpipe" and fox Monsieur Reynard. Maguire channels multiple children's literary golden ages, with allusions to Beatrix Potter and Kenneth Grahame alongside nonsense notes of Norton Juster and Russell Hoban. Theatrical situations abound, as from conniving skunk Lady Agatha Cabbage--who wants to gain Cress as a "housemaid"--and her scene-stealing live-chinchilla stole. Super-saturated panels by Litchfield (The Bear and the Piano), which resemble backlit stained glass, picture the forest and its denizens in glowing hues and shadowy black. Suitable for sharing and reading aloud, this exuberant tale revels in the performative and the flavor of language. Ages 8-12. Author's agent: Moses Cardona,John Haivkins and Assoc. Illustrator's agent: A nne Moore Armstrong, Bright Agency. (Mar.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2022 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"Cress Watercress." Publishers Weekly, vol. 269, no. 5, 31 Jan. 2022, p. 77. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A693466577/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=172f9227. Accessed 19 May 2023.
Maguire, Gregory CRESS WATERCRESS Candlewick (Children's None) $19.99 3, 29 ISBN: 978-1-5362-1100-9
A young bunny copes with the death of her father and the move to a new home.
Mama moves her children, Cress and baby brother Kip, one spring evening as the moon is in the sky. Their new home is in a dead, hollow oak tree called the Broken Arms; its ramshackle state reminds Cress of the Watercress family's loss. Natural dangers, including, most saliently, a snake nicknamed the Final Drainpipe and Monsieur Reynard the fox, feel more immediate here. As they settle in, there's a perfect seasoning of domesticity, adventure, and contained peril, as on the day Cress and Finian, from a neighboring squirrel family, are swept over a waterfall on a raft. Cress confronts--and charms--Tunk the Honeybear with aplomb, but then she and Finny are briefly held captive by an arrogant, pretentious skunk. Maguire's narrative offers wry puns, rich vocabulary, and entertaining dialogue, and Litchfield's glowing, slightly stylized, full-color illustrations present an enchanting, magical peek into this woodland world. Cress' personality is nicely realized as a child on the cusp of growing up as she deals with sorrow, crankily takes responsibility for Kip, and argues with her mother (who, like Little Women's Marmee, puts her own anger in check to step up for her children). The anthropomorphized world feels true to itself and to the animal natures inhabiting it.
Warmhearted and utterly charming. (Animal fantasy. 7-11)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2022 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"Maguire, Gregory: CRESS WATERCRESS." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Jan. 2022, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A689340095/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=a16112ad. Accessed 19 May 2023.
Maguire, Gregory AFTER ALICE Morrow/HarperCollins (Adult Fiction) $26.99 10, 27 ISBN: 978-0-06-054895-7
Alice doesn't live here anymore--and Maguire (Egg & Spoon, 2014, etc.) has great fun upending the furniture to find out where's she gone. Continuing his tradition of rewriting fairy tales with an arch eye and offbeat point of view, Maguire turns his attention to Lewis Carroll and Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Alice has dropped down the rabbit hole--"again," sighs an exasperated governess, one of the story's many betes noires--and now her best friend and confidante, Ada Boyce, is falling in after her, looking to bring our young Persephone, or perhaps Eurydice, back into the light. Well, of course, Ada finds all sorts of curiouser and curiouser things down below, from hookah-smoking caterpillars to mad hatters and pince-nez-sporting sheep, with Carroll's original cast of characters plus a few of Maguire's own imagining. Up on Earth, Maguire populates the scene with all kinds of folks from real life, among them Walter Pater, Charles Darwin, and various members of the British royal family, who fuss about doing serious and real-world things--including, in a nice, smart closing turn, a meditation on the evolutionary qualities of, yes, the imagination. Not that Alice and Ada aren't (weren't, that is) real, but Maguire leaves it to them, mostly, to enjoy the wackiness of the underworld and for the grown-ups to do the pondering. Still, some of the slyest moments come when the two worlds collide: "I have always heard that Queen Victoria was moderate in her tastes," says Ada, confused at a subterranean knight's alarm that the queen is likely to have their heads. And there's no end to sinister possibilities along with the usual charming Alice storyline--after all, Lewis Carroll didn't inscribe the entrance to Wonderland's tiny door with the words out of Dante, "All ye who enter here, abandon hope." A brilliant and nicely off-kilter reading of the children's classic, retrofitted for grown-ups--and a lot of fun.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2015 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"Maguire, Gregory: AFTER ALICE." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Sept. 2015. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A427027333/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=8e430fb3. Accessed 19 May 2023.
AFTER ALICE
By Gregory Maguire
273 pp. William Morrow/HarperCollins Publishers. $26.99.
Imagine finding yourself in a place where delusion is enforced by custom and law, no one really understands what anyone else is saying, facts are suspect, lies relished, heads roll for arbitrary and fanciful reasons, and only children are perceptive enough to observe that nothing makes sense. Where might you be? Wonderland? A Ted Cruz rally? In ''After Alice,'' Gregory Maguire suggests Lewis Carroll's Oxford might well match that description. During the reign of Victoria, this ancient college town of peculiar men and unexamined double standards was every bit as confounding as the world little Alice discovered at the bottom of the rabbit hole. The one is contrasted against the other in a narrative that purrs with all the warm confidence of a Cheshire cat.
Ada Boyce is puffy, bent-backed and unlovely, confined to an agonizing iron corset meant to correct her unladylike posture. Mother drinks, father sermonizes, baby shrieks and the governess entertains daydreams of drowning her charge. Ada's closest (and only) companion is dreamy Alice Clowd, who lives at the Croft, a short walk along the River Cherwell from Ada's home. On a dazzling midsummer morning in 1860-something, Ada slips away from her adult guardians to hunt down her best friend, plants a foot wrong and goes for a long tumble into literature's most famous fantasia, the nonsense world Carroll introduced in ''Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.''
At first, hardly anyone notes the disappearance of two children (it was an era when parents worried less about the sort of creepy fellows who fixate on little girls -- creepy fellows like Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, a.k.a. Lewis Carroll, who history suggests might not have been an ideal babysitter). Ada's family has no great use for her. Alice's big sister, Lydia, is glad not to have a couple of brats underfoot. And Alice's father has only just emerged from mourning his prematurely deceased wife to play host to a visiting celebrity, Charles Darwin. Mr. Darwin has brought a fetching young American abolitionist along with him, Mr. Winter, who is himself accompanied by a child escaped from slavery: quiet, serious Siam.
Winter may be handsome, idealistic and eligible, but he's also too old for Lydia Clowd, who is just 15. That doesn't stop Lydia from luring him on a long walk that will give her a chance to experiment with grown-up flirtation (in this novel, everyone is a victim of impossible daydreams). But romantic preoccupations give way to growing alarm, after little Siam goes missing as well, falling through the looking glass while no one is paying attention. Suddenly the somnolent summer afternoon has devoured three children whole, and only Lydia and Ada's governess have any sense that all is not entirely right.
Maguire effortlessly leaps between the absurd illusions of Wonderland and the building suspense of the search for the children in antique Oxford. Down below, Ada and Siam grapple with the maddening nonsense of the White Rabbit and the Mad Hatter. Up above, Lydia finds herself no less befuddled by her own mysterious longings and the motives of the adults around her. She's also haunted by a darker and more serious disappearance than the absence of a few wandering children: the heart-sickening loss of her mother. Her faith is of no use to her. Darwin's theories of evolution have made the comforts of religion look as silly as a story out of Mother Goose. Nor can Lydia turn to that seat of 19th-century authority, her father, for wisdom. Mr. Clowd has long since vanished down the rabbit hole of his own grief and confusion. The territory of mourning is unmapped country; so too is the geography of courtship, desire and cultural expectation. ''Lydia will spend her entire life in a nexus of Victorian social understandings too near to be identified by the naked eye, like viruses, or radiation,'' Maguire notes, in typically elegant fashion. ''After Alice'' offers an almost embarrassing harvest of delightfully stated observations like that one.
Lydia may be stranded in an adult world of unreasonable and ridiculous obligations, but in Wonderland, Ada has slipped free of both her insufferable corset and the equally iron-shod confines of her time, place and status. Siam finds the neighborhood even more to his liking. As a slave, Siam was once offered his freedom, if he could scoop up a hundred pennies that had been baked white-hot in a campfire. His palms are still horribly marked by the burns. But his blackness and his scars don't bother anyone in Wonderland, a place beyond the reach of history's brutality. ''There is no back story in dream. Time slips all its handcuffs.'' For an orphaned black kid in the era of the Civil War, that place on the other side of the looking glass looks a lot like real freedom.
As Ada and Siam draw nearer to Alice, the continually off-screen object of their quest, and as time runs out to find the vanished children in the world above, Maguire closes in on some big, haunting ideas himself, about the loss of loved ones and religious faith, about cultural and romantic subjugations, and about the evolutionary value of imagination. Heady stuff. Maguire confronts his weighty themes with a light touch and exquisite, lovely language. A sample page offers us such word candy as ''bosh'' and ''gallootress,'' and when stout Ada spies her own reflection, she feels she is staring upon ''a rotten packet of fairy.'' Maguire's playful vocabulary may be Carroll-esque, but his keen wit is closer to Monty Python:
'' 'I may be drowning,' she called.
'' 'Please don't,' came a reply.''
The author's mastery of his material occasionally falters, in small ways. He renders the social and historical tensions of long-ago Oxford so well, in such compelling fashion, that Wonderland itself occasionally loses its luster. And each reader will have a different tolerance for characters who speak in riddles. For myself, I'll take a monstrous Jabberwocky over circular and meaningless jibber-jabber any day. Still, it seems wrong to quibble when presented with such a tasty froth of incident and such a fine, unforced sense of play.
Gregory Maguire has made a cottage industry out of reframing famous children's stories to explore neglected side characters and misrepresented villains. He has tracked through all of the precincts of Oz and a lot of the landscape of Grimm's fairy tales, and one would not be surprised if his heart was no longer in such expeditions. Furthermore, Alice's Wonderland has been so often revisited -- in novels, films, games and comics -- that it would seem everything worth discovering there must have been strip-mined long ago. Even that phrase, ''down the rabbit hole,'' is so overused that it now has all the life of a taxidermied white hare. But Maguire's enthusiasm is intact, his erudition a joy, and his sense of fun infectious. What could have been a tired exercise in the familiar instead recharges a beloved bit of nonsense. By book's end, most readers will be hoping for a sequel (Maguire leaves the door open to one). As we say in Maine, my old home state: wicked.
CAPTION(S):
DRAWING (DRAWING BY ANNE-LISE BOUTIN)
By JOE HILL
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2015 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Hill, Joe. "Weirder Than Wonderland." The New York Times Book Review, 1 Nov. 2015, p. 21(L). Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A433264021/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=ac9e27aa. Accessed 19 May 2023.
Maguire, Gregory HIDDENSEE Morrow/HarperCollins (Adult Fiction) $26.99 10, 31 ISBN: 978-0-06-268438-7
A delightful, mystical, mythical confection by zeitgeist whisperer Maguire (After Alice, 2015, etc.), who likes nothing more than to work at the dark edges of a fairy tale. As evidenced especially in Wicked and its sequels, Maguire has a sharp appreciation for what struck Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm way back when: especially if they're German, the stories we tell our children are marvels of mayhem, compressed slices of violence and bleakness gussied up with an occasional shiny poisoned apple. In them, death is always present. So it is with this latest foray, in which Maguire locates a perhaps unwilling hero in a young foundling, Dirk Drosselmeier, who, having courted death himself, proves to be inept enough with an ax at his adopted woodcutter father's house to be packed off into the world--narrowly avoiding death, it seems, at the hands of the old man and his wicked-witchish wife. "He's witnessed enough to be scared already, I can't make it worse," she cackles, and off he goes. But the world has plenty of terrors of its own to offer, including the fact that everyone he loves will die or otherwise leave him. He learns to live on his own wits and resources; "I'm more like a spider," he says, "I cling with strings and hooks only to every passing day." Improbably, in the face of all that sorrow and odd encounters with the likes of the quack Doctor Mesmer, he makes good; he wasn't so handy with a hatchet, but with smaller blades he carves out a formidable nutcracker that evolves, in his hands, "from it to he." Shades of Pinocchio! It's at this juncture that, as if a mist lifting, the darkness of the story brightens and, magically, the familiar story that we know from Tchaikovsky's Christmas classic, Klara and the King of Mice and all, resolves with brilliant clarity. It's a fine bit of sorcery on Maguire's part, but of course, as all things must, it ends darkly. A splendid revisitation of folklore that takes us to and from familiar cultural touchstones into realms to make Freud blanch. Wonderful.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"Maguire, Gregory: HIDDENSEE." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Aug. 2017. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A500365038/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=da11eb1b. Accessed 19 May 2023.
By Gregory Maguire
Morrow
$26.99, 304 pages
ISBN 9780062684387
Audio, eBook available
Tchaikovsky's famous Nutcracker ballet, heart of the holidays for audiences worldwide, has its roots in "The Nutcracker and the Mouse King" by E.T.A. Hoffmann, a German writer in the early 1800s whose characters often move between real and fantasy worlds. Hoffmann's tale of a nutcracker presented to a young girl on Christmas Eve has been sweetened in retellings through the years (most notably by Alexandre Dumas), yet not one of the renditions of sugar plum fairies and battling mice has explained the origin of the titular Nutcracker... until now.
Bestselling author Gregory Maguire drops readers behind the scenes of common childhood stories in such novels as Wicked, Mirror Mirror and After Alice, and in Hiddensee: A Tale of the Once and Future Nutcracker, Maguire sweeps his readers deep into the forests of 19th-century Germany while linking his story to mythology and folklore. Paying homage to Hoffmann's original tale, Maguire keeps us enchanted with the life of Drosselmeier, called Dirk, a boy of desperate beginnings who will later become a toymaker and the godfather to Klara (the girl who will receive the Nutcracker) and whose interactions with the natural world make us long for the innocence and imagination of our own childhoods.
Dirk, raised in the forest as a foundling, leaves his miserable upbringing after a harrowing life-after-death experience, the catalyst for his connection to another dimension. His wide-eyed innocence serves him well as he traverses the bridge to manhood and the real world, yet in his heart he knows there is more in the trees and streams and animals than what he encounters. He just has so few people with whom he can share his secrets.
For those who are willing to hear and believe, Maguire unlocks the toymaker's secrets--without sugar plum fairies but with plenty of mesmerizing mysteries and the magic of childhood.
Gregory Maguire unlocks the secrets of the Nutcracker in an enchanting origin story.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 BookPage
http://bookpage.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Upton, Lonna. "HIDDENSEE." BookPage, Nov. 2017, p. 38. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A511212769/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=98b7e364. Accessed 19 May 2023.
Gregory Maguire. Morrow, $28.99 (384p) ISBN 978-0-06-309396-6
There must always be exactly seven brides in exile on the island of Maracoor Spot--but in the complex, enticing fantasy that launches bestseller Maguire's latest trilogy, a spin-off of his Wicked Years series, the balance is upset when the green-skinned Rain crash-lands offshore with a talking goose in tow. She has no memory of where she's from or how she got there, and her arrival upends the brides' status quo, which is furthet shaken by the death of one of their own. When overseer Lucikles arrives from the mainland of Maracoor Abiding for his annual checkin, he's left reeling in the face of these changes--and doubly so when he returns home to discover that Maracoor Abiding has been attacked by an enemy navy. Blame for the attack falls on Rain due to the suspicious timing of her arrival. Meanwhile, one of the brides is accused of murder, and Maracoor itself begins to unravel. Maguire cleverly teases out the characters' motivations and desires, turning what at first appears to be a straightforward tale into a gripping pageturner. Fans will revel in this triumphant return to the world of Wicked. Agent: Moses Cardona, Jobn Hawkins & Assoc. (Oct.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2021 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"The Brides of Maracoor." Publishers Weekly, vol. 268, no. 26, 28 June 2021, p. 52. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A667715249/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=9defe015. Accessed 19 May 2023.
Maguire, Gregory THE BRIDES OF MARACOOR Morrow/HarperCollins (Fiction None) $28.99 10, 12 ISBN: 978-0-06-309396-6
A mysterious young woman washes up on the shore of a secluded island in the first of a new trilogy from Wicked author Maguire.
There are always seven Brides of Maracoor, no more, no less. They live their entire lives in seclusion on their island, Maracoor Spot, where every day they go down to the water and weave their nets, a ritual that divides time into the well-ordered daily segments that allow civilization to function. Each year the Minor Adjutant, currently a bureaucrat named Lucikles, arrives from the mainland nation of Maracoor Abiding to check on the brides and bring them a replacement baby girl if one of their number has died. But one day, a young woman with green skin washes up on their shores, her arm flung around a goose and her hand clutching a raggedy broom. Rain, the green girl, can't remember much of anything about her life before she washed up on the beach, leaving the brides to discuss among themselves what to do with her. Maguire's longtime fans will remember Rain from Out of Oz(2011), but even newcomers will instantly connect the dots between her green skin and her broom, and if that's not enough there are those odd rumors of flying monkeys looking for a green girl. Maguire is setting up for a spinoff trilogy here, and the obviousness of Rain's origins for readers new and old alike allows him to spend more time fully creating the world of Maracoor Abiding with wonderful attention to detail. Sketching out just enough about Rain to build momentum for Book 2, this first installment does excellent character work with the people around her, particularly with regard to the power struggles among the brides on their strange island, with their strange task of weaving time. The larger world of Maracoor Abiding, with its priestesslike brides, mysterious artifacts, and its own systems of magic, myth, and politics, has echoes of Greek mythology and looks to be fertile ground as a setting for more books.
An expertly crafted introduction to a new series of magic and adventure.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2021 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"Maguire, Gregory: THE BRIDES OF MARACOOR." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Sept. 2021, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A673650059/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=14866ac3. Accessed 19 May 2023.