Gregory Maguire: LibraryThing Author Interview

Gregory Maguire is the author of the popular Wicked and many other novels for both children and adults. Maguire has three new books out right now: Making Mischief: A Maurice Sendak Appreciation, Matchless (a retelling of The Little Match Girl), and The Next Queen of Heaven. Maguire published The Next Queen of Heaven with the Concord Free Press, a revolutionary "generosity-based" publisher.

How did you get involved with the Concord Free Press?

While for most of this century I have been friends with Ann and Stona Fitch, the inspiring founders of Concord Free Press, I took to the notion of CFP with an enthusiasm entirely independent of my personal regard for the Fitches as writers and renegade publishers. In a larger cultural sense, much of what is distressing to me—the rancid fragmenting of political identities in this country into warring parties and the consequent inability to work together courteously—seems both a result of and perhaps a cause, too, of this mounting apprehension that individuals are largely incapable of bringing any productive change to public policy.

Then along comes the notion of CFP, with its generosity-based model, thumbing the nose at the "me, me, me" concept of battling political ideologies, the Hatfields and the McCoys of the Congress, and the red-blue state divide. CFP is boldly suggesting "us, us, us" instead. To become a part of an "us," you have to sacrifice a bit of the "me." I endorsed the notion as both solid and slightly incendiary, and accepted a role on the Board of CFP with a sense of honor. When I was later asked to contribute a piece of fiction, it made sense to back up my commitment of the ideal of CFP with a donation of real work.

The Next Queen of Heaven seems like a departure from your usual work—how did it come into being?

The roots of the novel go back many years. Like one of the main characters in the novel, I was a choir director in an upstate New York Catholic church (this during my college years). I loved music and I loved and still admire the sense of selflessness that can sometimes fall upon one when one retires ego in favor of a devotional impulse beyond one's self. I set the novel in 1999 because I wanted to take advantage of the millennial anxiety that visited religious and non-religious people alike, and also because I didn't want to have to deal with the revelations in the Catholic Church about the abuse by priests and by the bishops who played cover-up for them.

You've got two other books out right now, Making Mischief: A Maurice Sendak Appreciation and Matchless. You did all the illustrations in Matchless, which is out at the same time as Making Mischief, a tribute to Sendak's art. Coincidence? Can we expect more illustrating from you in the future?

I greatly enjoyed doing the pictures for Matchless, and indeed the art of the illustrated book is one of my chief joys. Maurice Sendak is my hero in this regard, but I also admire William Steig, the D'Aulaires, Erik Blegvad, many others. To do the drawings for Matchless humbled me; they seemed so simple, and in the printing of them I can admire them and see how many other directions I might have gone. I would like to try my hand again, but not to make it my primary goal.

Question from LibraryThing member biblioholic29: I recently bought and read Making Mischief: A Maurice Sendak Appreciation, and I can certainly see how Sendak's work has inspired Maguire's adult novels. I wondered if any other authors had as profound an impact on his style. (Baum, Grimm, Anderson, Dickens, etc. have influenced him in obvious ways, I'm looking for less obvious inspirations.) If he had a studio like Sendak's, which is described in the first chapter of Making Mischief, who would we see hiding on his walls?

What a good question. I actually do have a wall of heroes—well, it is a virtual wall, but on various walls around my home, I have places where there are people whose work I admire. I have a few Sendak pencil drawings—originals—and original artwork by children's book artists Trina Schart Hyman (her Wicked Witch of the West), Erik Blegvad, Nancy Ekholm Burkert. I have many paintings by my husband Andy Newman, and one I especially love is an older one he did decades ago of a staircase in Proust's childhood home. I have a reprint of an Italian Renaissance etching of Saint George. He looks about 16, and he is taming a wildly rearing horse perfectly framed by a Palladian arch, and on his ankles Saint George wears a pair of ankle-bracelets that look as if they are made out of the heads of miniature lions. It's very sexy and energetic. I have a signed photograph of Hans Christian Andersen, a carte d'visite with a line, appended (in Danish, of course) in Andersen's hand, which in translation reads "Life itself is the most wonderful Fairy Tale."

Elsewhere I have photographs, stuck on walls among photos of friends and relatives, of Emily Dickinson, for the clarity of her truth-telling; of Thoreau, for his embrace of simplicity; and of E.M. Forster, for his unfailingly courteous embrace of moral vision. There are a few ikons of the Virgin. There are a few signed photos of the original cast in Wicked. There's an autograph of L. Frank Baum and, somewhere on the shelves, another of Robert Frost. And who is missing, but there in spirit? Stephen Sondheim, Laura Nyro, Joni Mitchell (her music, not her cranky self-righteous self). And children's book writers whose work continues to inspire some forty-five years after I first found them in the library, and became more myself by reading them: Jane Langton, Louise Fitzhugh, L. M. Boston. How's that for a start? (I could go on and on.)

Question from LibraryThing member nperrin: Are there any fairy tales/stories you would really like to rework but haven't yet? Or, that you've tried but it hasn't quite worked out (for whatever reason)?

I have had, for many years, a notion that there is a Rapunzel story that can be told in agrarian New England or New York, pre-Civil War, at the height of one of the many religious revivals that galvanize moral action, on the one hand (like abolition) and stifle, on the other hand, certain kinds of creativity and iconoclasm. But I have not gotten there yet, to that particular story-region in my mind, and I may never get there.

Question from LibraryThing member Katya0133: When approaching the retelling of a fairy tale or other story, how do you decide who the new protagonist will be? Do you just pick the most maligned character from the original version? Do you go with the character whose story "calls" to you?

I have become known for this work of revisionism—I would like to find a different word for that, but I see how it seems appropriate. I don't have a soft heart for maligned creatures, really, but I do have a curiosity about any given "portrait" of a character to know how much deeper and more complex the truth is. This is true about people in history as well as current events. The media I follow usually portrays Obama as a sober realist and, by contrast, Sarah Palin as a freewheelin' nut job. I can't help wonder: what is erratic and irrational in Obama (whom I believe to be a sober realist); what is sound and defensible about Sarah Palin? (Please don't advise me on this: I would prefer to figure it out for myself.)

Question from LibraryThing members bibliojim and flissp: You've said that you played "Oz" as a child with your siblings and other kids. (Which character did you usually play?) At what point did you decide to actually write a book about the Wicked Witch of the West? How long did it take you to write the book, from the time you first set pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard)? Was it the work of a lifetime's musing, or was it written organically, growing only as you wrote? As you wrote Wicked, did you already have in mind to write sequels, or did you originally intend Wicked to be a stand-alone book?

I'll answer this briefly as I have written extensively about this elsewhere. I usually played the Scarecrow when I extemporized with friends and family in acting out The Wizard of Oz. The Scarecrow was Dorothy's best friend, the truest soul in Oz. That said, he didn't have the best role. Dorothy or the Witch were meatier roles, but I wasn't much in gender-betrayal as a kid at the age of 9, and I didn't go there.

The inspirations for the novel Wicked are multiple. Clearly it was an outgrowth of playing with the story as a kid, of the repeated viewings of the film through childhood, and perhaps of the lucky absence of the sequels by L. Frank Baum from the public libraries of Albany, NY. (The absence kept the sequels of the story alive, waiting to be known, all through my developing life as a writer. When finally I found them, I thought they hadn't been worth the buildup of anticipation, and that released me to write my own.) Other events and situations in my adult life, both personal and national, inspired me to turn to the story of the Wicked Witch of the West as a way to explore conundrums of moral behavior that I couldn't easily understand.

When I began to write Wicked for good, it took me five months to get the first draft done—but they weren't five months in a row. I would write for four or six week, take roughly four or six weeks off, go back again and write for a stretch, etc. So I began and finished the book between June 1992 and April 1993, I think, or was it 1993 and 1994?— I sold it very quickly and it came out about a year and three months later, in October of 1995.

I had no intention to write sequels, and even after writing Son of a Witch ten years later, I didn't anticipate writing more. But when I got to A Lion Among Men, I realized I had gotten enough people interested in the saga of The Wicked Years, as I call it, that I would have to give them the satisfaction of winding up at least a few of the many open-ended plot lines, and reveal a few things about the characters and incidents that I have known all along but that it has not seemed necessary or proper to disclose yet....

You've written for children and adults—do you prefer one over the other?

It is easier to be self-indulgent in writing for adults, so I like to go back to writing for children every now and then to chasten my tendencies of sentimentality or excess. On the other hand, I do like to write (and to read) passages that many readers of all ages call "boring descriptive bits"—I like to know what a room looks and feels like, how a building sits on a lot or a site or in a neighborhood; what the weather is like; what the terrain offers up to surprise or console. Armchair traveling, armchair prurience, you could call it.

Question from LibraryThing member klpm: I always wonder how difficult it is for you to switch gears between writing at the different reading levels. How do you do that successfully? Do you write successive books at a certain level and then switch for a while or can you really go from an adult fiction to a youth fiction and back again seamlessly? Is there any method for changing his focus and language?

I used to post photographs around the edges of my room—or my computer screen, when I began to learn to write on a computer—with images of who I imagined to be my anticipated or desired audience. Sometimes they were family members, sometimes other artists (even dead ones), and sometimes-toothy kids torn from the pages of advertisements. The goal of writing, said my mother over and over, is to communicate, and it helps to envisage an audience who might want to hear what you have to say. The older I get, though, the more I trust in trying to communicate with myself: to provide books just like the ones that would satisfy me the most, had I the luck to discover them on a book rack or library shelf somewhere. I like book (for any age) that are intelligent and don't speak down to the reader; that are humorous yet not coarse or dismissive of a possibility for a deeper emotion or meaning; that are worth rereading (therefore not too simplistic); that open up the world rather than close it down.

What's in your library?

I have a polymath's interest in reference books, so if I ever get book tokens as gifts for having spoken somewhere, I try to use them on books of history, science, the arts, atlases, language, grammar, dictionaries that the entire family can use. I have a substantial collection of poetry, and another, even more substantial, collection of children's fantasy fiction, beginning with Grimm, Perrault, Andersen and continuing through Lewis Carroll and the great writers of the end of the 19th century. With the resurgence of children's fantasy in the late twentieth century—thanks in part to the success of J K Rowling's Harry Potter series—I find I can no longer keep up. I buy, but have not yet read, books by Jonathan Stroud, Eoin Colfer, Cornelia Funke, Diana Wynne Jones, and many others. I hope they will cheer me up if I make it into a quiet old age.

What are you reading now?

This month: I finished, in English translation, vol. V of Proust ("The Prisoner"); I read Daemon in Lithuania; I am reading a biography of Laura Nyro, and a children's book by Neil Gaiman called The Graveyard Book, and I am about to start Jess Walters' The Financial Lives of Poets. I put down, with relief, A. S. Byatt's The Children's Book, and don't recommend it, I'm afraid. Because my youngest child was sick I have been reading in bed to her every night from my vast Sendak library, many picture books he did before he wrote and illustrated, Where the Wild Things Are, and I enjoy every one for different reasons—Sarah's Room, Charlotte and the White Horse, Let's Be Enemies, etc.

—interview by Abby Blachly and LibraryThing members