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Gregory Maguire and "Defying Gravity": Interview with the Author of Wicked
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The musical sensation about the back story of the witches of Oz all started in a book. Gregory Maguire is the author who first took the Wicked Witch of the West and presented her as Elphaba, focusing on her side of the story to answer the questions: Can someone be born wicked? Was the Wicked Witch so “wicked” after all? Maguire’s Oz stories stretched on to three books in the series so far. In addition to the Oz books Maguire gave his own creative twists to other stories—both with powerful tone, mood, description and story development that truly give Maguire a unique voice in Fantasy writing.
A huge fan, I was excited to get in touch with him. Gregory Maguire now answers common questions he gets asked about his works and more.
Jackie Sonnenberg: How is it you were able to write about L. Frank Baum's the land of Oz and characters (as well as the other stories) and make them your own? Weren't there copyright laws and regulations you had to go through?
Gregory Maguire: I didn't know copyright law when I began Wicked, and only learned after submitting it to my agent that L Frank Baum's literary estate had come out of copyright just months before I finished my book. I had assumed it had been out for decades. I did therefore have the rights to use what I wanted of Baum's books, but any inventions to the story made by MGM I had to imply rather than quote directly, as the MGM film is still under copyright. (Hence no one could sing "Over the Rainbow" directly, though I could imply they were singing it, and hope my reader would make the connection.)
JS: Do you feel that your story of Oz and the original story of Oz are meant to be the same story, but with different perspectives? What key differences make your Oz unique the way it is?
GM: This is a fine question. I consider that my story of Oz is perhaps as real as (but no realer than) the story of Dorothy.... Which is to say that the lives of children are real, their perceptions are real, and there is a value of truth and sincerity in their innocent apprehension of their lives--just as our adult perceptions, adjusted for life experience and the subtler sadnesses of human motivation and behavior, are also real. I mean never to contradict Dorothy's story or Baum's Oz, but to say two pairs of eyes can see the same incident and read different meanings in it. (Witness two children of the same parents, one of whom thinks the parents were angels and the other monsters.)
JS: How did Wicked go from print to the broadway phenomenon it has become now? Did you have involvement with the musical and what do you think of it?
GM: This is too long a question to answer, (I have written it elsewhere.) However I will say briefly the book was optioned by Universal Studios and after four years of seeing inadequate screenplays, I authorized its production as a musical for theater instead. I chose to keep my distance from the production, in part because L. Frank Baum kindly kept his ghostly distance from my original work, and in part because I thought if the piece were to have a chance of success it should be because the theater experts were not hindered by having to answer to the needs of my own ego or my sense of ownership. After all, Oz belongs to all of us, not only me. So it belonged equally to Stephen Schwartz and Winnie Holzman.
JS: Your last Oz book focused on Brr the Cowardly Lion. Will there be more stories about Oz, and if so, what direction will you be taking them? What do you see happening next?
GM: In the next two months I hope to start the fourth and perhaps final book of the Wicked Years series--we'll see-- and wrap up a lot of questions that have been asked in the first few books.
JS: Following the last question and last book, have we seen the last of Liir and Candle? Is there a future with them--and the late Elphaba's granddaughter?
GM: Yes, there is a future--but what it is, I am not sure.
JS: If Elphaba were still alive, what would she be doing?
GM: Is that a trick question?.... Well, I can only answer by relying on a conceit of Stephen Schwartz and Winnie Holzman, one I endorse wholly. An early version of Wicked the musical proposed a tiny little final scene before the curtain goes down, in which we see that Fiyero and Elphaba are not only alone together and separated for all time from Glinda, but in which they are camped about a fire, slowly teaching Dr. Dillamond and other exiled Animals how to regain language again. They have their work: their kindness: they haven't given up. This is Stephen's and Winnie's dream of it, not mine, but it seems hugely fitting and I endorse it too.
JS: In Mirror Mirror, how were you able to incorporate fantasy with history with the Borgias and tie it into a Snow White story? Why this time period important?
GM: I chose to write Mirror Mirror about Snow White, which seems to me essentially the story of a girl growing up--growing more beautiful, usurping the place of her mother (or stepmother)--and such a story of maturation I thought it was fitting to set in the High Renaissance in Northern Italy, when it might be said that the last darkness of the Middle Ages was falling behind and the culture itself, modern culture, was also growing up and taking its new enlightened place. That the Borgia family is so well-known for poisoning just made the poison apple piece delicious to contemplate.... Also on an NPR story I heard about the paranoiac effect of ingesting mercury, and learned that sometimes Renaissance princesses bathed in pools painted with mercury (and mercury can be ingested through the skin), so that made Lucrezia Borgia's paranoia--talking to a mirror!--that much more fun to play with, too.
JS: What symbolism is presented with painting and beauty in Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, and how does this fit the Cinderella story? What are these "confessions?"
GM: The general idea of Cinderella--I mean the fundamental idea of the Cinderella story in our culture--is that beauty is paramount. But what kind of beauty? Physical beauty, like that of a seventeen year old goddess (whether she be in rags or riches)? The beauty of a tulip? A shooting star? Such beauties fade in instants: does that make them less valuable? Or the beauty of a painting of a young woman, which might dazzle three hundred years later, and make us pause and catch our breaths? The confession may be that it is impossible to judge the relative merits of different sorts of beauty, and in that case, whether it be seen or unseen, congratulated or unsung, the beauty of the charitable gesture may be the chiefest beauty of all. In Confessions that is where I close, and in the end it is my Cinderella--my Clara--who makes the charitable gesture on behalf of her stepsisters, and so she is, so unlikely, the real beauty after all.
JS: Have you thought about other fairy tales you'd like to take for a spin?
GM: Look in the second half of this year for my new volume called Matchless, a retelling of Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Match Girl--with original illustrations of my own.
JS: Are you currently brainstorming new book plans you'd like to share, or are you relaxing for a bit and allowing inspiration to come to you?
GM: Besides Matchless, I am finishing up a volume called Making Mischief: A Maurice Sendak Appreciation. It will also come out this fall, a profusely illustrated, admiring and I hope quirky critical piece on the greatest Wild Thing of our time.
Gregory Maguire is an author living near Boston, Massachusetts with his family. He received his PH.D from Tufts University in English and American Literature. He is the founder and co-director of Children’s Literature New England, Incorporated, which is a nonprofit children’s charity. Maguire continues work with creative writing for both children and adults.
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