Gregory Maguire

Most famous for penning Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, which re-imagined The Wizard of Oz and was transformed into a hit Broadway musical, Gregory Maguire has carved himself a literary niche by looking at fairy tales and children's stories from new angles. He's reworked Snow White and Cinderella, and in his latest novel, What-the-Dickens, he explores the idea of the Tooth Fairy and its relationship to youth.

CP: You clearly have a very active imagination. Do you think most adults have imaginations as vivid as yours but they repress them, or is your imagination functioning on a higher level than other people?

GM: That is an interesting question and I have no idea what the answer is. There are ways in which we are boxed in ourselves. I don't think of myself as having a vivid imagination, I think of myself as having a slow mind. I know other people have quicker minds than mine. And one of the reasons I write is that I value the act of the mind, I value the act of thinking. And writing stories, and even writing letters and writing essays, helps me to know what I think. If I'm at a dinner party and somebody turns to me and says, 'What do you think of the nature of evil? Does it exist or not, and what is its nature?' I would say, 'Please pass the asparagus,' and go to the bathroom and cry for an hour because I couldn't think of an answer. I might then set myself the task of finding out what is the nature of evil; let me write a story so I can think about it. I don't know that I have a more vivid imagination, but I do know that, despite how glib I am and long-winded in answering your questions, I actually don't think very fast, and I write because I value thinking, and writing helps me know what I think.

CP: What do you think is appealing to adult readers about revisiting the stories that they loved and learned from as children?

GM: Well, frankly I think we cower in terror at the world as it is. I know I do, that's why I'm here with a closed door and my children on the other side of the door. The reality of things with global warming and An Inconvenient Truth, and the apparently inconvenient truth of the fiscal meltdown, that if you've been hearing the news today, seems to have happened in Europe and Japan and Canada, and will no doubt happen tomorrow on Wall Street. These things are really scary, and they're things we have to deal with, and we may not in fact conquer them, we may be conquered by them. So to go back to a time in which we were consolable—those stories of childhood were consoling and as children we were consolable—I think that's a legitimate function of art: to console. So I use the material at hand that's appealing to me. But I use it for the same reasons that anybody might use any material for art: to console, to challenge, to inspire, to question, and to remind people that even in the solitude of reading, we're not alone.

CP: Do you think that writing for one audience is more difficult than another?

GM: Yes, I think writing for children is much harder. And this is, I think, because children have so many more pulls to their appetites, to their attention. When I was a kid, which was several thousand years ago now, or so it seems, we were not prosperous, so we didn't have many advantages available to prosperous families 40 years ago, but secondly, the world was not as wired as it is with video. So the competition for books was much less, there was TV, and that was about it, and my parents were pretty strict about keeping the TV off most of the time. Now when a writer is trying to get a child's attention, they know that probably the child is reading in a room with the TV on, or where the TV can be turned on with the flick of a remote control. They know that when a child goes on vacation, there are screens that descend from the inside roof of the SUV so they can watch Shrek the Third for the 40th time. But if you're going get their attention and keep it, you really have to use every fiber and muscle group you have as a storyteller to make it worth their while and to keep them from flinging the book out the window onto the highway and going back to Shrek the Third.

Gregory Maguire discusses What-the-Dickens today. With musical guest the Owls.
Sun., Feb. 3, 2 p.m., 2008