The following is a special presentation Gregory Maguire Confessions of a Wicked Writer.

A conversation from the 2024 Annual Celebration of the Humanities.

Welcome, everybody, and thank you for all coming out tonight.

I am really honored to be here.

And, Gregory, it is so nice for us to finally be able to sit down, in person.

We've had a number of a number of zoom conversations and, and, and here we are getting to, to talk about things in a setting that just feels, kind of special.

Tonight, if you did not have a list of questions to ask me, I already have about seven.

I want to ask you.

Like how do you get how does a Buddhist monk get to fight in an Alaskan bar?

Yeah.

I mean, in one sentence, you're a journalist.

You know, the sound bite is all one sentence.

How did you do it?

There are, yeah, it's just paperwork.

A lot of documentation.

Yeah.

Licenses, fees, permits and so forth.

So, yeah, I, if we're lucky, we'll get to to some some material about my, my own work.

But I am really excited to talk to you about your work.

So many of us out here in the audience tonight are fans.

I, I do wonder if it's a little bit of a surprise that to some people that we're on the stage together.

Our work probably is not categorized under the same genre in a bookstore.

And yet, I've been thinking a little bit about the bridges that exist between us.

I do write memoir.

As a journalist, I'm very interested in people's stories.

And I think I want to start tonight by just asking you a little bit about your own story.

And, I know that, the novels you've written often trade in what I think of as creation or origin stories, of characters who in many cases, have a complex relationship to their past.

And I know that you've been very forthcoming in public, about your past.

A question that's been on my mind is, is what is the relationship, first of all, that that you feel like your work has to your history?

And also, how much do you want readers to think about your personal history in relationship to your work?

That's a good question.

And, I'll go backstage while you think of what the answer is and then you can read it, I'm sure, and a little piece of paper and slip it to me when I come back.

Actually, I'm going to answer that question, but I want first to acknowledge what mastery was saying at the beginning about the location, the ability of the individual to locate oneself in a new environment.

As she said, you had done by going to Brunswick and as she had done by by learning Mandarin.

And I suppose, as I did every time I sat down with a blank notebook and decided this is a new location that I don't know and I have to orient myself in, this made landscape that is, it's self-invention and it's self-protection and it's self-discovery all at once.

So however, your question really was about how do the details of one's own biography factor into the, you know, that process of orienting a new landscape around oneself on the page and in the imagination?

And I'm not sure that I know the answer.

I do know, and some of you who've known me for a long time, there are a few of you in the audience, if know me probably tonight, are thinking we've known him about one day longer than we wish we had.

But at that, my, my, my biography is, is was fairly simple in that, when I was born, my mother died in childbirth.

That's that old Dickensian story that we don't really think happens anymore.

And mercifully, it happens fairly rarely now in the in the, in the developed world, but to have been, deprived of my birth mother's love and attention, to be taken care of by relatives for a few months and then put in, a Catholic orphanage for a year or two.

No one's ever told me exactly how long.

Means that by the time I emerged into being the kind of person where I thought, oh, I am.

I'm.

I'm a person, I have feet, I'm me.

I'm not.

I'm not you.

I'm not the table.

I'm me.

I'm a person.

The notion of the tragedy that attended my very existence was actually part of how I understood and understand the world.

The world is riven through with threads of, of of trauma and and of tragedy.

Even though I'm a cheery person and I think a positive person, and I've tried to make good and and the gifts that I inherited from my birth mother and from my adoptive mother and my father, I still think that every time that I sit down with that now, it's a computer.

Of course, every time I sit down to orient myself in a new story, I feel that same sort of pressure of the it's the pressure that we all feel.

It's the pressure that we all felt as children.

And I daresay we all probably feel it a little bit more as adults than perhaps we acknowledge.

Basically, the question is, what the hell am I doing here?

You know, you might be asking yourself that this very evening, even though to me, even though to me, with those lights on the tables, you you just look like a bank of heaven here.

It's wonderful.

But what the hell are you doing here?

What are any of us doing in in the in the tragic and and possible lives that, that we find ourselves in?

Well, that's the big question.

And the answer can be found by going internally into your own life the way you did in memoir and fiction.

Or the answer can be found in going into the miasma of a created landscape, where anything that happens there is through and because of and from oneself.

It's still it's still it an awesome and a daunting and and a frightening task.

Sometimes I think I write in order to get away from the sadness of my of that that origin story.

And other times I think, no, the only reason I survived that is such sadness.

And, and in some ways, you know, the family members who, resented me for having been born because when I arrived that upset the applecart for everybody else.

Part of the reason I think I became a writer was because that was an A, that was a set of scales and balances.

I had to adjust, and I have to adjust every single day of my life.

I have to I have to make my life worthwhile so that I can justify its cost.

I didn't I didn't put in for it to cost what it cost, but nonetheless, that's what it cost.

So that's been a motivation for me to be, I think, a creative artist and a motivation for me to try to reach out of my the struggle of my origin story, to give something that that is capable of being accepted by everybody, not just by somebody who lives in my little narrow, gray box of life.

Yeah, there are so many ways to answer the question why?

Right.

You know, I, I remember as a young person thinking, reading somewhere that that the reason I think it was a Hermann Hesse, a novel that we write out of a fear of death, or we write to achieve immortality or something very highbrow, abstract.

And later I found myself thinking, well, maybe I write to escape.

And then I found myself thinking, you know, you use this word in relationship to, in relation to childhood a lot.

The word I think is blurry or blurred.

And that in our recollections of the past and our origins, there is a bit of a blur.

And I think as I get older, the more I realize that really the impetus for my own writing is to kind of write myself into existence.

And in the same way that cultures have origin stories.

I think it's so important that individuals have origin stories and that they're told on our own terms.

Maybe.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I know you have a pretty extensive background in folklore and mythology, too, and so how does that inform the way that you've shaped shape those stories?

You know, there's, as I continued with my education in my 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, I began to realize that I had been operating for many, many years under this false notion that I really wasn't very bright.

Now, I'm not saying I am very bright, but I'm saying in a large family and if you're from large families, you know, I had six brothers and sisters, actually, in Auburn in New York.

That was a middle size family.

But, I was a large family.

And once when I talked to a therapist, the therapist said, well, who are you?

You know, why are you here?

Who are you?

Who are you in your family?

And I said, well, I'm the artist.

He said, what do you mean by that?

And I said, well, my oldest brother is the genius.

My sister is the earth mother.

The next brothers, you know, Mister handyman, fix it.

I'm the artist.

The next brother's a bit of a and and he said, you're not.

You call yourself an artist.

But what about the other parts that that you were saying to your brothers and sisters and.

Well, they they have that all covered.

I'm not smart.

He says.

Why do you think you're not smart?

And I say, well, I'm not smart because I can't reason rationally.

In order to be smart, you have to do a basic and and and he listened to me talk and he said, you are you are reasoning with me about how it works.

Yeah.

How about how what an idiot you are.

You have you have more going on than you're giving yourself credit for.

Well, as the decades went on and I began to have friends who were medical doctors, and I married a man who was, a lawyer, a trial lawyer for a while.

And I began to realize, I actually do understand a lot about medicine, and I understand a lot about law.

And I have paid attention to public events.

So I'm beginning to be somewhat knowledgeable about some aspects of public policy.

So why, if I might have been a brain surgeon, or if I might have gone to defend the unjustly accused, why did I let it?

Is I to spend my life's embers writing stories, right?

Stories.

I mean, there's great stories.

The stories saved my life.

But even so.

And then I came upon a quote by the British moral philosopher Roger Scruton, who has passed away now, and I do not agree with most of what he wrote in the history of his long life.

But this one thing he said is kind of my carrying card as an artist.

He said, excuse me, I'm going to burp loudly into the microphone.

No, that's not what he said.

Maybe, maybe he did say it.

Maybe this is one of the things he said all the time.

Maybe it was his punchline.

And now, he said.

The constellation of the imaginary is not imaginary constellation.

And I'm going to say that again because to me it's almost like a prayer, the constellation of the imaginary.

It's not imaginary constellation, it's real constellation.

What you do when you work in the imaginary realm as an artist is giving real consolation to people.

It's doing what doctors do when they put on a Band-Aid.

It's doing what nurses do.

It's doing what.

God bless them.

The teachers do consolation to real individuals.

The fact that you don't see the individuals doesn't mean it's not happening.

And so therefore.

So no, you didn't become a brain surgeon.

You didn't go into, public defense.

You wrote fantasies, but you gave consolation to people you were doing.

You were doing your ministerial, your therapeutic work through the tools that you happened to have.

Now, we were talking backstage about the the special needs that seem to obtain upon our children the special details of the difficult world in which they're growing up that are different and are perhaps harsher than the world in which you grew up, which seems interesting enough, and certainly the world in which I grew up, which had its own harshness.

They need as much as we needed.

They need the handhold of consolation that the imaginary can supply.

I do believe, and I'm not being paid to say this.

I do believe that's why we're all here tonight.

I believe we're all here tonight because we know that the blessing of the right story slipping into us almost against our wishes, sometimes at exactly the right time, can be the thing that stands between us and the darkness.

I believe the right story can straighten up to strengthen us.

Can I ask what some of the right stories were?

You were?

Oh, yes, at the right time.

Yes you can.

And because of the childhood, I talked to you about, a lot of them were fairy tales.

Initially, even when I was in third or fourth grade, I'd go to the library and I'd get, you know, Joe and the third base curse.

I didn't read that.

I didn't know what that was.

I didn't know what that meant.

And then I'd get, you know, I'd get, you know, the Dixon boys and and and, you know, the secret of the cactus, you know, and I'd get 2 or 3 other things that I had absolutely no interest in.

But at the bottom of my library stack would be grandma's fairy tales.

Yeah.

And I would be pretending I was getting it out for one of my younger brothers and sisters.

But I got out the Grimm's Tales over and over again all through grade school, and I reread them.

The way one listens again to the Gospels say, as if one has never heard them before.

What is this going to say to me today?

The fairy tales said something to me.

They said.

You can survive.

You can survive.

Those people, their mothers died.

Their fathers threw them out or paid no attention.

Their older brothers or sisters stole all the wealth and ran off.

But you can survive.

This is why I exist as a story.

To reach across from the deep darkness of medieval Europe and say to you, you can survive to and I did.

I did survive because I took courage from that.

I also loved the traditional stuff that I.

But lots of people in this room loved like A Wrinkle in Time.

You know, Meg, Mary being able to save her father and her brother, her baby brother, the book that some of you might know called.

Well, all, you know, all the great ones, Charlotte's Web and, Harriet the Spy.

Yeah, exactly.

Thank you.

Harriet.

Most of the books I loved were fantasies.

They were books about people like the darling children breaking through the windows or flying to Neverland, or Alice in Wonderland, going down the rabbit hole and finding herself in in a world even more topsy turvy.

Then 2024 in America, they were about children who had their adventures, who had their brains, and their hearts and their experiences widened and then came home like the traditional hero's quest.

Sure.

Larger and more capable so that they could do something for somebody else.

Right.

Why do you think it was important that, you know, I think a of the books that and the stories that I was exposed to as a young person, they tended to to be about and to take place in worlds that that mostly resembled my own.

But it sounds like it was really important for you to engage with stories that took you to worlds that were either simulations of, or amplifications of, or fantastic versions of the world that we live in.

What was the magic that was happening there for you?

Why was that important?

Well, there's a distinction, between what I read and what I remember because I was I was a whore in the library.

I took up with everybody.

It's just that the ones that I remember where the ones where the ones that were fantastic.

Yeah.

Because they were the ones that suggested the world was wider than the world that had been handed to me.

Now, I want to say that somewhere, safely in the deep, dark gloom is a high school teacher of mine in this very room.

She was the, she was the chief officer in charge of the high school newspaper, of which I was, I think, the editor of the Arts and Human interest page.

She's only about 12 minutes older than I am, but she was my teacher.

And I want to say to people like Nancy Sandman sitting here in the dark, I'm not going to ask you to stand and come up on stage, but Nancy.

Keep oh, there you are.

People like you and people who work with children are doing so much and have done so much good to bring us forward to the point where we can all be here tonight caring about what we do, what, what kind of lifelines we throw out for the next generation.

To be to be told by somebody in high school.

Yeah, you can do this.

You can, you can, you can take this page.

You can run with it.

You know, that enormous confidence building.

Now, I should I should say that while my family was, we lived in a nice neighborhood because my mother was canny, my stepmother, second mother, whom I adored, and who raised.

She was canny.

And they were able to get a very nice house for about $3,000 because it was, you know, being foreclosed for taxes.

And she knew how to work the system.

So we had a nicer house, really, than we could afford.

My father was a journalist and and wrote, human interest columns and humorous column for the Albany Times Union, where I grew up.

And my fam, my family home was strict and severe when it came to Catholic piety.

When it came to, we didn't go hungry, but we sure didn't go full, you know what I mean?

You know, a lot of people remember what that's like.

But the liberty, the liberty that was expressed to us by the confessions of a library card by the Albany Public Library was all that we needed.

There was no other deprivation possible because we could feed ourselves.

We could even feed ourselves, say, in the Narnia books, when the Beaver family takes out food and lays out a spread for, the first Pevensie children to come through the wardrobe and get into an early and need and need some food, and the Turkish taffy that the white which gives to, the one of the sons, Edmund, had said, I'm not sure, we could feed ourselves on the food and books.

It was so, it was almost as good as the spread they put out here tonight.

It was almost as good about half of which, by the way, I've taken into my bag, I'm bringing back across state lines to Massachusetts.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Beautiful.

I, I also was intrigued, you know, I deep in the archives of of your, your internet, you know, history is a comment you made about, why, as a young person, you you felt like you may have begun writing, in addition to the idea of, you know, aspiring to tell your own story and engage with worlds that were unlike your own.

You also made a comment that I found really interesting and very different than most conversations that I have with other writers about creativity.

And, I think what you said is that you one of the reasons that you began to write was out of, I hope I get this right, a deep and very real sense of boredom.

And when I read that, I thought, that's what I've always wanted to say, but never had the courage to say out loud.

The the profundity of boredom in my young life and, and the, the work that it could do is something that I've really underrated over the years.

Right.

And I, talking about the austerity of your your childhood home.

I wonder, if you could just tell us a little bit more about the magic of boredom?

And I also want to talk a little bit about the possibilities for boredom for today's young people.

I'm so glad you didn't ask me to talk about the boredom of magic.

Yeah, my career would be shot if I had to do that.

Well, you know, as I said, my parents were dubious about, the blandishments of network television, so we were not allowed to watch very much of it.

We had to vote as a family of nine every Sunday, which, which half hour the TV was going to be on the upcoming week.

And for a long time it was Gilligan's Island.

Which says a little bit to you about the limitations of democracy, but we're not going there tonight.

The fact is that because we were not allowed to watch TV and because we all had good active minds, my parents were very articulate people who loved language.

We kept them.

We kept several dictionaries in the kitchen and the cookbook shelf because we looked up etymology, we looked at the sources of words all the time.

Because of that, there was really nothing to do.

We were we were peaceable children.

Some some children are scrappers.

We were not scrappers.

We were, we were we were pretty, pretty nice kids, pretty well-behaved kids.

But we had to do something.

I mean, what do you do from morning to night if you can't do anything?

I couldn't.

I couldn't ride a bicycle with permission until I was 16 and had passed the New York State driver's license exam.

I couldn't cross a street without permission until I was 12, and this is because of the death of my mother and my parents.

Panic.

Irrational panic about losing somebody else?

Sure.

During during their tenure, my birth mother, incidentally, happened to be the best friend of my second mother.

So she had lost her best friend when my mother died, too.

It wasn't just my father losing his wife.

So with all of this energy, all this mental energy stirred up by reading that we couldn't do anything else but read.

Really?

And, you know, we played with a little bit of Lego and we made, you know, Barbie doll dungeons and, you know, the normal stuff that kids do.

But there really was nothing to do but make things up.

Make up plays, make up movies, make up, try to draw comic strips.

Just anything you could do with a pencil and and some blank paper.

Press releases were on the other side, but one side was always white.

And that was our core.

Our foolscap.

And we.

I have, a shed at home in a box that is about the size of this space.

Under this table, I have about 200 manuscripts of stories that I wrote from the time I was about nine until I was out of high school.

And so did you ever read them that Malcolm Gladwell book called outliers?

Have you seen that?

There's that.

The first chapter is the chapter I Remembered the Best, where he talks about the Beatles and how when the Beatles went to Hamburg before they came back and were the Beatles, they had gone there to play in a bar four nights a week, ultimately with another group.

So they were going to play one set and the other group was going to play the other set.

For some reason, the other group never showed up, and the Beatles, instead of playing for four hours a night, played eight hours a night or nine hours a night.

For those four years they were in Germany.

By the time they came back to England.

Says Gladwell, they had done roughly, and this was his phrase, 10,000 hours of practice before they considered themselves professionals the same.

He said the same thing about, Steve Jobs tinkering with computers in his father's garage.

His father could get him the stuff his father said.

It's okay.

You don't have to.

You don't have to go to college.

You know, by the time he was 20, he had put in 10,000 hours of teaching himself how to work with the computer equipment and invent computers for the rest of us.

I, I counted back, I looked at these, and since I had so little freedom to do anything else, I'm quite sure I spent 10,000 hours writing and drawing from fourth grade to 12th grade that I put in my apprenticeship.

My teachers were my teachers, like Nancy, but my teachers were the library.

And the example of my parents, who loved to read, loved to write, and love to talk about language.

And so really, in a way, it's amazing.

It's amazing that, you know, I never really thought about doing anything else except for writing, because I'm a very, very little brain.

I could only have one idea, you know?

So or I went, I do want to turn to your work a little bit.

I think I told you in a conversation we had a couple of months ago that I first read wicked, while staying in a hotel, overlooking the Chao Phraya River in Bangkok.

And I mentioned that, you know, living in a in a world where, magic was not only, accepted, but kind of ordinary.

Yeah.

Part of of of everyday life.

I felt like I understood the terms of wicked a little bit better.

But I did have a question.

I think I began reading wicked, and my assumption was that because it was a story that was based on The Wizard of Oz, a character from The Wizard of Oz that I would be dealing with a book with.

With themes that were somewhat basic, or at least, suited to the age that I would be when I first experienced The Wizard of Oz.

Right.

I quickly found out that that was not the case.

There are, some very heavy ideas I think I mentioned in our last conversation in the first.

Oh, I don't know, 50 pages of wicked.

There's a scene where Elphaba draws Oz and we're in the dirt with a stick.

It makes a very, Or you describe her very vividly, making a kind of a the ontology of of Oz.

It's beautiful.

There's some pretty powerful sex scenes, in, in wicked.

And it struck me that, you know, though, this is a book, that draws on stories that I had experienced as a young person.

It was asking me to really think about, a very mature world.

You challenged my expectations.

And I think a lot of readers have felt that way.

How intentional was that?

What is your vision?

In working that way?

Well, for that book particularly, which was my first adult novel after I had published about 15 novels for children, I distinctly knew I was playing with a certain kind of literary to lignite, to take a children's story and say, now we all think we know this.

We're just going to go back and look again, people.

What what did we miss?

And, in order to assert my my right not to pervert the material because I don't believe that I did.

So that certainly wasn't my intention.

But to deepen it, strengthen it, making its tropes that much more believable because they included things that generally are left out of children's fantasy, like sex, like religion, like political discussion, like different religions, like the conflict between worlds we were talking about at the top of the hour and, and the urban industrial, that these are things that govern societies.

Wicked is about an individual who at the same time, like all of us, has to learn at the same time to be an individual with a full energy, an ounce of every bit of her being, and to be a member of her civic society, she has to learn to be fiercely independent and free.

And at the same time, she is not excused from the need to care for others and the need to pay attention to the world.

That even if the world has betrayed her and beaten her back, it's still her world, and she has an obligation to it.

And it seemed to me very important and kind of fun to take a children's book that we all thought we knew and to say, well, what?

What are the unanswered stresses in the original work?

Not even I'm not even talking about I'll get you in a little dog.

I'm not talking about Margaret Hamilton.

I'm talking about the original novel, 1900.

There are lots stresses, lots of left out parts, and in the plotting and in the characterizations in that novel that were just ripe for me to explore and I did put a fairly, open scene involving sex appendages on puppets in the first eight pages of the book, because I wanted grandmothers and the children's bookstores to read just enough of it to know, oh, little Lucy is really going to like this, you know, to know it wasn't a children's book.

I put it up front.

I put it front and center and thought, you don't like this?

That's fine.

I just want you to know what your what you're getting in, and that's that's why I.

That's why I did it.

Yeah, sure.

So I think, I think I'm now a little jetlagged.

So I think I'm now at the point where perhaps I'm skewing outside of my lane.

So pull me back.

If.

No, no, there's there's plenty more left to wonder.

It took me back if I. I'm sorry, but but I do want to keep, to to stay on this point a little bit.

I, you know, the, the, the metaphor, the image that keeps coming to mind is a kind of a Trojan horse, approach to storytelling where, we as the readers are entering what we think is familiar territory.

And the, the trick and I don't mean to demean it by calling it a trick, but of so much of your storytelling is to say, yes, you can enter through this gate.

Yeah, that may be familiar, but I'm going to take you places that a the old stories haven't addressed and be that that might be outside the bounds of what the original story's even intended.

Right.

I don't know if you think that's a fair characterization of your.

I think that's a fair characterization, you know?

So shoot me.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, certainly the one of the one of the only pans that the novel got when it was published 30 years ago this year, one of the only pans was probably the most important review, or I thought it was the most important review at the time by, a New York Times, Pulitzer Prize winning critic, whose name I won't mention, but it was Michiko Kakutani.

And and she, she just said she wrote 18 column inches which suggested I was the worst writer in the world, and I had no right to take this sacred institution and use it for my own perverted purposes.

And I was a terrible writer.

And if if anybody should ever here's my picture in the New York Times, if I happen to be crossing against the red, gun it.

you know, I don't I don't deserve to live.

And a friend, a friend of mine, other people in the room.

Well, no, my friend Barbara Harris and Barbara Harris, an old friend called me up after that 18 column inches was published in the New York Times, and she yelled at me on the telephone, why doesn't she just shoot her husband and have done with it?

But you know what?

Another friend of mine from San Francisco wrote up and said, well, I saw the piece in the Times.

I said, yeah, my career is over.

My book was published on Tuesday.

The review is on Thursday, my career is over after four days.

And she said, no, no, you don't understand, honey.

18 column inches is 18, column inches.

And the following Sunday, the L.A. times published a review above the fold on the front page of what was then the book section.

Absolutely glowing review.

And, now people in LA don't necessarily read fiction.

They do read newspapers.

And by Monday morning, Whoopi Goldberg was calling and Demi Moore was calling and Laurie Metcalf was calling.

And my life began again.

Yeah.

Imagine that.

Yeah, five days in short, it.

And then the book of course, had its own life and, and and bought its own purchase, bought its own right to exist in the world because people got what I was doing.

I have to tell you, it has been talked about people getting what I'm doing.

When I've had many, many, many like hundreds and hundreds of letters over 30 years by people who have told me how the novel wicked, but also the other one son of a witch and and hidden C and egg and spoon.

I mean, I've done I've done many of them, but they each have their own comfort apparatuses.

I think that's a clumsy way to say it, but it's the same with jet lag.

So there have been so many stories like a one woman said, I had an accident.

I'd never been able to read because I was dyslexic and had an accident, and I had to have a spinal fusion.

I had to lie on my back in a hospital bed for seven months, and my father came every day and he read me wicked from cover to cover.

And at the end of seven months he finished.

And it's the first book I ever read.

And this is I have had, as I say, hundreds of people write to me about the consolation it has afforded them in times of stress or crisis.

But it's made most dramatic, of course, because theater is more dramatic than the quietness of reading a book.

When the play opened at Broadway, Idina menzel, Kristin Chenoweth, Joel Gray, all the rest, there was an event at the Gershwin Theater where the Broadway cast recording had been released, and all the cast and I were sitting in a long, curving table, signing copies of the CD for people as they came in, and I was about six people away from Idina menzel down there, who plays Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West.

For did you know 21 years ago.

And I noticed about every eight people, Idina menzel was getting up and leaning across the table and giving somebody a hug like it was.

It was like clockwork, almost.

And I got curious.

So nobody wants my signature anyway, so I'll just I'm just going to go and I slid away from my, place and they went over and I stood behind Adina, and sure enough, 2 or 3 people later, there came a woman, an immigrant woman in a shawl.

I don't know whether she was Palestinian or Pakistani.

But what I do know is I lean forward because I'm nosy.

I learned well from Harriet the Spy.

I heard this, this woman say to Idina menzel, I have lived in America for six years, and this is the first time I have seen myself in America.

And she was talking about the witch and all.

All that was against her and all the good that was in her that she wanted to use, and she wanted to give.

And, you know, I, I'm an easy crier, so.

But give me some room underneath your table.

I mean, okay, but but this is what I mean about the constellation of the imaginary.

This woman felt seen by seeing somebody that she identified.

When and can we.

It could be ask, could be asked to do anything more.

I mean, I could I ask we could do.

Yes.

We could always ask to do more.

But I couldn't ask.

For anything for art to do other and to be sure of making a connection with somebody who really needed a connection that day.

Sure.

I, I have thought some.

Yeah, please.

I have thought some about, When wicked was published, what it was like to be an American during that time.

Yeah.

I promised I wouldn't get into this until a little later, but, you know, there is a, film version of, again in the works, that is coming out against a certain cultural backdrop.

Right?

Right.

In your mind, as the the creator of these stories, what is the relationship between the world that we live in now?

And, and the stories you put into the world?

Well, I will say that when wicked came out, probably because of Mitch Kakutani, it makes you live forever.

Is, you know, it found its own people and in a pattern that's very rare in publishing.

It was a word of mouth was a sleeper book.

It actually sold very well the first four months.

I actually earned royalties on it after.

Oh, well, I know, I even called up my agent.

I said, you know, I'm I'm afraid there's been a typo because I think somebody put an extra zero or maybe even extra two zero on my, on my royalty check.

And he who's so loyal and trustworthy and believes me so much said, yeah, I thought so too, he said.

But I went back and I checked accounting.

Now that book is so it never hit the bestseller list, but it has sold.

And for about the next six years, it's sold better every six month period than the than the time before.

So it was finding its way by word of mouth.

And because the story was saying something to people at the time.

Now, when I wrote it 30 years ago, I thought it had a very retro feeling.

I thought it was it was kind of Graham Greene and the quiet American.

And it would it would actually seem too old fashioned.

I mean, just the politics of it would seem old fashioned, you know, up against the the fascistic tendencies of the dictator.

And then Broadway got hold of it.

They were thinking about it.

They were working on it.

I was I gave it my blessing and 9/11 happened and I thought, oh, well, no, no, play that is going to ask people to be hesitant about naming who the villains are when we've just been attacked and had all this loss of life, this, that, that this play is dead in the water now.

But the but something else happened, which is that by the time it arrived on Broadway, we needed to we needed that to put on the brakes.

We needed it as a culture to say we can't jump to conclusions about who we think is right and who we think is wrong.

It's a it's our civic duty.

It's our it's our moral duty, to go more slowly and take more care before we decide how to behave and before we decide who our enemies are.

Well, so that was 2004, 2003, and the play took off.

And then, you know, the book followed along, scampering like various little lamb, you know, and and I thought, well, eventually, you know, eventually this will get tired.

I mean, I'm surprised it hit.

I'm surprised it works.

It hit for a number of different reasons, but eventually the politics of it will get tired, will seem old fashioned.

But I'll tell you, Jed.

It seems.

It seems more.

It seems more pertinent than ever.

Yeah, and that's not something I'm happy about.

But it is not gone.

It is not gone out of fashion because the things that it talks about are still there, still crucial.

Does the legacy of that story surprise you?

Maybe because I'm not entirely sure how much it was on your mind at the time that you were writing the book, that you were addressing the moment or the many moments that would have followed?

Yes, it does surprise me.

Everything, everything in life surprises me, including to be here in New Hampshire, which, I mean, I'm having such a good time.

It yes, it of course it surprises me.

No, no writer expects especially thinking they're going to do it for a living or for part of a living, even or for a hobby.

Nobody expects ever to do anything other than for the cold water.

Fourth floor, walk up and and and have to live on the dole.

So for the books that I've done to have hit and then continued to hit and continued to make their own history, the do you remember Rocky and Bullwinkle when Bullwinkle falls off the mountain and turns into this big snowball who goes down to the edge of the cliff?

That's what my career was like.

Whoa.

It's like this.

This one little story idea that I had about retelling, about talking about somebody who we think of as bad.

But maybe it was, or maybe it was and has turned into this juggernaut.

I have to be careful not to be flattened by it most days.

And luckily, I have three children who keep me humble.

So, so no.

Nobody.

No, but no writer, goes into the business thinking, oh yeah, I'm really going to make a bundle at this, right?

I'm only going to change the world.

No, you just try to survive day to day doing, doing your work and hoping, even if the only person it means something to is you, it still means something.

Sure.

It sounds a little bit like, You know, I think when we begin our writing careers, there's a level of innocence and naivete about the way that we create, which is probably a good thing.

Yeah.

Inside of us, as we evolve as writers, we become a little more self-conscious, a little more self-aware, maybe a little bit more, tuned in to the market.

And, the idea of feeling an obligation to say something or to address the world in some way.

Have you felt yourself evolve that way, or have you tried to protect that original naivete and, and innocence that perhaps you began with?

The main thing is that I only write the story that I really feel compelled to tell.

Yeah.

And and actually, I let me rephrase that.

I only write a story that addresses a question I feel compelled to ask because I never know the answer.

I write stories to see what I think about something.

Sure.

In wicked it was very it was really clear.

I didn't know what we were talking about.

We talked about somebody being wicked.

Yeah.

What are we talking about?

Them being psychologically deranged.

Certain scale that you could assess at a psychologist's office.

Are you talking about, you know, God and the devil having fought over your soul, and one of them getting the upper hand?

Oh, talking about malnutrition and talking about bad parenting and sociological training.

A street Officer Krupke all over again.

We don't know what we what we mean when we say some of these bad.

We can sometimes identify a behavior and say, you know, it's really bad, Johnny, to cut off your sister's tongue with the scissors.

That's unacceptable behavior.

Yeah, that's you know, you're not bad, but that was a bad choice, you know?

But it's a struggle we had, you know, these are important questions.

And, and so I, I write things to see what I think about them.

I don't always even come up with answers, but I at least I have the intellectual challenge of struggling with it.

And by struggling with it and story, I do move myself along a little bit.

Yeah, yeah.

Another thing I want to explore with you a little bit is, I don't know, I, I don't mean to sound too kind of abstract about it, but I feel like you offer a theory of story that has become pretty intriguing to me.

And I believe it's in Oracle of Macau in the way that you structure that book.

There's stories as rooms and stories as seeds.

Yes.

I can try to paraphrase the difference.

You'll do a better job explaining to me, but it was a very compelling case for how stories live within us.

So maybe you can offer to the audience what a story.

As of room is, and what a story as a seed is.

And if you have forgotten what that was all about, I'll do my best to fill in.

Well, I, I haven't entirely forgotten, but I want to say first is.

Thank you for noticing that.

Well, thank you for noticing that because you just, you know, you throw lots and lots and lots of spices in the jambalaya, but you never know what's going to, you know, kind of hit with somebody else's palate.

And when I, I found the story as I forget which one that came first, I think it might have been the seed first, but that didn't mean I found one.

And the room was at room first.

Okay, well, you are you read it more recently tonight.

So.

Well, story as a room that's akin to where we started talking about where we find ourselves, let's say in some rural situation where we may not we may not actually know much of what's outside our room because we just arrived or because we're in a foreign environment.

And yet the story of our own life is there.

You know, we're there, they're there, and we can add them, right?

We can decorate it and design it.

And little by little, we can push the windows open and invite the outside in.

The story of our own lives is a room that we decorate ourselves and we remodel ourselves.

And sometimes we move out of if it's if it's painful.

But a story as a seed is something else.

It's something that's possibly more potent, but much more organic and mysterious.

It's the thing we don't know the story as the room is the thing we know that we work from story as the seed is a thing we don't know, but that we must, we must follow because at our peril, we lose track of it, and we lose track of the generative force of our own thinking.

And our own conscience, I believe, is that does that come anywhere near?

Sure.

Am I just barking up the wrong tree?

You, Well, I think this might be part of the project.

Right?

Is it?

In my mind, it was the idea that, we have familiar stories.

Yeah, that at least we think.

Yeah, are the same between us.

Yeah, right.

We can agree on certain parables and fables that we grew up with, you know, even about, say, the creation of our country.

Right.

That seem stable.

Right.

And then, because we are who we are, we start telling other stories about those rooms.

Yeah.

And they become seeds.

And then other people hear those stories and they riff on themselves.

And I think what that was meaning, the reason that was meaningful to me is because, I think that as, a storyteller myself, I often feel some anxiety about, you know, how much can I amplify the story that's familiar into a subjective story?

Right, right.

And how much how big can it get?

And what how, depending on how big it gets, how much does it maintain a relationship to that original story?

Yeah.

And you have given yourself great liberty to go wherever you want.

It's true.

With those seeds.

Yeah.

It's like the bird drops the seed and the seed goes on and a new tree is grown, and then a bird takes it somewhere else.

And who knows how far it will go.

You've you've written many, many books.

Yeah.

Kind of on that principle, I imagine.

Yeah.

So.

Well, I really, you know, one of my, one of my very dear friends and, and a muse and a mentor was the American artist Maurice Sendak.

Where the Wild Things Are in the Night Kitchen, all that stuff.

And he he once described his writing process, his creative process as syncing a ladle into the subconscious, and just seeing, letting it dangle down there and then pulling it up and seeing what there was.

He trusted his self, his subconscious, to know more than he did.

And I do too.

I trust that if I have an instinct to do something that some part of me knows better than I know in my waking self what it is that's coming next, or what it is that has to be done.

And I, I think, I think I learned to trust that when I was about seven and I started writing stories because, you know, they just you don't know what the next line is till you figure out which of the letters you can write, the best and use those to start the next sentence.

Sure.

Do you work like that when you write memoir, do you trust the subconscious to tie your memoir?

I should always, oh, I always should.

And I find that when writing and I'm wondering, curious if to you, if you feel this way when my writing starts to feel like what I sometimes call homework.

Yeah, it's when I'm thinking too much.

Yeah, yeah.

My writing.

And it feels natural and intuitive when, the phrase that comes to mind is when the negative capabilities are starting to go to work.

Yeah.

And we have just a few minutes left, and I think this is a good time to turn to where I hope to end, which was, in a conversation about children, the role of children in your books.

I'm actually going to read a little, moment from, some of your writing.

This is from Egg Spoon.

You.

And toward the end of the book, you offer two lines that just really broke my heart.

One is full of, a bit of despair.

The other one offers so much hope when you're young.

I think being vulnerable to desolation comes from your not being able to imagine the world beyond you, and then later you write.

And yet nothing that is spiritual can fail to shine.

It is the light you see in the faces of children.

I am raising two daughters.

I work with college students who often seem like they are still sort of children.

And I just feel now more than ever, a responsibility to serve the young and in ways that I know we've talked about, what is our responsibility to the young now as storytellers?

And what do you have to say to the next generation of storytellers about how to find their way forward?

Our first responsibility is not to let them go, even when they squirm, to get away.

I believe in that as a parenting tactic or, I remember once.

I was telling.

I told the story of little Red Riding Hood to my kids.

And then there was some some tragedy happened later on in the afternoon.

And, our middle child, who was about four, you know, dropped his ice cream or, you know, something.

And he he just went into it, panic of screaming and kicking.

And he was angry and he was upset.

He had no he didn't know what he was feeling.

He had no control over his feeling.

And I ran to him and I grabbed him, and I hugged him.

And I sat down in a chair like this, and I hugged him and he squirmed to get away.

He squirmed.

He wanted, you know, and I just said, now we're going to just we're just going to stay here for a while.

And I just waited until he wailed it out and he yelled out.

Finally he put his his his little Asian head against my shoulder and he said, Is the big bad wolf real in the world?

So the question is, what do we owe?

What do we owe our young?

We owe them the truth, and we owe them not to let them go, even though they try.

Thank you so much.

Thank you.

Thank you everyone.

Thank you so much.

Thank you.

This has been a special presentation Gregory Maguire confessions of a Wicked Writer.

Conversation from the 2024 Annual Celebration of the Humanities.