About this episode
Gregory Maguire expresses himself with extreme precision. While many of us may grasp for words to communicate a specific emotion or to describe a series of events, Gregory seemingly has words and turns of phrase on command. What a delight it is to listen to Gregory talk about his journey, his writing, and his thoughts on a wide variety of topics.
"That's really all we are obliged to do for those we call our enemies. We are obliged to see them as humans, and then we behave the way we will. We are obliged not to consider them as less than human because that way, all hell breaks loose. - Gregory Maguire
Close to Gregory’s heart is the belief that everyone has a backstory, a context—even our enemies. And no matter how difficult the task may seem, he believes it is our duty to understand that story and find it within ourselves to empathize with them—not to excuse them but to simply see them as humans.
Gregory has built his career around telling the stories of antiheroes, most notably through the reimagining's of classic fairytales in novels such as "Wicked," "Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister," and "Mirror Mirror." That ability to find empathy and a curiosity to understand even the most seemingly undeserving characters emerges in his other children's and young adult books and is deeply rooted in experiences from Gregory’s early life.
In this episode, Gregory shares those early life experiences (which can honestly be described as “Dickensian”) and how his relationships with his father and siblings have impacted his writing and life choices. He tells us about his love of the “arresting strangeness” of literary worlds and how this sensation inspired him to become a writer. He also shares why he believes in the children's stories he writes, not always getting a “happily ever after.”
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Connect with Jordan and The Reading Culture @thereadingculturepod and subscribe to our newsletter at thereadingculturepod.com/newsletter.
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In his reading challenge, Arresting Strangeness (a term coined by J.R.R. Tolkien), Gregory has compiled a list of his favorite books that envelop you completely and force you to look at the world around you anew.
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This episode's Beanstack Featured Librarian is Lauren Mobley, a middle school librarian in Atlanta, Georgia. She tells us about a fun reading program she set up in her school inspired by a hit reality TV show.
Contents
- Chapter 1 - Travel of the Mind
- Chapter 2 - Home, the Orphanage, and back again
- Chapter 3 - The Children of Green Knowe
- Chapter 4 - Harriet the Recorder
- Chapter 5 - Origins of Empathy
- Chapter 6 - The Absence of a Happily Ever After
- Chapter 7 - Arresting Strangeness
- Chapter 8 - Beanstack Featured Librarian
Author Reading Challenge
Download the free reading challenge worksheet, or view the challenge materials on our helpdesk.
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Links:
- Gregory Maguire
- Gregory (@gregorymaguire) • Instagram photos and videos
- WICKED Official Trailer (2024)
- by JRR Tolkien - On Fairy-Stories
- The Children of Green Knowe (Green Knowe, #1) by Lucy M. Boston | Goodreads
- The Reading Culture
- The Reading Culture Newsletter Signup
- The Reading Culture on Instagram (for giveaways and bonus content)
- Beanstack resources to build your community’s reading culture
View Transcript
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Gregory Maguire:
That's really all we are obliged to do for those we call our enemies. We are obliged to see them as humans, and then we behave the way we will. We are obliged not to consider them as less than human, because that way, all hell breaks loose.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Think of your feelings toward your worst enemy. Now, try to flip those feelings. Can you instead sympathize with your villain? Just for a second, can you imagine them as the hero? Gregory Maguire is famous for doing just that, for humanizing his characters, applying empathy where others see evil. But empathy starts with paying attention. That's a skill Gregory picked up as an avid reader in his youth.
Gregory Maguire:
I'm not just transfixed by the story and by the mood. I'm learning about alertness, and that's why I might say that's part of where my career as a writer began, because to be a writer and to want to communicate what you are alert to means you have to be alert first.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Gregory is the hero of the anti-heroes. He's best known for his reimagining of classic fairy tale characters and novels such as Wicked, Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, and Mirror, Mirror. He has also authored numerous children's books, including The Dream Stealer, his series, the Hamlet Chronicles, and most recently, Cress Watercress. In this episode, he tells us about his truly Dickensian childhood and how his relationship with his father and siblings impacted his sense of empathy. We discussed the allure of literary worlds and how his experiences getting lost in them as a kid inspired him to be a writer, along with why he believes in his children's stories not always getting a happily ever after, and he'll tell us which classic children's literature character spurred his interest in journaling, a practice he's been at for nearly 60 years, and he has the receipts. Wait until you hear that story.
My name is Jordan Lloyd Bookey, and this is The Reading Culture, a show where we speak with authors and illustrators about ways to build a stronger culture of reading in our communities. We dive into their personal experiences, their inspirations, and why their stories and ideas motivate kids to read more. Make sure to check us out on Instagram for giveaways at the reading culture Pod, and you can subscribe to our newsletter at the readingculturepod.com/newsletter. All right, on to the show.
I read that you were at someplace, that you were weeding out your books. How's that going for you?
Gregory Maguire:
Oh, I have been weeding out my books. I never did a headcount of books, but I wouldn't be surprised if there are 10 to 15,000 books in the several homes that I own. But I've been collecting books since the first book I bought at a library book sale for 25 cents, and that was 60 years ago or so. But what you realize is if you clear away the arcana and the ephemera in the career of somebody whose main work you've really liked, and what you leave behind is the main work that you really liked, it actually looks better than it used to. It looks more interesting.
So my rule of thumb right now is let's say the doctor says "You have four years left to live," and I look and think, "Okay, I'm going to start rereading stuff that I love and I'm not going to go for this, the second-rate stuff, which was interesting to me when I was more of a student or more of an obsessive. I'm going to go back to The Waves and Passage to India and War and Peace. I'm going to go to the big guns to get one last bite of it," and that actually feels refreshing.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
First of all, I like the fact that if you're like you have four years to live, you're just thinking about what are the books I'm going to reread? [inaudible 00:03:54].
Gregory Maguire:
Yeah.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
That tracks. And not like, where am I going? What am I doing?
Gregory Maguire:
It's true. It's true. I have had lovely life of travel and living abroad, and I've done a lot of it. To travel in one's mind is I think a perk and a reward of old age. When your limbs become less reliable, with luck, your mind stays supple and can carry you places in the same way that it did when you were six and eight and ten and first learning to read and realizing that what reading was was travel of the mind. That's what reading is. It's travel of the mind.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
I love that. We'll start now at the beginning of the time when you were younger. Do you want to sort of share about your early life?
Gregory Maguire:
I was born in 1954, and about a week after I was born, my mother died from sepsis following complications resulting to my birth. She left behind four children and an ill and out-of-work husband. My father rattled out of his mind with grief, surprise, and a sense of hopelessness about how to walk forward from one day to the next and from one year to the next, first parceled his four children out to the sisters of my birth mother, and there I stayed at an aunt's house for six or nine months. But eventually, when she became pregnant, she said to my father, "Look Jack, you either have to let me adopt him or take him back, because I'm not going to be able to hang onto him for two or three years and then surrender him. I don't have that in me to do that. It will break my heart. So do something now. Figure it out."
So he put me in a children's home, an orphanage, from which infants came and went, were cared for by nurses and nuns, and left me there until he remarried. The person he remarried, my stepmother, we called her my second mother, was my birth mother's best friend from fourth grade. So in the long span of years, she had known my birth mother longer than my father ever did. They went on to collect the children from various outposts to pull us together as a family, and to have three children of their own, my half brothers and sisters. So on the surface of it, I was a Von Trapp family child. There were seven of us. We didn't have a schloss in the Tyrolean Alps. We were actually lower middle class, and a bit stretched for funds.
Neither of my birth parents went to college, but my father was very smart, an autodidact, and my second mother had gone and gotten several degrees. So by hook and by crook, by cunning and by care, they managed to cobble together a life for their family of nine and raise us on very little money and a lot of attention to literacy, because they both believed that being able to read and to some extent being able to write were the ways out of the Irish Catholic ghetto in which we were living, and the ways forward, and the ways to a sense of understanding of the world engagement in it and developing a love for it.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Why do you think they knew that or thought that, what we know?
Gregory Maguire:
One of the things that attracted all three of them to one another is that they were all smart and loved word games and loved storytelling, loved films. My father was a writer, and he became, after my birth mother died, he became a journalist and began to pull his life together and actually had a profile in the Albany, New York area as a columnist, a journalist, a human interest writer, a humorist, eventually a speech writer for the New York State Health Commissioner in Albany, New York. And my second mother had got English degrees and written a dissertation on Yates.
My birth mother just read a lot because that was all that was allowed her. They had really no money. It's hard to say which one was poorer than the other, but her mother had died when she was a child, and her Greek immigrant father raised all seven of the children by himself, speaking very little English. So the only way up was the library, and if you find yourself walking on the sidewalk with people who are also going to the library, you become friends with them, and that's actually the glue that tied them together into a knot of friendship and then gave us a very strong net from which to bounce into our own lives.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Something you'll have noticed at this point, and honestly, if you've heard any interview ever with Gregory, is that his vocabulary is seriously massive. There are few people walking around that have a precise word for absolutely everything easily at their disposal, and Gregory is one of those people. As it turns out, it runs in the family.
Gregory Maguire:
We grew up in a house where the dictionary lived on the same shelf in the kitchen as the cookbooks, because we were referring to it at least once a meal. Something would come up and my mother would say, is that from the Latin or the Greek? And my father, who had not studied Latin or Greek, nonetheless loved etymology and passionately, they would go scraping through the pages to find the answer to a question of the root of a certain English word and share it with us. And all of my brothers and sisters and I are etymologists and fetishists for different dictionaries. We get together at Thanksgiving and... Some families get together and talk about the game or they argue about politics. We get together and we talk about the proper use of the [inaudible 00:10:01] subjunctive.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
A hoot. You were like a precocious reader. You were reading really early, which was not the norm, really, that now these kids are reading and they're taught to read in kindergarten.
Gregory Maguire:
So yes, I was an early reader. Now, because we didn't have much in the way of money and because my parents were dubious about the blandishments of contemporary culture, especially television, which was flooding black-and-white-ly into everything in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah. TV dinner age.
Gregory Maguire:
Absolutely. Well almost our only license was the library card, and my mother would give us permission to go to the library almost whenever we wanted. It was a privilege. To read was a privilege. Not to be able to read was a punishment. It wasn't like, "Oh, phew, I'm done with my reading." We could go to bed. We had set bedtimes. And if we were reading, we could leave the light on an extra half hour. So we all read, obsessively, all the time. And we also read as soon as the lights went off, because the whole light was left on. We all slid to the bottom of her beds and kept reading in the hall light until at 11 o'clock my mother would turn the hall light off. We thought we were getting away with something. She raised seven readers.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah. Oh god. And do you remember the books of your childhood that you really loved? What were some of those?
Gregory Maguire:
Oh, absolutely. I do not remember much by way of picture books, although I must've had access to them, but because I could read for myself pretty early, I had those initial experiences of being able to open a book. The cover of a book with print in it as opposed to mostly pictures is like a garden gate. To open it and to walk through the cover and get to the first page and know your job is to untangle the black and white overgrowth on the page and figure out what's the secret of this particular garden. That was magical to me, and I could feel it from the time I was about six and a half or seven, and I began reading easy novels about then. I was reading easy novels in second grade. And some novels that weren't that easy, but I was just too compelled by the beautiful pictures on the cover or by the beautiful illustrations in the pages.
It was late afternoon before they finished the Christmas tree, and it was growing dark. They lit the old red Chinese lantern and many candles so that they could see to work. There were no glaring electric bulbs on this tree. Mrs. Oldknow had boxes of colored glass ornaments, each wrapped separately in tissue paper and put carefully away from year to year. Some were very old and precious indeed. Of course the most beautiful star was fixed at the very top, each glass treasure as light as an eggshell and as brittle, was hung on a loop of black cotton that had to be coaxed over the prickly fingers of the tree. They sat down together to look at their work. Tolly thought it so beautiful he could say nothing. He could hardly believe his eyes.
As they rested there, tired and dreamy and content, he thought he heard the rocking horse gently moving. But the sound came from Mrs. Oldknow's room, which opened out of the music room. A woman's voice began to sing very softly, a cradle song that Tolly had learned and dearly loved. (singing). "Who is it?" he whispered? It's the grandmother rocking the cradle," said Mrs. Oldknow, and her eyes were full of tears. "Why are you crying, granny? It's lovely." "It is lovely. Only it is such a long time ago. I don't know why that should be sad, but it sometimes seems so."
The singing began again. "Granny," whispered Tolly again, with his arm through hers. "Whose cradle is it? Linnet is as big as I am." "My darling, this voice is much older than that. I hardly know whose it is. I heard it once before, on Christmas." It was queer to hear the baby's sleepy whimper, only in the next room now, and so long ago. "Come we'll sing it too," said Mrs. Oldknow, going to the spinet. She played, but it was Tolly who sang alone, while 400 years ago, a baby went to sleep.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Published in 1954 The Children of Green Knowe would be the first in a series of six children's novels by Lucy M. Boston. The series is set in a historical British manor based on the author's own, and features a young boy who moves into it with his grandmother. The boy, Toseland, soon learns that the house is peacefully haunted by all of the souls that had lived there before them. This book marked one of Gregory's earliest encounters with the transformative influence of literary atmosphere. What he means by that, of course, is the ethereal ambiance that books can create, this secondary place inside, but outside our own world that exists solely to get lost in. Discovering this feeling through books like The Children of Green Knowe is what Gregory credits as sparking his interest in writing.
Gregory Maguire:
I was seven reading this, and learning what words could do.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yes, how they can just take you someplace. I mean, you're in it, right? You're there.
Gregory Maguire:
Absolutely in it. I didn't know that that was a famous old song, and I didn't know the melody at the time, but I sure got that something extraordinary was happening and they were both aware of it. I remember going to my mother and saying, "Well, I'm reading this book," and she said, "I know. I thought that was a little grownup for you. How are you finding it?" And I said, "I don't know if it's scary or not. I think it might be a ghost story." And she said, "Well, keep reading till you find out, and when it gets scary, put it down, and if it doesn't get scary, keep reading." It never got scary, but what it became was more and more saturated with a sense of place, a sense of time, and a sense of how this lonely child lives with his feelings in an exotic and a welcoming locale.
I think I became a writer partly because of my parents and the atmosphere of interest and words and stories that they conveyed upon all of their children, but I also became a writer because I had exposure to stunning writing at an early age. Now, why do we read? Why do we read children's books? Why do we give them to children and hope that they will be able to crack their marrow and suck the protein out of the language and the story? We give it to them so that they can be alert to the possibilities of the world. A passage like this said to me, "This child, Tolly, and this old grandmother, are alert to possibilities." And I'm not just transfixed by the story and by the mood. I'm learning about alertness. That's what I got from that book, and that's why I might say that's part of where my career as a writer began, because to be a writer and to want to communicate what you are alert to means you have to be alert first.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah. That's so interesting. It's like your books all have this quality, this unfolding that is really akin to a child basically discovering their world, and I think this story feels like it really... Like it fits as part of your origin.
Gregory Maguire:
It does, and lots of stories that I liked early on were stories in which the mother was not there. Nothing is ever said about Tolly's mother. Nothing is said about why he's there, actually, with his grandmother. This is just where he is now, and she's taking care of him, and this is a situation that children find themselves in without even knowing the questions to ask in an adversarial way to the people who are driving them to the new place they're being dumped. It's just "This is where you are now," and we're all kind of dumped in our own lives.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah. Yeah.
Gregory Maguire:
Some of us more unceremoniously than others. But the other kinds of stories that I also loved at the same time that I began to love literary fantasy were the fairy tales, because virtually every fairy tale begins with once upon a time there was a child whose mother died in childbirth. The child had to be raised by somebody who either didn't care for them or wasn't paying attention or had to come up against all kinds of thorns and umbrages that were going to interfere with healthy maturation. And I love those too. I think one of the reasons I write, in some ways, you could say, that I rewrite fairy tales for adults is that that story is haunting to me because it's the story of all children, how we pace our way along the unknown path, trying to find a break in the woods and a little light and a little horizon toward which to aim.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Even as a child. Gregory had an extraordinary power of observation and character study. It reminded me immediately of last week's episode with Nina LaCour, who described a similarly acute sense of focus, though her childhood was very different from Gregory's. I wondered if Gregory just kept all those keen and penetrating thoughts in his mind palace, or did he pause to put them down in a journal? When I asked him about it, he jumped ahead a bit and excitedly told us about one of the books from his reading challenge, which you'll hear about at the end of the episode.
Gregory Maguire:
In the list of 10 books under the rubric of arresting strangeness, there are nine books that you might qualify as fantasies, but there's one book that is not and that is the last one. That book is called Harriet the Spy.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Oh, I loved Harriet the Spy.
Gregory Maguire:
Harriet the Spy is of course about the famous sixth grade girl in prosperous household in a better-heeled neighborhood in New York City who keeps a journal, spies on everyone, and writes it down and then gets in trouble for being honest about her apprehensions of things. So you asked, did I keep a journal? As soon as I read Harriet the Spy, I started keeping a journal, and that was 57 years ago, and I still have it. I still keep it.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
You've kept a journal for 57 years?
Gregory Maguire:
I've kept a journal for-
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Or you have your journal from 57 years ago?
Gregory Maguire:
... 57 years. I have all of them.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Like handwritten journals?
Gregory Maguire:
57 notebooks are at the back of this room, in boxes. I have transcribed them all too, over 2 million words.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Oh my God.
Gregory Maguire:
And about 12 years ago, when my second mother died, I finally converted to keeping a journal on a computer instead of by hand, because I was traveling back and forth and it was just easier. When I went through that exercise and read, especially my high school and early post-college journals, I've realized I had been serving as my own propagandist and retelling my story incorrectly to make myself look better.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Should anyone read this? Austerity, you're like...
Gregory Maguire:
I didn't even know it. I was like, "Oh my gosh. I knew that fact about myself when I was a junior in high school?" I always tell people I didn't figure that out until I was a senior in college, and I guess... A little bit of revisionary history going on here. It is a wonderful practice. Harriet taught me how to be a writer. I knew a lot of the tricks of the trade by watching my father, my mother, my brothers and sisters, and most of the nuns and teachers I had, but Harriet was a child writer. So I began my apprenticeship with Harriet the Spy as my mentor when I was about sixth grade, and I've really never stopped. It's served me very well.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Honest observation is a wonderful skill for an apprentice writer, but you might recall that Gregory's mentor, Harriet, also spends most of her book as a pretty merciless judge of the people in her circle, and cutting depictions of them eventually land her in deep trouble. Gregory, in contrast, has built entire books around compassionate, empathetic portrayals of characters normally written off as evil, most famously, of course, the Wicked Witch of the West.
Gregory Maguire:
I don't have many regrets in life, but one regret I have is that Margaret Hamilton didn't live long enough to see the book Wicked, and to see that the character she played was actually going... She wasn't going to be sanctified. She wasn't going to be rehabilitated. She's still a nasty piece of work that nobody really gets, but she was at least going to be humanized, and that's really all we are obliged to do for those we call our enemies. We are obliged to see them as humans, and then we behave the way we will. We are obliged not to consider them as less than human, because that way, all hell breaks loose.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
What made you think about someone else's side of a story so much? I guess you're in the middle. I'm thinking of you hearing everybody's stories and-
Gregory Maguire:
Well, that's a very good question. I'd say there are about three different ways I could think of to answer it, and I'll try to do it quickly. One is that as a middle child who is the closest mathematically to the most number of kids, you do hear everybody's complaining about everybody else. You end up going back and forth and trying, or John Kerry or whoever it is these days, trying to make peace and trying to understand people's points of view, and really being able to see things about each other that some of the kids on the more extreme margins of the family couldn't see about their older siblings because you're just closer in development to all of them. I'm not the first person to say the middle child in a family very often is the linchpin for the sibling group well into adult life, and I think I am, whether I like it or not, or at least I'm one of them.
The second thing is, without sounding prosaic about it, I was raised very deeply Catholic, and the law of charity, and the law of patience, and the laws of turning the other cheek, and do unto others as you would have them do unto you really were bedrock for me. Probably, I'm a naturally sympathetic soul, but I think the position in the family aggravated by deep cultural training about the importance of charity, it was such that it made me sympathetic, or maybe at least try to be sympathetic to people whose points of view or whose behavior I couldn't necessarily get.
But the third thing, and not to be coy about it, is I ended up by the end, well, I guess now I realize it was sort of toward the end of high school, I began to question whether I was gay or not, and that certainly positions oneself on the margins of the dance floor, especially in the early '70s, mid-'70s. It wasn't the age, I wasn't the person, it wasn't the culture where you took your cues from RuPaul and went out loud and proud into middle school cafeteria. You hung back, you watched, you didn't know what you were thinking or feeling. You just knew that to think and to feel and to notice what you were feeling was the important first step, and you could figure out what it meant later.
I think being gay is not an insignificant part of being an artist. Certainly isn't essential, Lord knows, but maybe it helps, maybe it helps, because you grow up in childhood thinking, "Why do I feel like everybody else has got the answer to a question I haven't even yet been able to formulate in my own head?" And for some people who are a little clueless, the way I was, it can take some time before one can pose oneself that question, or one has the courage to pose oneself that question. And in a very straight-laced Catholic household, took a lot of courage to say to myself, "Well, maybe this is your reality, big boy. Deal with that."
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Actually. Can we talk a little bit more about your relationship with your father? I know it was very complex.
Gregory Maguire:
Growing up, it was no secret to me and to my siblings and even to my second mother that my dad had a hard time with me. Just my very presence, I think, irritated him, because it reminded him of his loss, and probably because I made a special effort to be, well, not to be unmanly, but to be manly in a different way, that I didn't mind expressing my emotions and I didn't mind being flighty and traveling and talking about things that were not the game, the Sunday game. And I liked hanging out with boys and girls. I liked singing. I liked being in plays, lots of stuff I liked that he never forbade, but he kind of would roll his eyes at, and I just thought, "Well, he's never going to like me, and he's a little harder on me than my siblings."
And most of my siblings agreed with me and agree with me still. He was harder on me. I have long ago forgiven him because he couldn't help it. He was emotionally stunted as so many Irish American men from that decade were and remain. But he did the best he could. But when he died about almost 30 years ago, and my second mother died 12 years ago, when she died, I inherited the family files, and I found the letters from the 1950s that he wrote to his mother in Brooklyn, and I saw that he'd written that people were imploring him to separate the children, to break up the family, to let me get adopted from the orphanage, and he would write and say, "Maybe I'll have to do that eventually, but not yet. I still harbor hope that I can keep this family together," and that was news to me 12 years ago, and 12 years ago I was 58.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah. God, so much therapy that you could have just saved on.
Gregory Maguire:
Absolutely. Absolutely.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Wow. What a paradigm shift.
Gregory Maguire:
Oh, what a paradigm shift. Luckily, because I am I think largely of a generous nature, I had long ago forgiven him. I wouldn't have wanted to be born into his situation or deal with who he had to be or have that situation [inaudible 00:30:25].
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
It's sort of your specialty, Gregory. It's understanding the anti-heroes.
Gregory Maguire:
Yeah, yeah. Well, I didn't like him much in high school or college, but as soon as I got out of the house, I began to be able to tolerate him a little better. And then I went and I adopted three children of my own. My husband and I took three children from overseas, all of whom were infants, and all of whom are now in their mid-20s, and we raised them. And I did that partly because I wanted children, and partly because it was legal to do by the time I got around to it, but I did it in part as a "Thank you," a moral "Thank you," a moral settling of debts to my second mother who had raised four children of her best friend, and also I did it in part, I realized only very recently, because one of the things that happened when I was born is that my three older brothers and sisters lost their mother.
Now, I always was thought about the curse for my father having lost his beloved wife, but my father was in his late 30s. He was a man, you have a pregnant wife, you know that things can go wrong.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
That's right.
Gregory Maguire:
Little children don't know that. Little children saw their mother leave and I arrived, and they certainly didn't do a moral accounting with a scratch pad and an abacus to blame me for it, but it was nonetheless the reality. I only realized this in the last year or so, thanks to my journal, that what I did was when I was born, my brothers, John and Michael, and my sister, Rachel, all were deprived of their mother who had raised them and lived with them since they were born. And what did I do? I adopted two boys and a girl who had no mother, and I raised-
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Wow. Wow.
Gregory Maguire:
It's another moral accounting, a moral redressing, a way of making myself feel good about myself. But adopting these children has been more important to me than having a 40-year career as a writer, or having written Wicked, which is kind of an enterprise and a universe unto itself. Those are all fun and great. I'm proud of them and happy of them, but having children and raising them, that's my achievement in my life.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
When it was done, she realized she had actually said very little about who Papa was to them in this book she wrote. But what was there to say? Only this: papa was nice. He liked carrots, he was average size for a rabbit, his looks were ordinary, and his habits mild. He was more than good enough. He loved his family. So this is the story she wrote. She has tried to leave out the boring parts. She hopes you like it. It is almost all true. She's called it after her own self, which she knows is a bit stuck up, but it's the only title she could think of right now. It's her first try. Cress Watercress by Papa's daughter. Cress Watercress, the end, but not the final drainpipe.
Okay, y'all. It's my turn to read a passage. That was from Gregory's 2022 Children's book, Cress Watercress. It's a tearful ending to a bittersweet story which explores the disappearance of a young rabbit's father and concludes with him never being found. Gregory's work, despite fantastic and magical settings, is deeply rooted in the human experience of the real world, with intrinsic empathy and gut-punching honesty. But the real world is not always forgiving. Stories don't always have fairy tale happy endings. I read this passage aloud for Gregory, and asked him why he felt it was important to write these difficult stories even for young readers.
Gregory Maguire:
Well, thank you for reading that out loud. I am really ashamed to say my eyes almost began to water.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
It's so beautiful.
Gregory Maguire:
When you read her description of herself, of her dad, because when we're little and we don't have basis of comparison, everybody looks normal. My dad was average. He was a dad, he was my dad. He's what I have as a ruler, as a yardstick, as a metric. That's what we all feel when we're young. Cress Watercress was written in part because I thought to myself about a certain young person I know, not in this household, who was having some troubles in middle school and high school, and I thought, years ago, I might have gotten a book at the library or the bookstore and said, "Here, read this," with the hope that this book might've provided some comfort or even some counsel.
But few people are reading in the same way that they were when I was a child or even 25 years ago, let's say, and people get their inoculations of story in grade school, and pretty much it stops when you get to middle school. Maybe you have reading classes or English classes, but the inoculation of what you can learn and derive from story is done by the time you're about 11 or 12, I think, in contemporary culture. So I started thinking, why can't the things that we hope YA stories will give to children about perseverance and about the reality of sadness, that everything is not a happy ending. What's real is that we learn how to live with our own sorrow. That's what's real. But most books for children under the age of 12 don't say that. They make endings more or less happy. You have to wait until middle school to get your dystopian fiction, your Hunger Games, children eating children, whatever.
And I thought, if there's one more children's book I have in me, I want to write a children's book that will supply, in a safe, tolerable, and even funny way, the idea to children that everything not turning out right is actually called life, and I didn't want to hide it from them. And then I thought, what's the most ridiculous way to try to do this? In a story with fuzzy animals.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Remember earlier in this episode when Gregory teased that his reading challenge would be about arresting strangeness? Well, now is the time to expand on that, starting with Gregory reminding us that it was not his term, but one borrowed from a Tolkien essay titled On Fairy Stories.
Gregory Maguire:
He was writing about how fairy tales are different from other kinds of storytelling, and what they provide, what kind of truth they provide that is other than the kinds of truths that other kinds of literature provide, the quality of arresting strangeness. I love this. I think I preferred, as a child, to read fantasy because that quality of arresting strangeness was the scent of cooking in the next room. It was the sound of a baby being sunk to sleep 400 years ago. It was something that pulled me forward into the pages, narrative propulsion, the arresting strangeness. And so I came up with a list of 10 books that satisfied that criterion for me. Most of them come from my childhood, but not all. I've arranged the list according more or less to the age of the audience.
Father Fox's Penny Rhymes by Clyde and Wendy Watson is a modern compilation of invented nursery rhymes like Mother Goose, but they're all set in a community of foxes in a large family with 14 or 16 or 18 Fox children. And they are silly, there's two or three rhymes per page, just like the pages of a Mother Goose. But the pictures are so endearing, and the rollick and the rhythm of the rhymes is so compulsive that the child on your lap feels like they belong to Father Fox's household, which is what they should.
The Amazing Bone by the amazing William Stag, written and illustrated by the New Yorker cover artist and cartoonist. Charlotte's Web by E.B. White. Nothing to say about that, except as Fern looks at the world of animals and the world of spiders, so do we look at our own world, and we can't tell whether it's magic or miracle, and we don't need to tell. But we read the book and we realize it's either one or the other, or it's both.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
You can find Gregory's full list at the readingculturepod.com, along with reading challenges from all of our past guests, including folks like Kate DiCamillo, LeUyen Pham, and Nicola Yoon. This episode's featured librarian is Lauren Mobley, a middle school librarian in Atlanta, Georgia. She told us about a fun reading program she set up at her school inspired by a hit reality TV show.
Lauren Mobley:
Another program that we did recently, and I try to do it twice a year, is The Masked Reader,
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Ooh.
Lauren Mobley:
... you know, like The Masked Singer?
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah, yeah.
Lauren Mobley:
So I'll find teachers and I'll get on social media and give them a face filter, so like a tiger, a hot wing, a jug of water, you know, anything, right? Elsa, just funny stuff, and they'll read the first page of a book like a minute long. They put them into a compilation video and then we do our live quizzes where the kids will guess who is reading. So it's like The Masked Singer, but The Masked Reader, and that gets the whole school like, "It was [inaudible 00:40:28] the whole time."
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Okay, though, that's the best. I said nailed it, but that is a brilliant idea. You just came up with that?
Lauren Mobley:
I saw someone do it on Twitter, and I think that they did it maybe every week. They had a different teacher get on,
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Oh, wow.
Lauren Mobley:
... and do it. I was like, "I'm going to make it a game show one time."
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah. She also told us about her own podcast, which I recommend checking out.
Lauren Mobley:
I have my own podcast for school librarians. It's called Library on Lock, LOL, and it's really fun and light. I don't do much editing. Me and some cool librarians from across the country get on and just talk about what amazing things they're doing in their schools. I've had some incredible guests to talk about their programming ideas, getting involved in the library thing, everything from crafting to connecting with the public library, enhancing read-alouds, and I even had my first author, Jerry Craft, on for a split second to recap the Alabama School Library Association conference. I think it is so much fun. Listeners enjoy how relaxed it is, and it'll keep you laughing while learning. You can listen wherever you tune in to podcasts.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
This has been The Reading Culture, and you've been listening to our conversation with Gregory McGuire. Again, I'm your host, Jordan Lloyd Bookie, and currently, I'm reading Come and Get It by Kylie Reid and Pumpkin by Julie Murphy. If you enjoy today's episode, please show some love and give us a five-star review. It just takes a second and it really helps. To learn more about how you can help grow your community's reading culture, you can check out all of our resources at beanstack.com, and remember to sign up for my newsletter at thereadingculturepod.com/newsletter for special offers and bonus behind-the-scenes content. This episode was produced by Jackie Lamport and Lower Street Media, and script-edited by Josiah Lamberto Eakin. Thanks for joining, and keep reading.
That's really all we are obliged to do for those we call our enemies. We are obliged to see them as humans, and then we behave the way we will. We are obliged not to consider them as less than human, because that way, all hell breaks loose.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Think of your feelings toward your worst enemy. Now, try to flip those feelings. Can you instead sympathize with your villain? Just for a second, can you imagine them as the hero? Gregory Maguire is famous for doing just that, for humanizing his characters, applying empathy where others see evil. But empathy starts with paying attention. That's a skill Gregory picked up as an avid reader in his youth.
Gregory Maguire:
I'm not just transfixed by the story and by the mood. I'm learning about alertness, and that's why I might say that's part of where my career as a writer began, because to be a writer and to want to communicate what you are alert to means you have to be alert first.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Gregory is the hero of the anti-heroes. He's best known for his reimagining of classic fairy tale characters and novels such as Wicked, Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, and Mirror, Mirror. He has also authored numerous children's books, including The Dream Stealer, his series, the Hamlet Chronicles, and most recently, Cress Watercress. In this episode, he tells us about his truly Dickensian childhood and how his relationship with his father and siblings impacted his sense of empathy. We discussed the allure of literary worlds and how his experiences getting lost in them as a kid inspired him to be a writer, along with why he believes in his children's stories not always getting a happily ever after, and he'll tell us which classic children's literature character spurred his interest in journaling, a practice he's been at for nearly 60 years, and he has the receipts. Wait until you hear that story.
My name is Jordan Lloyd Bookey, and this is The Reading Culture, a show where we speak with authors and illustrators about ways to build a stronger culture of reading in our communities. We dive into their personal experiences, their inspirations, and why their stories and ideas motivate kids to read more. Make sure to check us out on Instagram for giveaways at the reading culture Pod, and you can subscribe to our newsletter at the readingculturepod.com/newsletter. All right, on to the show.
I read that you were at someplace, that you were weeding out your books. How's that going for you?
Gregory Maguire:
Oh, I have been weeding out my books. I never did a headcount of books, but I wouldn't be surprised if there are 10 to 15,000 books in the several homes that I own. But I've been collecting books since the first book I bought at a library book sale for 25 cents, and that was 60 years ago or so. But what you realize is if you clear away the arcana and the ephemera in the career of somebody whose main work you've really liked, and what you leave behind is the main work that you really liked, it actually looks better than it used to. It looks more interesting.
So my rule of thumb right now is let's say the doctor says "You have four years left to live," and I look and think, "Okay, I'm going to start rereading stuff that I love and I'm not going to go for this, the second-rate stuff, which was interesting to me when I was more of a student or more of an obsessive. I'm going to go back to The Waves and Passage to India and War and Peace. I'm going to go to the big guns to get one last bite of it," and that actually feels refreshing.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
First of all, I like the fact that if you're like you have four years to live, you're just thinking about what are the books I'm going to reread? [inaudible 00:03:54].
Gregory Maguire:
Yeah.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
That tracks. And not like, where am I going? What am I doing?
Gregory Maguire:
It's true. It's true. I have had lovely life of travel and living abroad, and I've done a lot of it. To travel in one's mind is I think a perk and a reward of old age. When your limbs become less reliable, with luck, your mind stays supple and can carry you places in the same way that it did when you were six and eight and ten and first learning to read and realizing that what reading was was travel of the mind. That's what reading is. It's travel of the mind.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
I love that. We'll start now at the beginning of the time when you were younger. Do you want to sort of share about your early life?
Gregory Maguire:
I was born in 1954, and about a week after I was born, my mother died from sepsis following complications resulting to my birth. She left behind four children and an ill and out-of-work husband. My father rattled out of his mind with grief, surprise, and a sense of hopelessness about how to walk forward from one day to the next and from one year to the next, first parceled his four children out to the sisters of my birth mother, and there I stayed at an aunt's house for six or nine months. But eventually, when she became pregnant, she said to my father, "Look Jack, you either have to let me adopt him or take him back, because I'm not going to be able to hang onto him for two or three years and then surrender him. I don't have that in me to do that. It will break my heart. So do something now. Figure it out."
So he put me in a children's home, an orphanage, from which infants came and went, were cared for by nurses and nuns, and left me there until he remarried. The person he remarried, my stepmother, we called her my second mother, was my birth mother's best friend from fourth grade. So in the long span of years, she had known my birth mother longer than my father ever did. They went on to collect the children from various outposts to pull us together as a family, and to have three children of their own, my half brothers and sisters. So on the surface of it, I was a Von Trapp family child. There were seven of us. We didn't have a schloss in the Tyrolean Alps. We were actually lower middle class, and a bit stretched for funds.
Neither of my birth parents went to college, but my father was very smart, an autodidact, and my second mother had gone and gotten several degrees. So by hook and by crook, by cunning and by care, they managed to cobble together a life for their family of nine and raise us on very little money and a lot of attention to literacy, because they both believed that being able to read and to some extent being able to write were the ways out of the Irish Catholic ghetto in which we were living, and the ways forward, and the ways to a sense of understanding of the world engagement in it and developing a love for it.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Why do you think they knew that or thought that, what we know?
Gregory Maguire:
One of the things that attracted all three of them to one another is that they were all smart and loved word games and loved storytelling, loved films. My father was a writer, and he became, after my birth mother died, he became a journalist and began to pull his life together and actually had a profile in the Albany, New York area as a columnist, a journalist, a human interest writer, a humorist, eventually a speech writer for the New York State Health Commissioner in Albany, New York. And my second mother had got English degrees and written a dissertation on Yates.
My birth mother just read a lot because that was all that was allowed her. They had really no money. It's hard to say which one was poorer than the other, but her mother had died when she was a child, and her Greek immigrant father raised all seven of the children by himself, speaking very little English. So the only way up was the library, and if you find yourself walking on the sidewalk with people who are also going to the library, you become friends with them, and that's actually the glue that tied them together into a knot of friendship and then gave us a very strong net from which to bounce into our own lives.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Something you'll have noticed at this point, and honestly, if you've heard any interview ever with Gregory, is that his vocabulary is seriously massive. There are few people walking around that have a precise word for absolutely everything easily at their disposal, and Gregory is one of those people. As it turns out, it runs in the family.
Gregory Maguire:
We grew up in a house where the dictionary lived on the same shelf in the kitchen as the cookbooks, because we were referring to it at least once a meal. Something would come up and my mother would say, is that from the Latin or the Greek? And my father, who had not studied Latin or Greek, nonetheless loved etymology and passionately, they would go scraping through the pages to find the answer to a question of the root of a certain English word and share it with us. And all of my brothers and sisters and I are etymologists and fetishists for different dictionaries. We get together at Thanksgiving and... Some families get together and talk about the game or they argue about politics. We get together and we talk about the proper use of the [inaudible 00:10:01] subjunctive.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
A hoot. You were like a precocious reader. You were reading really early, which was not the norm, really, that now these kids are reading and they're taught to read in kindergarten.
Gregory Maguire:
So yes, I was an early reader. Now, because we didn't have much in the way of money and because my parents were dubious about the blandishments of contemporary culture, especially television, which was flooding black-and-white-ly into everything in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah. TV dinner age.
Gregory Maguire:
Absolutely. Well almost our only license was the library card, and my mother would give us permission to go to the library almost whenever we wanted. It was a privilege. To read was a privilege. Not to be able to read was a punishment. It wasn't like, "Oh, phew, I'm done with my reading." We could go to bed. We had set bedtimes. And if we were reading, we could leave the light on an extra half hour. So we all read, obsessively, all the time. And we also read as soon as the lights went off, because the whole light was left on. We all slid to the bottom of her beds and kept reading in the hall light until at 11 o'clock my mother would turn the hall light off. We thought we were getting away with something. She raised seven readers.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah. Oh god. And do you remember the books of your childhood that you really loved? What were some of those?
Gregory Maguire:
Oh, absolutely. I do not remember much by way of picture books, although I must've had access to them, but because I could read for myself pretty early, I had those initial experiences of being able to open a book. The cover of a book with print in it as opposed to mostly pictures is like a garden gate. To open it and to walk through the cover and get to the first page and know your job is to untangle the black and white overgrowth on the page and figure out what's the secret of this particular garden. That was magical to me, and I could feel it from the time I was about six and a half or seven, and I began reading easy novels about then. I was reading easy novels in second grade. And some novels that weren't that easy, but I was just too compelled by the beautiful pictures on the cover or by the beautiful illustrations in the pages.
It was late afternoon before they finished the Christmas tree, and it was growing dark. They lit the old red Chinese lantern and many candles so that they could see to work. There were no glaring electric bulbs on this tree. Mrs. Oldknow had boxes of colored glass ornaments, each wrapped separately in tissue paper and put carefully away from year to year. Some were very old and precious indeed. Of course the most beautiful star was fixed at the very top, each glass treasure as light as an eggshell and as brittle, was hung on a loop of black cotton that had to be coaxed over the prickly fingers of the tree. They sat down together to look at their work. Tolly thought it so beautiful he could say nothing. He could hardly believe his eyes.
As they rested there, tired and dreamy and content, he thought he heard the rocking horse gently moving. But the sound came from Mrs. Oldknow's room, which opened out of the music room. A woman's voice began to sing very softly, a cradle song that Tolly had learned and dearly loved. (singing). "Who is it?" he whispered? It's the grandmother rocking the cradle," said Mrs. Oldknow, and her eyes were full of tears. "Why are you crying, granny? It's lovely." "It is lovely. Only it is such a long time ago. I don't know why that should be sad, but it sometimes seems so."
The singing began again. "Granny," whispered Tolly again, with his arm through hers. "Whose cradle is it? Linnet is as big as I am." "My darling, this voice is much older than that. I hardly know whose it is. I heard it once before, on Christmas." It was queer to hear the baby's sleepy whimper, only in the next room now, and so long ago. "Come we'll sing it too," said Mrs. Oldknow, going to the spinet. She played, but it was Tolly who sang alone, while 400 years ago, a baby went to sleep.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Published in 1954 The Children of Green Knowe would be the first in a series of six children's novels by Lucy M. Boston. The series is set in a historical British manor based on the author's own, and features a young boy who moves into it with his grandmother. The boy, Toseland, soon learns that the house is peacefully haunted by all of the souls that had lived there before them. This book marked one of Gregory's earliest encounters with the transformative influence of literary atmosphere. What he means by that, of course, is the ethereal ambiance that books can create, this secondary place inside, but outside our own world that exists solely to get lost in. Discovering this feeling through books like The Children of Green Knowe is what Gregory credits as sparking his interest in writing.
Gregory Maguire:
I was seven reading this, and learning what words could do.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yes, how they can just take you someplace. I mean, you're in it, right? You're there.
Gregory Maguire:
Absolutely in it. I didn't know that that was a famous old song, and I didn't know the melody at the time, but I sure got that something extraordinary was happening and they were both aware of it. I remember going to my mother and saying, "Well, I'm reading this book," and she said, "I know. I thought that was a little grownup for you. How are you finding it?" And I said, "I don't know if it's scary or not. I think it might be a ghost story." And she said, "Well, keep reading till you find out, and when it gets scary, put it down, and if it doesn't get scary, keep reading." It never got scary, but what it became was more and more saturated with a sense of place, a sense of time, and a sense of how this lonely child lives with his feelings in an exotic and a welcoming locale.
I think I became a writer partly because of my parents and the atmosphere of interest and words and stories that they conveyed upon all of their children, but I also became a writer because I had exposure to stunning writing at an early age. Now, why do we read? Why do we read children's books? Why do we give them to children and hope that they will be able to crack their marrow and suck the protein out of the language and the story? We give it to them so that they can be alert to the possibilities of the world. A passage like this said to me, "This child, Tolly, and this old grandmother, are alert to possibilities." And I'm not just transfixed by the story and by the mood. I'm learning about alertness. That's what I got from that book, and that's why I might say that's part of where my career as a writer began, because to be a writer and to want to communicate what you are alert to means you have to be alert first.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah. That's so interesting. It's like your books all have this quality, this unfolding that is really akin to a child basically discovering their world, and I think this story feels like it really... Like it fits as part of your origin.
Gregory Maguire:
It does, and lots of stories that I liked early on were stories in which the mother was not there. Nothing is ever said about Tolly's mother. Nothing is said about why he's there, actually, with his grandmother. This is just where he is now, and she's taking care of him, and this is a situation that children find themselves in without even knowing the questions to ask in an adversarial way to the people who are driving them to the new place they're being dumped. It's just "This is where you are now," and we're all kind of dumped in our own lives.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah. Yeah.
Gregory Maguire:
Some of us more unceremoniously than others. But the other kinds of stories that I also loved at the same time that I began to love literary fantasy were the fairy tales, because virtually every fairy tale begins with once upon a time there was a child whose mother died in childbirth. The child had to be raised by somebody who either didn't care for them or wasn't paying attention or had to come up against all kinds of thorns and umbrages that were going to interfere with healthy maturation. And I love those too. I think one of the reasons I write, in some ways, you could say, that I rewrite fairy tales for adults is that that story is haunting to me because it's the story of all children, how we pace our way along the unknown path, trying to find a break in the woods and a little light and a little horizon toward which to aim.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Even as a child. Gregory had an extraordinary power of observation and character study. It reminded me immediately of last week's episode with Nina LaCour, who described a similarly acute sense of focus, though her childhood was very different from Gregory's. I wondered if Gregory just kept all those keen and penetrating thoughts in his mind palace, or did he pause to put them down in a journal? When I asked him about it, he jumped ahead a bit and excitedly told us about one of the books from his reading challenge, which you'll hear about at the end of the episode.
Gregory Maguire:
In the list of 10 books under the rubric of arresting strangeness, there are nine books that you might qualify as fantasies, but there's one book that is not and that is the last one. That book is called Harriet the Spy.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Oh, I loved Harriet the Spy.
Gregory Maguire:
Harriet the Spy is of course about the famous sixth grade girl in prosperous household in a better-heeled neighborhood in New York City who keeps a journal, spies on everyone, and writes it down and then gets in trouble for being honest about her apprehensions of things. So you asked, did I keep a journal? As soon as I read Harriet the Spy, I started keeping a journal, and that was 57 years ago, and I still have it. I still keep it.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
You've kept a journal for 57 years?
Gregory Maguire:
I've kept a journal for-
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Or you have your journal from 57 years ago?
Gregory Maguire:
... 57 years. I have all of them.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Like handwritten journals?
Gregory Maguire:
57 notebooks are at the back of this room, in boxes. I have transcribed them all too, over 2 million words.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Oh my God.
Gregory Maguire:
And about 12 years ago, when my second mother died, I finally converted to keeping a journal on a computer instead of by hand, because I was traveling back and forth and it was just easier. When I went through that exercise and read, especially my high school and early post-college journals, I've realized I had been serving as my own propagandist and retelling my story incorrectly to make myself look better.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Should anyone read this? Austerity, you're like...
Gregory Maguire:
I didn't even know it. I was like, "Oh my gosh. I knew that fact about myself when I was a junior in high school?" I always tell people I didn't figure that out until I was a senior in college, and I guess... A little bit of revisionary history going on here. It is a wonderful practice. Harriet taught me how to be a writer. I knew a lot of the tricks of the trade by watching my father, my mother, my brothers and sisters, and most of the nuns and teachers I had, but Harriet was a child writer. So I began my apprenticeship with Harriet the Spy as my mentor when I was about sixth grade, and I've really never stopped. It's served me very well.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Honest observation is a wonderful skill for an apprentice writer, but you might recall that Gregory's mentor, Harriet, also spends most of her book as a pretty merciless judge of the people in her circle, and cutting depictions of them eventually land her in deep trouble. Gregory, in contrast, has built entire books around compassionate, empathetic portrayals of characters normally written off as evil, most famously, of course, the Wicked Witch of the West.
Gregory Maguire:
I don't have many regrets in life, but one regret I have is that Margaret Hamilton didn't live long enough to see the book Wicked, and to see that the character she played was actually going... She wasn't going to be sanctified. She wasn't going to be rehabilitated. She's still a nasty piece of work that nobody really gets, but she was at least going to be humanized, and that's really all we are obliged to do for those we call our enemies. We are obliged to see them as humans, and then we behave the way we will. We are obliged not to consider them as less than human, because that way, all hell breaks loose.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
What made you think about someone else's side of a story so much? I guess you're in the middle. I'm thinking of you hearing everybody's stories and-
Gregory Maguire:
Well, that's a very good question. I'd say there are about three different ways I could think of to answer it, and I'll try to do it quickly. One is that as a middle child who is the closest mathematically to the most number of kids, you do hear everybody's complaining about everybody else. You end up going back and forth and trying, or John Kerry or whoever it is these days, trying to make peace and trying to understand people's points of view, and really being able to see things about each other that some of the kids on the more extreme margins of the family couldn't see about their older siblings because you're just closer in development to all of them. I'm not the first person to say the middle child in a family very often is the linchpin for the sibling group well into adult life, and I think I am, whether I like it or not, or at least I'm one of them.
The second thing is, without sounding prosaic about it, I was raised very deeply Catholic, and the law of charity, and the law of patience, and the laws of turning the other cheek, and do unto others as you would have them do unto you really were bedrock for me. Probably, I'm a naturally sympathetic soul, but I think the position in the family aggravated by deep cultural training about the importance of charity, it was such that it made me sympathetic, or maybe at least try to be sympathetic to people whose points of view or whose behavior I couldn't necessarily get.
But the third thing, and not to be coy about it, is I ended up by the end, well, I guess now I realize it was sort of toward the end of high school, I began to question whether I was gay or not, and that certainly positions oneself on the margins of the dance floor, especially in the early '70s, mid-'70s. It wasn't the age, I wasn't the person, it wasn't the culture where you took your cues from RuPaul and went out loud and proud into middle school cafeteria. You hung back, you watched, you didn't know what you were thinking or feeling. You just knew that to think and to feel and to notice what you were feeling was the important first step, and you could figure out what it meant later.
I think being gay is not an insignificant part of being an artist. Certainly isn't essential, Lord knows, but maybe it helps, maybe it helps, because you grow up in childhood thinking, "Why do I feel like everybody else has got the answer to a question I haven't even yet been able to formulate in my own head?" And for some people who are a little clueless, the way I was, it can take some time before one can pose oneself that question, or one has the courage to pose oneself that question. And in a very straight-laced Catholic household, took a lot of courage to say to myself, "Well, maybe this is your reality, big boy. Deal with that."
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Actually. Can we talk a little bit more about your relationship with your father? I know it was very complex.
Gregory Maguire:
Growing up, it was no secret to me and to my siblings and even to my second mother that my dad had a hard time with me. Just my very presence, I think, irritated him, because it reminded him of his loss, and probably because I made a special effort to be, well, not to be unmanly, but to be manly in a different way, that I didn't mind expressing my emotions and I didn't mind being flighty and traveling and talking about things that were not the game, the Sunday game. And I liked hanging out with boys and girls. I liked singing. I liked being in plays, lots of stuff I liked that he never forbade, but he kind of would roll his eyes at, and I just thought, "Well, he's never going to like me, and he's a little harder on me than my siblings."
And most of my siblings agreed with me and agree with me still. He was harder on me. I have long ago forgiven him because he couldn't help it. He was emotionally stunted as so many Irish American men from that decade were and remain. But he did the best he could. But when he died about almost 30 years ago, and my second mother died 12 years ago, when she died, I inherited the family files, and I found the letters from the 1950s that he wrote to his mother in Brooklyn, and I saw that he'd written that people were imploring him to separate the children, to break up the family, to let me get adopted from the orphanage, and he would write and say, "Maybe I'll have to do that eventually, but not yet. I still harbor hope that I can keep this family together," and that was news to me 12 years ago, and 12 years ago I was 58.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah. God, so much therapy that you could have just saved on.
Gregory Maguire:
Absolutely. Absolutely.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Wow. What a paradigm shift.
Gregory Maguire:
Oh, what a paradigm shift. Luckily, because I am I think largely of a generous nature, I had long ago forgiven him. I wouldn't have wanted to be born into his situation or deal with who he had to be or have that situation [inaudible 00:30:25].
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
It's sort of your specialty, Gregory. It's understanding the anti-heroes.
Gregory Maguire:
Yeah, yeah. Well, I didn't like him much in high school or college, but as soon as I got out of the house, I began to be able to tolerate him a little better. And then I went and I adopted three children of my own. My husband and I took three children from overseas, all of whom were infants, and all of whom are now in their mid-20s, and we raised them. And I did that partly because I wanted children, and partly because it was legal to do by the time I got around to it, but I did it in part as a "Thank you," a moral "Thank you," a moral settling of debts to my second mother who had raised four children of her best friend, and also I did it in part, I realized only very recently, because one of the things that happened when I was born is that my three older brothers and sisters lost their mother.
Now, I always was thought about the curse for my father having lost his beloved wife, but my father was in his late 30s. He was a man, you have a pregnant wife, you know that things can go wrong.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
That's right.
Gregory Maguire:
Little children don't know that. Little children saw their mother leave and I arrived, and they certainly didn't do a moral accounting with a scratch pad and an abacus to blame me for it, but it was nonetheless the reality. I only realized this in the last year or so, thanks to my journal, that what I did was when I was born, my brothers, John and Michael, and my sister, Rachel, all were deprived of their mother who had raised them and lived with them since they were born. And what did I do? I adopted two boys and a girl who had no mother, and I raised-
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Wow. Wow.
Gregory Maguire:
It's another moral accounting, a moral redressing, a way of making myself feel good about myself. But adopting these children has been more important to me than having a 40-year career as a writer, or having written Wicked, which is kind of an enterprise and a universe unto itself. Those are all fun and great. I'm proud of them and happy of them, but having children and raising them, that's my achievement in my life.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
When it was done, she realized she had actually said very little about who Papa was to them in this book she wrote. But what was there to say? Only this: papa was nice. He liked carrots, he was average size for a rabbit, his looks were ordinary, and his habits mild. He was more than good enough. He loved his family. So this is the story she wrote. She has tried to leave out the boring parts. She hopes you like it. It is almost all true. She's called it after her own self, which she knows is a bit stuck up, but it's the only title she could think of right now. It's her first try. Cress Watercress by Papa's daughter. Cress Watercress, the end, but not the final drainpipe.
Okay, y'all. It's my turn to read a passage. That was from Gregory's 2022 Children's book, Cress Watercress. It's a tearful ending to a bittersweet story which explores the disappearance of a young rabbit's father and concludes with him never being found. Gregory's work, despite fantastic and magical settings, is deeply rooted in the human experience of the real world, with intrinsic empathy and gut-punching honesty. But the real world is not always forgiving. Stories don't always have fairy tale happy endings. I read this passage aloud for Gregory, and asked him why he felt it was important to write these difficult stories even for young readers.
Gregory Maguire:
Well, thank you for reading that out loud. I am really ashamed to say my eyes almost began to water.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
It's so beautiful.
Gregory Maguire:
When you read her description of herself, of her dad, because when we're little and we don't have basis of comparison, everybody looks normal. My dad was average. He was a dad, he was my dad. He's what I have as a ruler, as a yardstick, as a metric. That's what we all feel when we're young. Cress Watercress was written in part because I thought to myself about a certain young person I know, not in this household, who was having some troubles in middle school and high school, and I thought, years ago, I might have gotten a book at the library or the bookstore and said, "Here, read this," with the hope that this book might've provided some comfort or even some counsel.
But few people are reading in the same way that they were when I was a child or even 25 years ago, let's say, and people get their inoculations of story in grade school, and pretty much it stops when you get to middle school. Maybe you have reading classes or English classes, but the inoculation of what you can learn and derive from story is done by the time you're about 11 or 12, I think, in contemporary culture. So I started thinking, why can't the things that we hope YA stories will give to children about perseverance and about the reality of sadness, that everything is not a happy ending. What's real is that we learn how to live with our own sorrow. That's what's real. But most books for children under the age of 12 don't say that. They make endings more or less happy. You have to wait until middle school to get your dystopian fiction, your Hunger Games, children eating children, whatever.
And I thought, if there's one more children's book I have in me, I want to write a children's book that will supply, in a safe, tolerable, and even funny way, the idea to children that everything not turning out right is actually called life, and I didn't want to hide it from them. And then I thought, what's the most ridiculous way to try to do this? In a story with fuzzy animals.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Remember earlier in this episode when Gregory teased that his reading challenge would be about arresting strangeness? Well, now is the time to expand on that, starting with Gregory reminding us that it was not his term, but one borrowed from a Tolkien essay titled On Fairy Stories.
Gregory Maguire:
He was writing about how fairy tales are different from other kinds of storytelling, and what they provide, what kind of truth they provide that is other than the kinds of truths that other kinds of literature provide, the quality of arresting strangeness. I love this. I think I preferred, as a child, to read fantasy because that quality of arresting strangeness was the scent of cooking in the next room. It was the sound of a baby being sunk to sleep 400 years ago. It was something that pulled me forward into the pages, narrative propulsion, the arresting strangeness. And so I came up with a list of 10 books that satisfied that criterion for me. Most of them come from my childhood, but not all. I've arranged the list according more or less to the age of the audience.
Father Fox's Penny Rhymes by Clyde and Wendy Watson is a modern compilation of invented nursery rhymes like Mother Goose, but they're all set in a community of foxes in a large family with 14 or 16 or 18 Fox children. And they are silly, there's two or three rhymes per page, just like the pages of a Mother Goose. But the pictures are so endearing, and the rollick and the rhythm of the rhymes is so compulsive that the child on your lap feels like they belong to Father Fox's household, which is what they should.
The Amazing Bone by the amazing William Stag, written and illustrated by the New Yorker cover artist and cartoonist. Charlotte's Web by E.B. White. Nothing to say about that, except as Fern looks at the world of animals and the world of spiders, so do we look at our own world, and we can't tell whether it's magic or miracle, and we don't need to tell. But we read the book and we realize it's either one or the other, or it's both.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
You can find Gregory's full list at the readingculturepod.com, along with reading challenges from all of our past guests, including folks like Kate DiCamillo, LeUyen Pham, and Nicola Yoon. This episode's featured librarian is Lauren Mobley, a middle school librarian in Atlanta, Georgia. She told us about a fun reading program she set up at her school inspired by a hit reality TV show.
Lauren Mobley:
Another program that we did recently, and I try to do it twice a year, is The Masked Reader,
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Ooh.
Lauren Mobley:
... you know, like The Masked Singer?
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah, yeah.
Lauren Mobley:
So I'll find teachers and I'll get on social media and give them a face filter, so like a tiger, a hot wing, a jug of water, you know, anything, right? Elsa, just funny stuff, and they'll read the first page of a book like a minute long. They put them into a compilation video and then we do our live quizzes where the kids will guess who is reading. So it's like The Masked Singer, but The Masked Reader, and that gets the whole school like, "It was [inaudible 00:40:28] the whole time."
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Okay, though, that's the best. I said nailed it, but that is a brilliant idea. You just came up with that?
Lauren Mobley:
I saw someone do it on Twitter, and I think that they did it maybe every week. They had a different teacher get on,
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Oh, wow.
Lauren Mobley:
... and do it. I was like, "I'm going to make it a game show one time."
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah. She also told us about her own podcast, which I recommend checking out.
Lauren Mobley:
I have my own podcast for school librarians. It's called Library on Lock, LOL, and it's really fun and light. I don't do much editing. Me and some cool librarians from across the country get on and just talk about what amazing things they're doing in their schools. I've had some incredible guests to talk about their programming ideas, getting involved in the library thing, everything from crafting to connecting with the public library, enhancing read-alouds, and I even had my first author, Jerry Craft, on for a split second to recap the Alabama School Library Association conference. I think it is so much fun. Listeners enjoy how relaxed it is, and it'll keep you laughing while learning. You can listen wherever you tune in to podcasts.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
This has been The Reading Culture, and you've been listening to our conversation with Gregory McGuire. Again, I'm your host, Jordan Lloyd Bookie, and currently, I'm reading Come and Get It by Kylie Reid and Pumpkin by Julie Murphy. If you enjoy today's episode, please show some love and give us a five-star review. It just takes a second and it really helps. To learn more about how you can help grow your community's reading culture, you can check out all of our resources at beanstack.com, and remember to sign up for my newsletter at thereadingculturepod.com/newsletter for special offers and bonus behind-the-scenes content. This episode was produced by Jackie Lamport and Lower Street Media, and script-edited by Josiah Lamberto Eakin. Thanks for joining, and keep reading.