The Deep Dark WoodsNYT bestselling author Gregory Maguire talks about the inspiration behind his adaptations and the necessity of fairy tales.
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I said to myself, you know these stories with which you are working, the fairy Tales in particular, There's no way you can ruin them. You are just a writer writing within your particular decades for your particular audience. These stories are eternal. You couldn't wreck it, even if you wanted to. You couldn't abuse it. It is stronger than you. And long after the last copy of any known book of yours is writing in a landfill, the fairy Tales are going to exist. They're going to continue.
I'm Miranda Hawkins. Welcome to the Deep Dark Woods. This is the final interview of this season, and today I speak with New York Times bestselling author Gregory Maguire. He's written several dozen books and including Wicked, which was adapted into a feature length film, Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, and Mirror Mirror. We talked on zoom about everything from journaling to his childhood love of fairy tales, to Harriet the Spy and the challenges of publishing. So I do have to say, first of all, going through and learning a bit about you and everything for this I was like, Oh my goodness, there's so much we have in common. But one of the main things is that I ran across is that you also love Harriet the Spy. Yeah.
I grew up on Harry at the Spy.
I wanted to be a detective growing up, so and like Harry at the Spy, you know, I felt like she'd fit into that. And I remember watching the movie and I wanted to be just like her. And I was listening to an interview you did back in twenty twenty.
It was about how you.
Were like transcribing all your notes that you had had and you were upside think like a million, six hundred thousand words or something.
Absolutely, it's over in the corner of my study and if you can see, there's a huge stack of papers there that my printed life journals. It's three thousand pages single space, I think, or three thousand, five hundred or something.
Oh my goodness.
Okay, so is that transcribing, Like that's all your journals now?
All my journals from when I began them in sixth or the summer machines sixth and seventh grade up until now. For the last ten years, I've been keeping journals on the laptop instead of by hand. But yeah, so I keep doing it. It's one of my life's work, even though nobody will ever see it. It's something I started doing and I can't stop.
Okay, kind of curious as to why, Like, is it just you're like something you want to make sure is like six around or well?
The question of why I'm doing it is answered by the definitely sagacious old Golly, who has told Harriet at one point in that novel that description is good for the soul and clears the mind out like a laxative. And that's how I feel. I feel that I carry around my impressions and my moral conundrums and emotional concerns like heavy baggage. The Latin word for suitcases is impedimenta. And I feel as if I carry around the perceptions of my life and that apprehensions like heavy, heavy impedimenta, filled with lead bars. But if I store those lead bars in the pages of a journal, I can leave them behind and depart the writing room as it were, the writing chamber, the writing moment, with a lighter tread and a more open eye. And that is very useful to a writer. It's very useful to somebody who wants to survive being alive. And so that's why I do it. I really do it as much as a psychological assist as I do for a kind of practice and training for being a writer. So just as I have answered this question in too many words, I write in my journals with too many words, and that's why so long.
Well, I think it's great to be honest.
So and like I also understand the why of like, you know, it makes a soul a little lighter.
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely, Yeah.
So I was going to actually ask if you've used anything in those journals in your writing, you know, But it seems like that is very separate from well.
It is very separate. There are several things that I can say. One is that another way of thinking about journal writing is it's a way of keeping your hand in while you aren't writing fiction. It's a way of keeping your brain supple and your capacity for manipulating language and ideas adroit and full of tensil strength. Because if you play the piano, you need to do hours of scales. Even after you're a master, if you are a runner, Olympic runner, you still have to do warm ups. You still have to do cool downs, and so I think of writing a journal. I think of doing it as kind of warm ups and keeping myself oiled and flexible and ready for when I need to use those skills for a more creative outlet.
That makes absolute sense.
So, you know, I talked about Harriet the Spy, which is one of your favorite books, and you've talked about, like, you know, growing up on the Wizard of Oz and like other books as well.
But you know, we're here to also talk about The Brothers Grim.
So I'm kind of curious, you know when you first ran across those and like, what were some of your favorite stories.
Well, it's a wonderful story. And I have largely gotten tired of talking about myself, although I will do it. You know, me a drink and I'll talk about myself.
Well, I appreciate it.
Like any other human being on the planet. But in fact, the Brothers Grim and the related fairy tales of Parole and the invented literary fairy tales of Anderson and Oscar Wilde, et cetera, had a huge impact in my reading life as a child. Now here's where it comes. The inevitable potted picture of childhood, you know, misery. My family was not wealthy. My birth parents were not educated except in life. Neither of them got beyond high school. But they were self educated and they were very smart autodidas, as you could do in the first half of the twentieth century in a way not so easy to do now. They were not wealthy by any stretch. My mother was a Greek immigrant and my father was an out of work Irish American writer. They had four kids, and when I was born, my mother died in childbirth about seven days later, and at first I was with an aunt, and then I was put in an orphanage. My father remarried, so I had a stepmother. My goodness, I had a birth mother, a godmother, a stepmother, an orphanage, and then I was brought back into the family. I was the youngest of the four, and I had a perfectly happy childhood. But the dramatic tropes around my beginnings are the tropes of fairy tales. The mother dies in childbirth and the child has to make his or her way. Usually it's a her without proper supervision by two parents. Oftentimes the stepmother is wicked. That's how it happens in fairy tales. Now, my stepmother was anything but wicked. Indeed, I used to make a joke that my stepmother and my godmother were the same person. So depending on how I was feeling about her at any given moment, she was either the fairy godmother or the wicked stepmother. But she was never wicked, and she was well educated. She had several degrees. She and my father shared an absolute passion for reading and for the library, and that was one of the few luxuries we had, was the license to read and the permission to visit the library. And I found grim fairy tales. Well, I found other things too. I found animal stories, I found Winnie the Pooh, I found picture books and baseball sports stories and stories about little girls and dancing shoes and everything. But there was something about the fairy tales that seemed to have a slightly brighter luster when they were discovered on the library shelf. They seemed to glow a little bit more. They pulled me toward them. And I was not above reading and rereading things that I loved. I would read things, you know, on a rotation of about every three or four months, sometimes if I really liked it. Is the way people watch their favorite videos over and over again, their favorite movies over and over again. Now that was what I did with books. Fairy tales spoke to me in several ways. One of them is they are so short compared to novels. They're more like picture books in a way. They're really compressed. And they also don't spend any time, or almost no time with description. A ring is a ring. It's not a beautiful, shining ring. It's just a ring. A cloak is a cloak. You don't have to know if it's three inches off the floor, if it's last year's model, or unless it's spurt into the story. Even what is made of a cloak is a cloak. So there are lots of lessons to be learned about how to tell stories, but more so, there are lessons to be learned about how to survive the vicissitudes of life. And that is something that every child needs to know and something that I really wanted to know because I was more up against it, I think, in childhood than I was able to perceive.
Yeah, so it's funny because I feel and I'm curious what your thoughts on this are, but like, do you feel like our initial interactions with the world affect the stories that were drawn.
To the experience of reading definitely affects what the child understands, because what they understand is that books are community objects. Books are a community forum. A picture book, particularly, is designed to be the perfect size to spread across two laps, or to spread across one lap of a child sitting in your own But once you get to be about four and you are beginning, I think to recognize that the understanding of life requires the assemblage of building bricks of apprehension. Then what you apprehend in your driveway or on your grandmother's basement steps, and what you apprehend in the story that is told to you or that you were learning to read for yourself eventually begin to be separate building bricks useful for the same construction of apprehension. You are building yourself the palace or the hovel or the magician's tower from which you will live your life.
Yeah.
So, I also grew up in the library, and fairy toes are always my favorites.
Hence why I think they always will be. I don't know what it is. I just yeah, I love them to death.
But I would leave there with life as many books as I could, and then how.
Many would you take out at a time when you were little fourth grade?
Okay, oh, I think my mom cut me off at like six at a time. Well, that's what it was, just my mom and I so and I was an only child, so I spent most of my days reading like that. I was just engrossed in books. I could read a book a day. So she'd be like, you're only allowed to take this many. We will come back next week or whatever.
I promise you.
And you know, the things I got in trouble for in school was reading under my desk. So yeah, I was like more into the story than I don't know math at the time. After the break, Gregor maguire tells us how he comes up with his stories. Welcome back to the Deep Dark Woods. I'm talking to author Gregory McGuire. So, I know you've talked about the origins of what a couple of different times, and you said at one point that there's kind of two origins. One was like the Unconscious when you were a kid and you watch it, and then you would have the neighborhood kids like you know, basically become a troop and acted out, and then you had the conscious of the Gulf Wars nineteen ninety one and seeing the headline of Hussan possibly being you know, the next Hitler, and it really got you to thinking of you know, what, what is evil?
What does that mean?
And hence you know, incomes the green witch, you know, flying into your brain. So you did the adaptation of snow White with Mirror Mirror, and then did the adaptation of Cinderella.
With the Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister. So I'm kind of.
Wondering where you got those, where those started, what were their origins, and also not only what were the origins, but why those tales specifically.
Well, when Wicked was published, nothing was more surprising to my agent and to me but that it sold very well right away. It never hit the best seller list for the first eight years, but it lived underneath the bestseller list cut off for months and months and seasons and seasons, and indeed its sales figures grew every six months for almost ten years. So of course I was interested in following up. Of course I thought it was possibly my only I was going to be one shot wonder Boy Wonder with one adult novel. I had written Chiltern's books before, but this was my first adult novel. So I wrote another novel and I sent it to my editor and my agent. It was actually it was eventually published under a different title. It was published about twenty five years later under the title The Next Queen of Heaven, but at the time that I wrote it, nineteen ninety seven or so, it was called Eating the Bible. So I sent this off to my editor and my agent and we got into her office and she said to me, Gregory, I just finished reading Eating the Bible. I love it. I'm not going to buy it. It'll never sell what else you're working on? And you know, she said that all that without one breath. And I said, well, I do have another idea, I said, and that was a lie. I didn't have any other ideas, but I couldn't bear to let her interest in me slip away. And my agent said to me, oh, you have another idea, And my editor said, oh, you have another idea, pray tell, and so I said it's it's called Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister. And the title was just born out of panic. My subconscious invented it in order to have something say, and my editor said, oh, that sounds wonderful. What is it about? My agent said, yes, you didn't mention this, what is it about? And I said, I never talk about works in progress because I didn't know what it was about. It was just a good title. But it was intrigued and intriguing title to them. And on the train back to Boston, I asked myself the question, well, what does that title mean, Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister? What is that about?
Oh?
Well, the ugly stepsisters are Cinderella figures. So I just followed it from there.
That's absolutely great.
I'm so sorry it's such it's such a revealing, desperate story.
No, no, I love it.
But it shows, it shows that fairy tales are there in there, like in the bedrock.
That's what I was gonna say, because like for you just to just to pull that out out of nowhere and be like, this is it and then you just went with it.
And I mean, it's a fantastic book. I think it was the first one I've read out of all your works. And it's funny that you.
Say your adult novels, because I didn't realize until recently that you wrote Leaping Beauty and so.
Yes, and I've been going through and reading those and that.
Was also where you're like, yeah, it was just one night I had to sit down and I needed to like make some money, and this is what came out. But anyways, so what about Mirror Mirror then? Is it something along those lines or was that like.
Well after you know, one of the reasons I resisted Confessions at first, and one of the reasons why my agent resisted me writing a sequel to Wicked right away was neither he nor I wanted me to set myself up in shop as the grown up writer who rewrites children's books for adults audience. I didn't want to be like, you know, put into that category. And also I wanted to have a career that was that was a respectable career. I didn't want to be seen to be taking my audience or even my muse for granted. On the other hand, children's stories and fairy tales particularly are deeply influential and are important to me, and so when Confessions of an all this substitute came up, I thought, well, I guess you know. I tried eating the Bible and that didn't work, and I do want to keep being published by an adult house if possible, for no other reason than that it pays about ten times better than children's books. And Confessions did very well too, like right Away did well. But after that I thought, hmm, I really want to write a ghost story now, a contemporary ghost story. This is the one that was eventually published as Lost. And my agent said, well, Judith Reagan, your publisher wants you to do another fairy tale or another children's book. Why don't you do something about Alice? And I said, Alice is a master work of English literature. The Wizard of Oz is a good book and a strong story, but it's not a master work. I mean, Analyss is up there with Virginia Woolf and with you know, Emily Dickinson and John Keats. I mean, it's a real work of absolutely brilliance, and I would have enormous hubris to think that I could improve on it or adam rate upon it. But the fairy tales, because they're old and because they're from the oral tradition, are a lot more porous and open to interpretation, so you don't have to actually change too much in order to make them more appealing. So he said, she wants you to do snow White or something, and I said, I want to do a ghost story. He said, she's not going to buy it. She didn't buy eating the Bible. She's not going to let you do a ghost story. And I said, why don't you go back to her and tell her I will do a snow White story if she takes my ghost story and publishes. At first he said she'll never say yes, but she did so my third adult novel was lost, and then I owed her a snow White story. I began Mirror mirror by thinking about and this is an analogy for all the ways that I work. I begin by remembering the story before I even read it, remembering it from childhood readings and rereadings, and thinking, what does this convey to me? What do I think it meant? What did I think it meant? What do I think it means? Now? What's the disconnect between how the story is told and what it really seems to be about? I mean, Cinderella is either about beauty or virtue or could it be about both? And what is snow White about it? It's about being endangered and falling asleep and waking up and being a different person when you wake up. That's about education, that's about surviving adolescence and becoming an agent in one's own life. The fact that she's a passive character in the fairy tale is incidental to me. So I began to think about the awakening mind of Sleeping Beauty, and then I thought, well, when what are the analogies for the awakening mind and Sleeping Beauty? And I thought, the analogy for the awakening mind in our Western culture is the Renaissance. It's when we came out of the dark ages and started to think, this can't mean that, it must mean this, and we must find new ways to appreciate and understand what the world is telling us. So that's why I set Mirror Mirror in the High Renaissance at the turn of the fifteenth into the sixteenth century. And then I began to research Lucreate, sie A Borgia and Cesare Borgia and Alexander the sixth So the meaning of the story sort of predicts where it should be set and how it wants to unfold itself. The same happened with Confessions. Initially started to set in the eighteenth century Denmark, but I realized, no, this is about something else. This is about the inflation of values of being. And so then I thought of the tulip boom and bust market in Holland in the early part of the seventeenth century, which was concurrent with the rise of the market of genre paintings and of paintings as home decoration as opposed to celebrations of medieval pomp and ecclesiastical power or religion. It was more about real people, so that you know those things sort of, I sort of work with my cultural understandings until I get the setting that makes a lot of sense. And that's where Mirror and Mary came from.
Got it.
And I was going to say, you've kind of spoken on and our touched upon it as I've been speaking to you, but as I'm learning more about fairy tales, you know, and where they come from and everything, it's always like snapshots of society's values, right, And so I'm kind of curious.
You know, there's multiple adaptations between.
Brothers Grim and where we are now, And even with your own adaptations, I feel like you're very nu once how you go about it, Like you really like have an idea and you just kind of want to dig into it. So what are you hoping that your readers get when they read these books, and like, do you think that you've accomplished that?
Well, that's a really good question, and in a sense you'd be better placed than I to answer the question what I've accomplished. But what I did come away with after a while is I kind of calm myself down. I took a bromide. You know, I lay down in a dark room with washcloth over my eyes for about two years, and I said to myself, you know, these stories with which you're working, the Fairy Tales in particular, but to some extent, Alice in Wonderland too, Because I eventually got the hubris to try a look in on Alice. These stories are There's no way you can ruin them. You are just a writer writing within your particular decades for your particular audience. These stories are eternal. Alice is a work of art. You couldn't wreck it even if you wanted to. You couldn't abuse it. It is stronger than you, so you have just as much right to look at it as anybody else. A cat can look at a king, and the same thing goes for the fairy tales. If you can make fun of them, as I did in Leaping Beauty. You can take them as the settings for moral questions, as I did in Mirror Mirror and in Confessions of Another Stepsister. But they are much stronger than you are. And long after the last copy of any known book of yours is writting in a landfill, the fairy tales are going to exist. They're going to continue, and they're going to be reinterpreted by somebody else in fifty years or a hundred years, or a hundred fifty years. So once I once I slotted myself as a very minuscule player in their particular literary histories, then I actually began to relax and thought, no, I have as much privilege and as much right and authority as anybody else to look at Cinderella and think, what does Cinderella mean to me? It doesn't mean that I have the answer to Cinderella. It just means I have my answer, or I have my answer for right now in my life. Maybe in twenty years I'll have a different answer. Who knows. So I don't think I have any particular thing I want to convey, but I do think the overall impression I want to give is that these things belong to all of us. They are a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The fairy tales of the Brothers, grim End of Buro, and basically world fairy tales belong to all of us. And there's no reason not to indulge in learning and enjoying and even playing with them. And there's no fear. There should be no fear in thinking you can accidentally ruin them. You can't, You're not that strong.
We'll be back after the break. So I spoke with author Greg gry maguire and had a few questions left for him, one being if he had a favorite brother's Groom fairy tale.
Well, I wouldn't have said either Snowhder, Cinderella, or my favorites as a kid. There's something absolutely alluring about Rapunzel to me. And Rapunzel I think it's kind of like a second tier story. I don't think it's most people's favorite grim tale, but there's something about the specificity of that child being locked in a tower and having such well fortified hair such well, you know, I don't know what her hair conditioner is, but boy, she's really getting the egg proteins in that hair. She's able to haul up her lover night after night after night night on the strength of her tresses. It's almost Scandinavian. It's almost like something out of that should be happening in Valhalla, or really in ancient Greece. You know. It's just so I can't even think of the words for it as I'm talking to you about it. I did once think I might write a book called Rapunzel in America, but I never did it. And then I saw a couple of people had done things sort of a little bit like what was on the edge of what I was thinking of. So who knows if I keep writing, Maybe I will one day. Now I have a past review. I don't know whether in your homework for this hour you have had a chance to read my novel from about six or seven years ago, called Hidden Sea.
No I read the Dreams Stealer, Yeah, yeah, with all the Russian folklore, yes yes, or that.
One yeah well, and c hid d e n See looks a little bit like hide and Seek, but it's also the name of an actual island off the coast of northern Germany. And I wanted to write the life story, just as Wicked is the life story of the wicked Witch of the West from birth to death. Hidden c is the life story of the man who had grow up to be Godfather Josselmeier, who carves the nutcracker and gives it to Clara on Christmas Eve or New Year's Eve. And I now think and I pausit this in Hidden and see that European fair tales, in particular, at least in part ohe some of their genetic material to Greek myths and to myths of all the Mediterranean base. And this is not true just for the West too, but the West is where the grim fairy tales emerged. So in my book Hidden see Godfather Drossomeyer has a kind of out of the body experience. He's actually hit by a falling tree and he dies but comes back to life, and he is clued into the fact that magic is disappearing from the industrial world, and the lands of fairy, the lands of the gods, the lands of Oberon, and of the forest of Brasolian and of Camelot. They are evaporating in the wake of the industrial revolution and in the wake of the industrialization of Europe, which of course what's happening at the beginning of the Romantic Era as part of what fomented the Romantic Era and the rise of fairy tales. So Drassmeyer asks his interlocutors where is this going? And they say, humankind cannot live without its other world. It cannot live without its and it's os and its wonderlands. It cannot live without Purgatory and Hell and Heaven. It cannot live without the Island of Capri or without Atlantis. It cannot live without having an alternate map of an imagined space. It will not survive. But industry is crowding it out the magic forest in which the gods lived. It has to go somewhere. Where Where can it go? And what Drosselmeyer does is carved the nutcracker, realizing that in the lives of children, the worlds of magic and the magic Forest will stay potent even if they turn their backs on it when they go to middle school. We need it for our own mental health, and we need it in order to be able to survive the indignity of having been born human and so immensely corruptible.
Wow, that's like you kind of just blew my mind there. To be honest, I was just like, oh, wow, I never never really thought of it that way, but that was that was beautiful And yeah, and I absolutely agree with you.
We definitely do need that magic.
We have to keep it so stories are for everyone, not just kids, especially fairy tales, but adults need it as well.
We need a little bit of magic cheap is going well?
Well, back back to your original thesis about why you wanted to talk to me about fair tales. Men, you and I are not in third grade. We are grown ups. You know. We worry about the next elections, We worry about global warming, and we worry about our retirement funds. We worry about our kids, We worry about the next virus and water quality, and who knows what the whole thing is there to pester us and to bruise us and to make us incompetent with anxiety. But here we are talking about fair tales to two educated, grown adults. And what I think of is that fairy tales are a little bit like they're like parables, or like aspirins. Maybe in this modern world, maybe they're like gummies. They're a little portable bit of potency that we can take and carry with us. And sometimes I carry little scraps of poetry in my pockets. I don't necessarily take them out, but it's something that's there in my pocket that supports me. And I think fairy tales are like that for a lot of people. And I also think they're like that for a lot of people and they don't even know it, and that's okay, that's okay, but you know it and I know it.
To learn more about New York Times best selling author Gregory Maguire, you can visit his website at Gregorymaguire dot com. That g r E g O R y A g U I r E dot com.
Next time, we get into one.
Of the darkest tales, The Brothers Grim Ever Collected the Deep Dark Woods is a production of School of Humans and iHeart Podcasts. It was created, written, and hosted by me Miranda Hawkins. Senior producer is Gabby Watts. Executive producers are Virginia Prescott, Brandon Barr, Elsie Crowley, and Maya Howard. Theme song was composed by Jesse Niswanger, who also sound designed and mixed this episode. You can follow the show on Instagram at School of Humans and don't forget to subscribe and leave a review.
