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After writing four books about Dorothy, the Land of Oz and the Wicked Witch, author Gregory Maguire – whose book spawned the Tony Award-winning Broadway hit “Wicked” – will land in Dorothy’s home state.
“I had a choice of hundreds of cities to go to – I chose Wichita,” Maguire said. Then he joked, “It has the word witch in it.”
Maguire began the Wicked Years series in 1995 with “Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West.” Next came “Son of a Witch” and “A Lion Among Men.”
“Out of Oz: The Final Volume in the Wicked Series” goes on sale Tuesday. On Nov. 7, Maguire will speak at the new Forum Theatre for the Performing Arts in Wichita.
How Kansas inspired ‘Wicked’
This will be Maguire’s second visit to Kansas. More than two decades ago, he taught a two-week seminar on fantasy writing at Fort Hays State University. Five years later, “Wicked” was hatched. Maguire said the visit was part of the bedrock in writing the novel.
The Wicked series is a fantasy work inspired by L. Frank Baum’s 1900 classic “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.” His first Wicked book inspired the popular musical.
When he first visited Kansas, Maguire said he walked to the edge of town and tried to lose himself in a field of alfalfa. He wanted to feel “pleasantly anxious about how deeply lost it was possible to feel in Kansas.”
Having grown up in Albany, N.Y., Maguire is used to close quarters, lots of trees and not much land.
“Kansas is huge,” he said. “I think there is a kind of prairie soundness there.”
Maguire enjoyed Midwestern friendliness. This self-sufficient yet genial attitude gave rise to Dorothy, he said.
He said that Dorothy is the spiritual twin of Alice from “Alice in Wonderland.”
“They share a lot on cornering the market on common sense in an insane world,” he said. “Part of what helped Dorothy get through Oz is that she’s used to broad nature and straight talk. She’s extremely open.”
But the Wicked Witch, on the other hand, cannot tolerate so much openness and eagerness. If she were to live in the United States, Maguire said, she would have to live in a place like Brooklyn.
A closer look at Oz
Although Maguire read the Narnia series and all the Alice books throughout his childhood, he didn’t read the Oz books until college. When he was growing up, the books were hard to find, he said.
“The suppression by the librarians of ‘The Wizard of Oz’ made me crave the historical truth even more,” he said. When he received his doctorate in English and American Literature from Tufts University, he had devoured five of the 14 Oz books.
But although he enjoyed Baum’s now-classic novels, he found that they did not build on themselves the way J.R.R. Tolkien’s, Lewis Carroll’s or C.S. Lewis’ novels did. Nevertheless, Dorothy from Kansas stayed in his consciousness.
Like Dorothy, Maguire lost his mother. She died during childbirth, and he was sent to an orphanage. After his father married his godmother, his mother’s best friend, he was reunited with his three siblings. Maguire adored his stepmother just as Dorothy loved Auntie Em.
When writing his Wicked series, Maguire wanted time to proceed. He also wanted a historical context.
“The Oz books are like interchangeable episodes from ‘I Love Lucy,’” Maguire said. “I didn’t want it (Wicked) to be a never-ending rerun.”
The end of the Yellow Brick Road
In addition to the time element, Maguire wanted to look into how the Wicked Witch and others could be demonized. He wondered how someone benefits from targeting another. In “Out of Oz: The Final Volume in the Wicked Series,” Emerald City is invading Munchkinland, Glinda is under arrest, the Cowardly Lion is on the run, and Dorothy is back in Oz.
And, on page 563, Maguire wrote, “Finis,” marking the end of the Wicked Years.
“Out of Oz” “ends on an uplift that is filled nonetheless with all the longing and distress and hope with which we all struggle though our daily lives,” he said.
Maguire looks forward to writing another fantasy. He knows he has one more retelling of a fairy tale set in a historical setting left to write. Which fairy tale and what time period is up for grabs.
“I know about fantasy,” he said. “I know how strange it is, and I love it. That will be my way into a new series.”
Maguire wrote “Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister,” the retelling of “Cinderella,” and “Mirror Mirror,” a reinvention of the Snow White fairy tale. He used the Dutch Renaissance and Italian Renaissance as backdrops. Next time, he hopes to pick a new fairy tale and historical period.
But Maguire does not want to abandon his Wicked series just yet. He is excited about traveling across the country and speaking with fans about his latest work.
Sarah Bagby, owner of Watermark Books and Cafe, was instrumental in getting him to Kansas.
“We pitched a proposal several years in a row,” she said.
Finally, Maguire agreed.
“He’s an amazing person,” Bagby said. “I think Gregory Maguire has done a good job to lend more background characters to Oz. He’s been amazingly respectful of the original characters.”
Maguire’s world of Oz is rather different from the one Baum’s Dorothy entered.
“I suppose,” he said jokingly, “I’ve come to convert law-abiding Kansans and to introduce them to the dangerous side of Oz.”
