Gregory Maguire reading
Alas, no pictures. I went to the reading after yoga (a half hour before the official start time) and it was already pretty packed. I spotted a prime seat in the second row and grabbed it. It was then I learned that the long line off to the right was to buy the book, and you could only get it signed if you bought it first. This was very different from Jennifer Weiner's reading, where the books were stacked on a table and you could take one, have her sign it, then buy it. Not here. Not wanting to lose the seat, I didn't get a book. I'll take it out of the library. And, because I didn't get a book, I didn't get a chance to ask him if I could take his pic, and I wouldn't have felt comfortable taking a pic without asking.
With that out of the way, it was a good reading. GM is a short, compact man who was wearing a silvery vest under a sports jacket with black pants. There is a faint air of tweed about him and he speaks with the cadences of a professor. As soon as he started reading, his voice became more authoritative and he assumed different voices for the different characters, one of which was almost a growl. He said later that's how his Irish grandmother talks.
He said we won't see Elphaba alive in this book, but we won't see a corpse either. He talked about how the musical Wicked widened the already large readership of the book Wicked, to include 14-year-old girls, and how they all wrote to him asking what happened to Nor, who was a political prisoner of the Wizard. GM, not wanting to tell them about the realities of political prisoners, asked Maurice Sendak how to answer these letters. Maurice said, "Let them deal with it! Life sucks, they'll find that out soon enough." Ouch! GM now has 3 adopted children, one of whom will be 14 someday, he said, so he wanted to handle it more delicately. Although I don't think he went into how he handled it.
He said the idea for Wicked came to him after two 14-year-old boys in London, where he was living at the time, killed a 2-year-old child. He wanted to explore what would "make someone so corrupt as to kill someone else." He thought of writing about Hitler, dismissed that idea, tried to think who else people are afraid of, and Margaret Hamilton as the Wicked Witch floated before his eyes. "If we're all allotted a moment of genius, that was mine," he said, "because everyone knows who she is and no one knows anything about her. She was ripe for the taking." He confessed that he fantasized about a movie version after Universal optioned the story, and he even casted it in his head: k.d. lang as Elphaba, Emma Thompson as Glinda's mother, a young Antonio Banderas as Fiero, and Angela Lansbury as Madam Morrible. But he said there was a "glass ceiling" and without someone like Mel Gibson, the studio lost interest and the musical came to the fore. He does not think Son of a Witch will get made into a musical, but he sang the words "Son of a Witch" to the tune of Beethoven's Fifth.
My favorite moment of the reading was when this big, bulky guy who would not have looked out of place at a Harley motorcycle bar, and had a big spiderweb tattooed on one elbow, raised his hand and said shyly, "Your writing is extraordinary. I never read fiction, but someone bought Wicked for me and I couldn't put it down. Your children are lucky to have such a great storyteller for a dad."
To which GM replied: "My kids don't like my stories!" He also said he won't let them watch The Wizard of Oz because it's "too damn scary." So, he says, they'll be the first kids who were familiar with Wicked first.
He also said he wrote a sequel to Wicked right away, called The Education of Tin and Straw, and it was like "afterbirth"...he wrote Wicked "so fast," he said, and then this book "spurted out." His agent said, "Gregory, with all due respect, put that book in your bottom drawer. Because it's not very good!" I'm curious about it, though.
With that out of the way, it was a good reading. GM is a short, compact man who was wearing a silvery vest under a sports jacket with black pants. There is a faint air of tweed about him and he speaks with the cadences of a professor. As soon as he started reading, his voice became more authoritative and he assumed different voices for the different characters, one of which was almost a growl. He said later that's how his Irish grandmother talks.
He said we won't see Elphaba alive in this book, but we won't see a corpse either. He talked about how the musical Wicked widened the already large readership of the book Wicked, to include 14-year-old girls, and how they all wrote to him asking what happened to Nor, who was a political prisoner of the Wizard. GM, not wanting to tell them about the realities of political prisoners, asked Maurice Sendak how to answer these letters. Maurice said, "Let them deal with it! Life sucks, they'll find that out soon enough." Ouch! GM now has 3 adopted children, one of whom will be 14 someday, he said, so he wanted to handle it more delicately. Although I don't think he went into how he handled it.
He said the idea for Wicked came to him after two 14-year-old boys in London, where he was living at the time, killed a 2-year-old child. He wanted to explore what would "make someone so corrupt as to kill someone else." He thought of writing about Hitler, dismissed that idea, tried to think who else people are afraid of, and Margaret Hamilton as the Wicked Witch floated before his eyes. "If we're all allotted a moment of genius, that was mine," he said, "because everyone knows who she is and no one knows anything about her. She was ripe for the taking." He confessed that he fantasized about a movie version after Universal optioned the story, and he even casted it in his head: k.d. lang as Elphaba, Emma Thompson as Glinda's mother, a young Antonio Banderas as Fiero, and Angela Lansbury as Madam Morrible. But he said there was a "glass ceiling" and without someone like Mel Gibson, the studio lost interest and the musical came to the fore. He does not think Son of a Witch will get made into a musical, but he sang the words "Son of a Witch" to the tune of Beethoven's Fifth.
My favorite moment of the reading was when this big, bulky guy who would not have looked out of place at a Harley motorcycle bar, and had a big spiderweb tattooed on one elbow, raised his hand and said shyly, "Your writing is extraordinary. I never read fiction, but someone bought Wicked for me and I couldn't put it down. Your children are lucky to have such a great storyteller for a dad."
To which GM replied: "My kids don't like my stories!" He also said he won't let them watch The Wizard of Oz because it's "too damn scary." So, he says, they'll be the first kids who were familiar with Wicked first.
He also said he wrote a sequel to Wicked right away, called The Education of Tin and Straw, and it was like "afterbirth"...he wrote Wicked "so fast," he said, and then this book "spurted out." His agent said, "Gregory, with all due respect, put that book in your bottom drawer. Because it's not very good!" I'm curious about it, though.
Comments
i've never even heard gregory maguire, but i checked his page on the harper collins website, and even the FAQ he wrote was a good read.