Gregory Maguire shares a memory of his childhood in which he and his friends recreated a scene from The Wizard of Oz in front of a crowded Hall Auditorium Monday night. (Michael Pickering)
"I would say I speak two languages," author Gregory Maguire told a nearly full house at Hall Auditorium Monday evening, "English and narrative."
Maguire is the author of Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, the novel that served as the inspiration for the smash musical hit of the same name. Throughout his lecture, he weaved narrative and metaphor as mechanisms for finding one's way to a place of belonging, striding onstage carrying a backpack and proceeding to toss his dress jacket to the other endof the stage.
He talked of his first stab at fiction, a doomed short story titled "The Hotel Bomb" that eventually came to serve as a symbol for his own coping with the loss of his mother in childbirth, and he talked of writing as a vehicle for turning the real world into a fantastical one that carries heavy metaphorical significance.
"Fairy tales are like literary Tylenol," Maguire said. "Take one when you have a headache."
Maguire validated his reputation as a fairy tale "revisionist," blending fact with fiction, throughout the speech by continually engaging the audience with hyperbolic anecdotes from his childhood and adult life, taking on the personas of the characters by changing his facial expressions and mimicking their voices.
In addition to weaving his life philosophy of being enriched by the power of fantasy, Maguire minimized the critical distance between himself and his narratives throughout his lecture, often espousing abstract - or even mundane - theories about real life through some of his created characters.
In a story that served as a sort of unifying factor around which his speech revolved, Maguire retold a tale from his childhood of a group of neighborhood kids gathering in his own backyard to reenact L. Frank Baum's The Wizard of Oz, the work that served as the inspiration for his own best seller years later. In a parallel to his own technique of portraying fairy tales in newly constructed lights, Maguire recounted how the land of Dorothy's imagination was reconfigured by the presence of other fairy tale characters, such as Captain Hook and Tinkerbell.
Maguire went on to talk of Storytown, a theme park located in Lake George, N.Y., that Maguire visited as a child, as a sort of "narrative matrix" or a fantastical backdrop where all conceived stories can take on their own dimensions of reality.
"(Wicked) continues the game we played in my backyard in Albany, N.Y., 40 years ago,"Maguire said.
While Maguire did not talk at length about his novel Wicked itself or the musical adaptation of the book, he did say that he was intrigued by the possibility of expanding on the mythology of Oz and confronting the question of evil that serves as one of the cruxes of the work, as the character Elphaba grows up to become the culturally infamous icon known as the Wicked Witch of the West.
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"I was engaged with the question of evil and how I might recognize it," Maguire said. "I wanted to take all the knowns (about Oz) and make a unified theory out of the contradictions."
Maguire went on to say that the ideologies of religion and racism became crucial to him in the development of the work and that he is thrilled by the integrity of the musical adaptation to the original themes of the novel.
Lana Kay Rosenberg, chair of the Lecture Series Committee, said that Maguire's appearance clearly stood out among other appearances sponsored by the series.
"I really think it was one of the more thoughtful and well-prepared lectures we've had in a while," Rosenberg said. "Some people have a wonderful message, but don't have the delivery. (Maguire) has both."
Senior Scott Malafarina, who described himself as a fan of Maguire and his works, agreed with Rosenberg.
"I'm amazed that someone would be able to go that far in-depth with one character and be able to look at the other side of evil the way that Maguire does," Malafarina said. "It was clear that he captivated everybody tonight."
Maguire hinted that he is at work on a new installment in the Wicked series, but declined to give details on how the book might turn out. Ultimately, his message was that human crises are inevitable, but they are not unsolvable problems.
"In the wake of the most dreadful storms, we can sing," Maguire said. "We have to."
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