Wicked recently celebrated its one-year anniversary at the Orpheum Theatre in San Francisco and continues an open-ended engagement. It is in its seventh year on Broadway, and currently has seven productions across the globe including San Francisco, London, Germany, Japan, Australia and two concurrent North American National Tours.

We caught up with author Gregory Maguire whose best-selling novel "Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West" was the inspiration for the blockbuster musical.

"Son of a Witch" top, "A Lion Among Men" bottom

Did you initially intend an Oz series when you first wrote “Wicked”? Please share with us your impetus for the stories that followed — “Son of a Witch” and “A Lion Among Men.”

“Wicked” was intended to be, as the British say, a one-off. It sold in the hundreds of thousands before the musical opened, an astounding amount for a novel by a novice, but has sold millions since. When the musical opened and a new readership came to my novels, I began to receive hundreds of letters from people asking about what had happened to characters of mine that never made it onto the stage. Their curiosity piqued my own, and “Son of a Witch” was a result of their questions and also of my own dismay at a certain sort of fever pitch of irrational patriotism as expressed in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. I am not averse to patriotism, but I am skeptical of patriotism that is hijacked for the especial betterment of select individuals rather than entire populations, and skeptical, too, of patriotism that is dressed up as piety. “Son of a Witch” addressed my concerns of the time; I put Liir—Elphaba’s and Fiyero’s son—in a race for his life during a period of dizzying patriotic fervor.

 “A Lion Among Men” was easier to write, then, because in “Son of a Witch” I had left a good deal unsaid. Returning to one of the original characters of Baum—the Cowardly Lion—made me feel right at home the way writing “Wicked” had made me feel ten or more years earlier.

What are you planning next?

I have done about the first twentieth of the fourth and, I think final, volume of The Wicked Years. The title to date is “Out of Oz.” You can expect it in the autumn of 2011 if all goes well….

What is the first book you read that had an impact on you?

A book less well known now than it was in my childhood, a sort of literary ghost-mystery called “The Children of Green Knowe”. It concerned a young orphan gone to stay with his great-grandmother in an ancient stone house in the fens of Cambridgeshire. Much later, I came to realize that the author had written about her own home—the oldest continually occupied house in England, over eight hundred years as a private dwelling!—and I went and had tea with her. She was about six hundred years old herself. Lucy Boston.

You’ve mentioned that reading poetry is something you do to get the creative juices flowing — any particular poets?

I don’t think there is a poet to touch Emily Dickinson, but then poets don’t suffer an annual competitive peer ranking like the Grammys or the Tonys. For different reasons I admire Elizabeth Bishop, A. R. Ammons, Eamon Grennan, Keats, Sharon Olds, Louise Glück, and Walter de la Mare.

Who inspires you?

There are times when even a writer, whose currency is language, can become weary of the magic spell that words cast. I hit such a spell last night (after returning from a dazzlingly stimulating literary conference). I got out a collection of fugues and motets and minuets by Bach—not quite your Child’s First Bach, but pretty close—and read through a couple of fugues I had once been able to play at tempo. This meant my hands were moving very slowly over the keyboard as I remembered fingering and read the notes, and the wonderful plangent and sort of asymmetrical chords—I forget the musical term—hung in the air mysteriously and with great power. I thought: Is there any human invention more inspiring than music? And I do not know, even taking Shakespeare and penicillin and Hair Club for Men into account, whether there is.

Do you write longhand or on a computer? And why?  

I begin to write in longhand, which helps me establish tone-in part because (as we all remember from grade school) writing by hand hurts the hand after a while, and one ends up making better word choices if one goes more slowly. That said, after I begin to transcribe the section onto the computer, I often can keep going in the same tone and voice, and so the second parts of many chapters are often written on computer. I edit ferociously, daily, and chew up valuable woodlands in printing too many drafts. (To make up for my part in destroying our natural environment, I eat very little meat and thus trying to preserve the Brazilian rainforest by not requiring McDonald's to cut it down on my personal behalf.)

What item in your writing room is the most significant to you and why?

As a creative artist whose work has been adapted to theater AND as an audience member, what do you think is important about live performance?

All art strives, I believe, to reconnect us with our lives: to remind us that life is nuanced, valuable, evanescent. The very way that theater casts its spell-well, all performance art, like dance or music or the reading of poetry aloud, works the same way, but in some ways musical theater is an amalgam of all three—it exists only for a brief time. While we are enchanted with a story unfolding before us in a limited time and place, while we are together in enchantment, we are living very fully indeed. We return to the sidewalks outside the theater, to the subways and suburbs, faintly but distinctly different. Richer, I like to think. Bigger. More alive. More awake. Put simply: Something has changed within us. Something is not the same. 

Are there other Broadway musicals you like? What is the first one you ever saw?

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