April 16, 2024 • 33 mins
NYT bestselling author Gregory Maguire talks about the inspiration behind his adaptations and the necessity of fairy tales.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:08):
School of Humans.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
This episode discusses sensitive topics.
Speaker 1 (00:13):
Please listen with care.
Speaker 3 (00:16):
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.
(00:39):
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.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
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
(01:15):
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
(01:37):
across is that you also love Harriet the Spy. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (01:43):
I grew up on Harry at the Spy.
Speaker 2 (01:45):
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.
Speaker 1 (01:59):
It was about how you.
Speaker 2 (02:01):
Were like transcribing all your notes that you had had
and you were upside think like a million, six hundred
thousand words or something.
Speaker 3 (02:08):
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.
Speaker 1 (02:28):
Oh my goodness.
Speaker 2 (02:29):
Okay, so is that transcribing, Like that's all your journals now?
Speaker 3 (02:32):
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
(02:53):
doing and I can't stop.
Speaker 2 (02:54):
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?
Speaker 3 (03:01):
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
(03:21):
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,
(03:45):
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
(04:07):
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.
Speaker 1 (04:29):
Well, I think it's great to be honest.
Speaker 2 (04:31):
So and like I also understand the why of like,
you know, it makes a soul a little lighter.
Speaker 3 (04:36):
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely, Yeah.
Speaker 2 (04:38):
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.
Speaker 3 (04:47):
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
(05:14):
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
(05:35):
for a more creative outlet.
Speaker 1 (05:38):
That makes absolute sense.
Speaker 2 (05:40):
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.
Speaker 1 (05:48):
But you know, we're here to also talk about The
Brothers Grim.
Speaker 2 (05:51):
So I'm kind of curious, you know when you first
ran across those and like, what were some of your
favorite stories.
Speaker 3 (05:57):
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.
Speaker 1 (06:07):
Well, I appreciate it.
Speaker 3 (06:09):
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
(06:32):
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
(06:52):
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,
(07:12):
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
(07:35):
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
(07:58):
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
(08:21):
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
(08:43):
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
(09:05):
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
(09:29):
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
(09:51):
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
(10:13):
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.
Speaker 2 (10:26):
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.
Speaker 3 (10:38):
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,
(11:02):
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
(11:23):
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
(11:46):
the magician's tower from which you will live your life.
Speaker 1 (11:51):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (11:52):
So, I also grew up in the library, and fairy
toes are always my favorites.
Speaker 1 (11:57):
Hence why I think they always will be. I don't
know what it is. I just yeah, I love them
to death.
Speaker 2 (12:01):
But I would leave there with life as many books
as I could, and then how.
Speaker 3 (12:06):
Many would you take out at a time when you
were little fourth grade?
Speaker 2 (12:11):
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.
Speaker 1 (12:30):
I promise you.
Speaker 2 (12:31):
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
(12:55):
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,
(13:19):
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?
Speaker 1 (13:32):
What does that mean?
Speaker 2 (13:34):
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.
Speaker 1 (13:45):
With the Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister. So I'm kind of.
Speaker 2 (13:49):
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.
Speaker 3 (14:00):
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
(14:24):
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.
(14:46):
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.
(15:10):
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,
(15:31):
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
(15:55):
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
(16:15):
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?
Speaker 2 (16:32):
Oh?
Speaker 3 (16:32):
Well, the ugly stepsisters are Cinderella figures. So I just
followed it from there.
Speaker 1 (16:39):
That's absolutely great.
Speaker 3 (16:42):
I'm so sorry it's such it's such a revealing, desperate story.
Speaker 1 (16:48):
No, no, I love it.
Speaker 3 (16:51):
But it shows, it shows that fairy tales are there
in there, like in the bedrock.
Speaker 2 (16:55):
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.
Speaker 1 (17:01):
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.
Speaker 2 (17:06):
Say your adult novels, because I didn't realize until recently
that you wrote Leaping Beauty and so.
Speaker 1 (17:13):
Yes, and I've been going through and reading those and that.
Speaker 2 (17:15):
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.
Speaker 3 (17:28):
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,
(17:51):
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
(18:11):
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
(18:33):
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
(18:54):
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
(19:17):
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,
(19:38):
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,
(19:59):
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
(20:20):
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
(20:41):
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
(21:04):
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
(21:25):
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
(21:49):
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
(22:10):
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
(22:33):
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.
Speaker 1 (22:40):
Got it.
Speaker 2 (22:41):
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.
Speaker 1 (22:56):
You know, there's multiple adaptations between.
Speaker 2 (23:00):
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?
Speaker 3 (23:20):
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
(23:43):
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
(24:07):
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
(24:30):
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
(24:52):
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
(25:13):
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
(25:35):
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
(25:56):
thinking you can accidentally ruin them. You can't, You're not
that strong.
Speaker 2 (26:03):
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.
Speaker 3 (26:20):
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
(26:43):
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
(27:03):
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
(27:24):
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
(27:49):
about six or seven years ago, called Hidden Sea.
Speaker 2 (27:54):
No I read the Dreams Stealer, Yeah, yeah, with all
the Russian folklore, yes yes, or that.
Speaker 3 (28:03):
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
(28:28):
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
(28:53):
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,
(29:14):
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
(29:36):
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
(29:57):
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
(30:17):
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,
(30:42):
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
(31:04):
immensely corruptible.
Speaker 2 (31:07):
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.
Speaker 1 (31:21):
We definitely do need that magic.
Speaker 2 (31:23):
We have to keep it so stories are for everyone,
not just kids, especially fairy tales, but adults need it
as well.
Speaker 1 (31:31):
We need a little bit of magic cheap is going well?
Speaker 3 (31:33):
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
(31:57):
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
(32:20):
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
(32:41):
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.
Speaker 2 (32:53):
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.
Speaker 1 (33:09):
Next time, we get into one.
Speaker 2 (33:11):
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.
(33:33):
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.
School of Humans.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
This episode discusses sensitive topics.
Speaker 1 (00:13):
Please listen with care.
Speaker 3 (00:16):
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.
(00:39):
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.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
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
(01:15):
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
(01:37):
across is that you also love Harriet the Spy. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (01:43):
I grew up on Harry at the Spy.
Speaker 2 (01:45):
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.
Speaker 1 (01:59):
It was about how you.
Speaker 2 (02:01):
Were like transcribing all your notes that you had had
and you were upside think like a million, six hundred
thousand words or something.
Speaker 3 (02:08):
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.
Speaker 1 (02:28):
Oh my goodness.
Speaker 2 (02:29):
Okay, so is that transcribing, Like that's all your journals now?
Speaker 3 (02:32):
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
(02:53):
doing and I can't stop.
Speaker 2 (02:54):
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?
Speaker 3 (03:01):
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
(03:21):
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,
(03:45):
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
(04:07):
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.
Speaker 1 (04:29):
Well, I think it's great to be honest.
Speaker 2 (04:31):
So and like I also understand the why of like,
you know, it makes a soul a little lighter.
Speaker 3 (04:36):
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely, Yeah.
Speaker 2 (04:38):
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.
Speaker 3 (04:47):
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
(05:14):
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
(05:35):
for a more creative outlet.
Speaker 1 (05:38):
That makes absolute sense.
Speaker 2 (05:40):
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.
Speaker 1 (05:48):
But you know, we're here to also talk about The
Brothers Grim.
Speaker 2 (05:51):
So I'm kind of curious, you know when you first
ran across those and like, what were some of your
favorite stories.
Speaker 3 (05:57):
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.
Speaker 1 (06:07):
Well, I appreciate it.
Speaker 3 (06:09):
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
(06:32):
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
(06:52):
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,
(07:12):
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
(07:35):
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
(07:58):
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
(08:21):
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
(08:43):
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
(09:05):
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
(09:29):
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
(09:51):
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
(10:13):
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.
Speaker 2 (10:26):
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.
Speaker 3 (10:38):
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,
(11:02):
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
(11:23):
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
(11:46):
the magician's tower from which you will live your life.
Speaker 1 (11:51):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (11:52):
So, I also grew up in the library, and fairy
toes are always my favorites.
Speaker 1 (11:57):
Hence why I think they always will be. I don't
know what it is. I just yeah, I love them
to death.
Speaker 2 (12:01):
But I would leave there with life as many books
as I could, and then how.
Speaker 3 (12:06):
Many would you take out at a time when you
were little fourth grade?
Speaker 2 (12:11):
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.
Speaker 1 (12:30):
I promise you.
Speaker 2 (12:31):
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
(12:55):
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,
(13:19):
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?
Speaker 1 (13:32):
What does that mean?
Speaker 2 (13:34):
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.
Speaker 1 (13:45):
With the Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister. So I'm kind of.
Speaker 2 (13:49):
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.
Speaker 3 (14:00):
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
(14:24):
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.
(14:46):
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.
(15:10):
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,
(15:31):
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
(15:55):
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
(16:15):
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?
Speaker 2 (16:32):
Oh?
Speaker 3 (16:32):
Well, the ugly stepsisters are Cinderella figures. So I just
followed it from there.
Speaker 1 (16:39):
That's absolutely great.
Speaker 3 (16:42):
I'm so sorry it's such it's such a revealing, desperate story.
Speaker 1 (16:48):
No, no, I love it.
Speaker 3 (16:51):
But it shows, it shows that fairy tales are there
in there, like in the bedrock.
Speaker 2 (16:55):
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.
Speaker 1 (17:01):
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.
Speaker 2 (17:06):
Say your adult novels, because I didn't realize until recently
that you wrote Leaping Beauty and so.
Speaker 1 (17:13):
Yes, and I've been going through and reading those and that.
Speaker 2 (17:15):
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.
Speaker 3 (17:28):
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,
(17:51):
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
(18:11):
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
(18:33):
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
(18:54):
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
(19:17):
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,
(19:38):
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,
(19:59):
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
(20:20):
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
(20:41):
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
(21:04):
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
(21:25):
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
(21:49):
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
(22:10):
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
(22:33):
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.
Speaker 1 (22:40):
Got it.
Speaker 2 (22:41):
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.
Speaker 1 (22:56):
You know, there's multiple adaptations between.
Speaker 2 (23:00):
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?
Speaker 3 (23:20):
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
(23:43):
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
(24:07):
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
(24:30):
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
(24:52):
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
(25:13):
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
(25:35):
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
(25:56):
thinking you can accidentally ruin them. You can't, You're not
that strong.
Speaker 2 (26:03):
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.
Speaker 3 (26:20):
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
(26:43):
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
(27:03):
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
(27:24):
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
(27:49):
about six or seven years ago, called Hidden Sea.
Speaker 2 (27:54):
No I read the Dreams Stealer, Yeah, yeah, with all
the Russian folklore, yes yes, or that.
Speaker 3 (28:03):
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
(28:28):
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
(28:53):
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,
(29:14):
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
(29:36):
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
(29:57):
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
(30:17):
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,
(30:42):
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
(31:04):
immensely corruptible.
Speaker 2 (31:07):
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.
Speaker 1 (31:21):
We definitely do need that magic.
Speaker 2 (31:23):
We have to keep it so stories are for everyone,
not just kids, especially fairy tales, but adults need it
as well.
Speaker 1 (31:31):
We need a little bit of magic cheap is going well?
Speaker 3 (31:33):
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
(31:57):
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
(32:20):
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
(32:41):
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.
Speaker 2 (32:53):
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.
Speaker 1 (33:09):
Next time, we get into one.
Speaker 2 (33:11):
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.
(33:33):
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.
Host
Miranda Hawkins
Popular Podcasts
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com