With the massive cinematic success of both Wicked and Wicked: For Good — not to mention the endless merch and product tie-ins — it’s apparently Gregory Maguire’s world, and we’re all just living in it.

“It is a very peculiar world to live in when the entire continent seems to go pink and green,” the out author behind the 1995 novel on which the Broadway musical and films are based said at a recent event hosted by the Center on Religion and Culture at Fordham University in New York City. “I’m living in my own fantasy bubble.”

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The October 23 event saw Maguire reflecting on the inspiration for his revisionist origin story about the Wicked Witch of the West and his dismay that the political themes he built into its story 30 years ago seem to by playing out in contemporary American politics.

As screenwriter and journalist Jim McDermott, who moderated the conversation with Maguire, notes in his coverage of the event for the Center on Religion and Culture’s blog Sapientia, both the novel and its musical adaptations reimagine the Wonderful Wizard of Oz as a charismatic demagogue with authoritarian tendencies (not unlike those of many right-wing politicians both in the U.S. and abroad today).

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“I did not want to be prophetic,” Maguire reflected at the Fordham event. “I wanted to be hackneyed and old-fashioned. I wanted to sell books for four months and then get remaindered.”

Elsewhere in their conversation, Maguire explained that the inspiration to write Wicked came from media coverage of the first Gulf War, which compared Saddam Hussein to Adolf Hitler. The specter of one of history’s unequivocal monsters, Maguire said, made him question his own opposition to war.

“I could feel my blood pressure go up,” Maguire recalled, according to The Fordham Ram. “I decided I needed to write about how people use language in order to legitimize their right to belittle somebody else or even to kill them.”

From there, he set out to explore how someone could grow to become truly evil. But instead of tackling a real-life figure, Maguire turned to the green-skinned villain from the 1939 film adaptation of L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

“Everybody knows who the Wicked Witch of the West is,” he told McDermott, “but nobody knows why she’s wicked.”

However, Maguire explained, he quickly realized he was doing a disservice to the character by portraying her as “subhuman.”

“You can’t hijack her life to prove your intellectual points about what moral monsters are,” he said, according to The Fordham Ram. “You owe it to this human creature to allow her to live her life in some amount of freedom and don’t make her carry your burdens. Make her live her own burdens.”

Maguire also offered insight into why so many of his novels center on women. “Men are just as misunderstood. They’re just not as interesting,” he explained. “I find that women and gay men seem … to have a greater capacity than the straight men I know to be able to hold two ideas in their head at the same time. It’s not that straight men … aren’t rational and aren’t feeling, but it’s hard for them to be rational and feeling at the same time.”

A life-long Catholic, Maguire also spoke about how he reconciles his faith with the church’s anti-LGBTQ+ teachings.

“Some people say ‘You’re not Catholic’ because I don’t conform with some of the belief systems,” he said, recalling how a friend once accused him of treating Church doctrine like a cafeteria where he could pick what to believe and what to leave behind.

“‘But the Church says you can’t do that,’” Maguire recalled being told. “And I said, ‘Yes, but that’s something I leave on the counter.’”

He also noted that awe is the root of both religion and fantasy literature.

“The subtle changes and complexities and the foreign aspects of a magical world,” he said, “give us the chance to experience the act of experience anew. That is a recipe for awe.”

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