Gregory Maguire: playing with stolen property

First up this morning was the author Gregory Maguire, speaking for an hour on 'playing with stolen property'. In case anyone doesn't know, he is the author of Wicked and specialises in reworking traditional stories with a twist. Anyone who knows me will know that I love books that do this - in fact my dissertation was on reworkings of myth in children's literature, so this talk ticked all my boxes. He used an anecdote about a childhood game (playing The Wizard of Oz but with added Captain Hook, Peter Pan and Tinkerbell) to show how childhood stories are a universal language that we can all relate to, and that this is why he uses such material in his books - it's a way of relating to as many people as possible. This is exactly the point I made in my dissertation, although I would argue that in a limited way - obviously the examples he gave and uses are culture-specific and wouldn't necessarily apply to someone from another time and place. But if you take it that step further and talk about the universality of the myths, stories and archetypes that underpin those very same childhood stories, you get to the crux of it, that stories that rework others touch us on a deeper level, and tap into that shared part of our minds.

He went on to discuss two reworkings he's been working on of late - an appreciation of Maurice Sendak, where he puts words to many of Sendak's drawings (and pointing out that Sendak himself has always been a 'great larcenist'), and a reworking (incorporating a retelling) of Hans Christian Anderson's Little Match Girl, Matchless. He read us the start of this book, showing the illustrations, and talked a little about what he has brought to this new version of the story. He discussed how as time has gone on we have found the story harder and harder to bear, as we as a society have become more secular and have lost our appreciation of the transcendency that Anderson was trying to convey. So he has tried to find a fantasy in the story as passed down to us that he can use to attempt to restore that sense of transcendency.

It was an entertaining and thoughtful session, and a real treat at the start of what looked to be a long day!