COC Book Club

Readers, you asked, and Gregory Maguire has graciously answered your questions!
 
Q: I was surprised and thrilled at the setting of Holland for Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister. Why did you select this particular place and time?

GM: My prime ambition was to write a novel in which I could compare relative aspects of beauty. I initially began with a notion I might use 19th century Denmark or Sweden, if for no other reason than that would give me a tax-exempt permission to visit those countries for the first time. But before long I realized that it would be hard to consider how we value beauty unless I also had, in some way, a chance to talk about money, and then I remembered the great bust in the tulip market. (My book came out simultaneously with THE GIRL IN THE PEARL EARRING and a year before a wonderful book on the tulip crisis in Holland, so I had to do a whole polder of research that, a year later, would have been available to me within the stiff boards of a single book or two.)

Once I settled on Holland because of tulips, it all fell into place. For one thing, I grew up in Albany New York, which was settled by the Dutch in the early 1600’s (even before Manhattan) and which to this day holds an annual beauty contest in April and May called the Tulip Festival. Celebrating the beauty of young women at their prime, at the time of the prime of the thousands and thousands (perhaps 10, 20 thousand tulips in bloom all at once in Albany’s Washington

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Our COC Book Club is hosting a special blog entry with Gregory Maguire, author of Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister. Bookworms will know the name most associated with Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, but Mr. Maguire has written numerous other novels, both for children and adults. In fact, Mr. Maguire’s literary career began as a children’s author in 1978 with the publication of The Lightning Time.  

Since then, Mr. Maguire has published 38 works, including short stories, picture books, fantasy, realistic and historic fiction and nonfiction. Writing text for picture books is especially difficult, according to Mr. Maguire who likens the process to a baking a soufflé: “With minimal text the work must be strong, coherent, and light, and the effort of constructing it must not show. (No eggshells. No illicit contractions.)”

That said, Mr. Maguire is a writer of high calibre. His works have been translated into eight languages, including Dutch, Hebrew and Japanese. His work has also been translated to both Broadway musical in the case of Wicked, which debuted on Broadway staring Idina Menzel, Kristin Chenoweth and Joel Grey, as well as film, in the case of Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, which was filmed by ABC/Disney and starred Stockard Channing and Jonathan Pryce.

So now you know a little bit more about Mr. Maguire. You might even say that Mr. Maguire is the Roald Dahl of America! And we’re delighted to have him on the blog to answer some questions around the tale of Iris, ugly stepsister.

I've finished reading Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister and am very keen to talk about this fascinating take on the Cinderella story.

Author Gregory Maguire has graciously agreed to answer some questions for us. Please e-mail them to me at: giannaw@coc.ca or leave them here in the comments section by end of day Thursday!

Watch this space for more posts shortly!