Gregory Maguire

Author of Wicked, the revisionist retelling of the Land of Oz from the witch’s point of view. Kyle’s notes capture Maguire describing his own method — “Give it the Maguire treatment,” meaning to “steal someone’s story and make something new out of it,” a self-aware act of “petty larceny” on an existing tale. In the book’s afterword Maguire treats fiction as a “map to the World Next Door” needed to navigate the World at Hand, a framing Kyle files under Storytelling.

Context: Gregory Maguire is an American novelist best known for Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West (1995), a reimagining of L. Frank Baum’s Oz that became the basis for the long-running Broadway musical.

Where this appears

• Wicked — Maguire is the author; the page draws on his afterword’s view of fiction as a navigational “map” and his self-described method of remaking existing stories.