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The Writing of Fantasy

Gregory Maguire Susan Cooper Roger Sutton: November 14, 2007; Running Time: 1:31:01

About the Lecture

About the Lecture

Sometimes the world gives off a glare “that’s hard to look at directly,” says Susan Cooper, and for her, making sense of things means engaging in fantasy -- “a way of getting to the truth without looking at the real.” Cooper and fellow writer Gregory Maguire admit to working out personally difficult questions, and often cosmic conflicts, in their books of fantasy for children and adults.

Maguire, author of Wicked, says he was bothered by the build-up to the first Gulf War, which fed into his novel for grownups about a children’s character (the Wicked Witch of the West). He calls fantasy “escapism plus something else.” Says Maguire, “When I sense I’m approaching a story that’s going to have to be told in a fantastic way, it is usually because it’s about something so upsetting to me that I wouldn’t trust myself to write about it in a naturalistic way, whether it be corruption of government in any particular decade of my life, or whether it be stress that can exist within children between the need to believe in magic and the injunction to believe in God...”

Says Cooper, “You’re talking to yourself really. So many of us say, ‘I don’t write for children,’ and we don’t; we are published for children, read by children. You deal with your own passions, emotions, problems, by having them flow into a piece of writing that needs that particular emotion.…”

When moderator Roger Sutton wonders about “this human impulse to make things up that are impossible,” Cooper responds about her desire to tell “deep truths,” cloaked in extraordinary features. Fantasy offers the freedom “to think bigger” while offering the protagonist something to identify with. Says Cooper, “There’s a reason why a lot of us start from the real world and go into magic, the way I tend to do…It’s partly that you want your reader to retain a sense of reality, but you’re going through fantasy to truth. It’s that indirect approach that’s going to get you somewhere.”

Maguire believes that the origins of his fantasy literature, while connecting with the tradition of myths and legends, spring from “the wet ground of the subconscious.” As a child he was dreaming and play acting in the dirt alley next to his home. This nourished a more deliberate engagement with fantasy as he got older. “One of the reasons one bothers to write as well as read fantasy is to continue to strengthen the muscle of the imagination, the muscle that in fact can consider that things can be different, things in the hard world in which we live, our hard lives.”

Lecture Details

Location: 32-123

About the Speakers

Gregory Maguire

Author

Gregory Maguire is the author of the novels Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, and many other novels for adults and children. Many of Maguire's adult novels are revisionist retellings of classic children's stories. Wicked was turned into a hit Broadway musical of the same name.

Maguire received his Ph.D. in English and American Literature from Tufts University, and his B.A. from the State University of New York at Albany. He was a professor and co-director at the Simmons College Center for the Study of Children's Literature from 1979-1985. In 1987 he co-founded Children's Literature New England. Maguire's most recent novel is .

Susan Cooper

Author

Susan Cooper has been writing for more than 30 years. At Oxford University, where she earned an M.A. in English, she was the first woman to edit the university newspaper. After graduation, she worked as a reporter on London's Sunday Times. She wrote her first books, Mandrake and Over Sea, Under Stone during this period.

She arrived in the U.S. in 1963, and after writing two books for adults, set out on her famous children's fantasy series, The Dark is Rising in the 1970s. She published other novels, including The Boggart and its successor, in the 1990s, and a book, Victory was published in 2006. She has also written a number of picture books for children.

Roger Sutton

Editor in Chief, The Horn Book and Author

Roger Sutton has served as editor of the children's book resource, The Horn Book, since 1996. He was previously editor of The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books, and a children's and young adult librarian. He is also the author of Hearing Us Out: Voices from the Gay and Lesbian Community.

Sutton received his M.A. in Library Science from the University of Chicago in 1982, and a B.A. from Pitzer College in 1978.

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