at the Simmons College Center for the Study of Children’ s Literature. In 1987, Gregory co-founded a nonprofit educational charity, Children’ s Literature New England, Inc., and was co-director for twenty-five years. In 1990, he earned his PhD in English and American literature from Tufts University. He has published several dozen novels and continues to release new works to this day.
He and his husband, painter Andy Newman, have three adopted children, two from Cambodia, and one from
Guatemala. In 2009, the family was featured on Oprah in a segment called“ Unconventional, Unforgettable Dads.” They split their time between Vermont and Massachusetts.
From his home in Strafford, VT, Gregory opens up about his family, his craft, legendary friendships in the world of children’ s literature, and the long, winding, yellow-brick road that took Elphaba from the page to the stage to the silver screen.
Megan: Growing up, the library was like a sanctuary for you, one of the only places you were allowed to go as a kid.
Gregory: My own dear parents, God rest all three of their souls, were all interested in language and in literature. It was free to have a library card. Since we were not prosperous, the library was our babysitter, our governess, our Maria von Trapp, our Mary Poppins. My father was a journalist, my stepmother, who raised me, had been a poet, and my birth mother, who died when I was born, was interested in writing as well. In letters of hers that have come down to me through the ages, I can see that she had a vivid and brusque, Dorothy Parker-like tone. She also had a capacity for nonsense in her writing that neither my father nor my stepmother had, and since that’ s part of my own character, I feel I really did inherit something through the chromosomes of genetics.
Beyond handing us our American citizenship and our Irish Catholicism, my parents said,“ You work it out for yourselves. Write about it, think about it, and proceed on your own best instincts and your own best intellect.” That was what the library was for us. Three of my brothers became writers. My parents wanted us to be doctors or lawyers, and we all ended up wanting to write, because that was what we understood.
Megan: When did you have the epiphany that you wanted to be a writer?
Gregory: I started writing when I was about five. I stayed in as often as I could and crouched at the coffee table in the living room with scraps of paper and made stories and pictures of anything I could think of. Let’ s make a map. Let’ s make a comic strip. Let’ s make a play. Let’ s make a string of related poems. I had, and I have, I’ m afraid, a ferocious need to create something every day. Some people need to swim; some people need to practice scales on their flute. I need to use language every day— by hand or on the keyboard— otherwise I feel kind of intellectually constipated.
My stepmother said to me once,“ Gregory, what is the purpose of art?” I didn’ t know. She said,“ You have to remember— the purpose of art is to communicate. If you are not communicating, then there’ s something wrong with what you’ re doing.” I’ ve never forgotten that as I choose how to shape a sentence, when to be nervy and brash and break the rules, and when to pull myself back from self-admiration.
Megan: You’ ve kept a journal for over 60 years. Has that practice fed your writing?
Gregory: I started when I was about 13 or 14. I realized pretty early on that one of the ways to dispel a sense of responsibility for being the cause of the death of my mother— even if it was inadvertent, it was still a tragedy— was to try to live as earnestly and as attentively as I could, to soak up the life that had been denied her. The journal was a good tool for that, and it remains so. I’ m just trying, right until my dying day, to live with ferocity and with intention and with vivid engagement, as a way to thank my birth parents for having brought me into the world. The journal and the fiction writing are really separate tracks, though. I also got ideas by daring myself to do the assignments I gave to children. For a long time before Wicked was published, I was spending time in classrooms all over New England and New York as an author in residence. One of my strategies was to arrive at schools with two manila envelopes— one filled with images of real things cut from magazines, the other with images from our imaginative landscapes: a dragon, an elf, a robot, an alien. I’ d say: put one hand in each envelope, take out one image from each, and write me the scene where these characters engage. It doesn’ t have to have an ending or a plot, but it does have to have something so vivid that Steven Spielberg could come in tomorrow and
VTMAG. COM SUMMER / FALL 2026 23