found me and my colleague chatting up a storm. She approached us and said,“ Are you possibly waiting for Katherine Paterson?” That was my inelegant introduction to a woman whose work I had already deeply admired— and whose friendship I hadn’ t expected.
She became a permanent fixture at our conferences, and when my colleagues and I left Simmons and started a nonprofit called Children’ s Literature New England, Katherine came every single summer— always a lead keynote speaker, beloved, cherished, respected, and comic. Yes, she’ s funny. Always moving, always clever with the arrangement of a talk, so she would turn a corner and bring you with her before you knew what neighborhood you were going into. I learned a lot about speaking from her, and a lot about how to connect with an audience. But I also learned about the
nature of friendship. She had nothing but clear-eyed regard for me as a young person and cared as much about hearing how I was doing as she ever cared to discuss how she was doing. That is the rubric of a friendship, and not everybody can carry that off.
Maurice Sendak, another dear friend, taught me to really trust the superior knowledge of the subconscious, that it usually knows more than the conscious mind about what needs to be said and what you need to do. He would just wait until his subconscious was ready to toss him another clue. I have learned to rely on that myself.
Megan: Wicked was the first adult novel you wrote after 17 years of writing only children’ s books. I read that you were in London thinking about the nature of good and evil, and decided to take the Wicked Witch of the West and flesh her out, give her more of a back story. I would love to hear more about that thought process.
Gregory: When I started to write Wicked in about 1992 or‘ 93, my first ambition had been to write the life story of a true sociopath or a psychopath— somebody akin to Stalin or Hitler, with menace interlaced into their integuments and pumping through their brain, through the heartless heart that lives in their heart cavity. That was my aesthetic ambition. I gave Elphaba a dicey inception and ugliness from infancy. I gave her the aberration of a mouthful of snake teeth and the ability to seem menacing even to the people who should have loved her the best. At about page 38, when she was about one or two, I finished a certain scene by having her crawling across the floorboards of their cottage in
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