Now I‘ve arranged my thoughts tonight under this title, “Can I Get There by Candlelight?” The older I get the more I find that nobody remembers this literary reference so I’m going to tell you where it’s from. I could take a quiz and say how many of you know it, but then if you raise your hands and I call on you, then you’ll be in trouble.

“How many miles to Babylon?”

“Three score miles and ten, sir.”

“Can I get there by candlelight? “

“Yes, and back again, sir.”

Well, you know it. I can see that. Is it – did anybody learn that growing up in childhood? “How many miles to Babylon?”

“Three score miles and ten, sir.”

“Can I get there by candlelight?”

“Yes, and back again, sir.”

That nursery rhyme is probably the first bit of literature I can remember. My Irish step-grandmother . . . sang it to me in a dismaying tuneless way. It was under my skin probably earlier than the sign of the cross and Little Red Riding Hood, certainly before I found Oz or Narnia, Utopia, or Dante’s Inferno. In that rhyme I met my first literary puzzle. How many miles to Babylon? Three score miles and ten, sir. Can I get there by candlelight? Yes, and back again, sir. It’s a really splendid four lines. A little literary puzzle. What Babylon evokes of the mysterious East. And I don’t mean the Babylon you can get to on the Long Island Railroad. I mean that city of incense and legend. Sandalwood and smoking coals. Amber beads, turquoise tiles. Bearded potentates, dancing slaves. Pearlescent dusks, pomegranate dawns.

But to a kid Babylon could be just the city, the next suburb over. A town just beyond like Schaghticoke or Schenectady. Still, for a sleepy kid, any destination farther from the bathroom is too far to get to at night. So how is that trip so competently promised? How many miles to Babylon? Three score miles and ten, sir. Can I get there by candlelight? Which might mean by the time you actually light the candles or it might mean can I get there with nothing more than the light of a single candle? Can I get there, little me?

Indubitably, sir. There are two ways to travel by candlelight to the center of the world. Candlelight is what lights you to bed where you can dream yourself anywhere, anytime. Candlelight is also what lights you to read when the threatening dark reduces your freedom to pass safely about. Open a book by candlelight, sir, and you can get to Babylon and back or to Oz or Jerusalem or Middle Earth or the slopes of Kilimanjaro or the moors of Yorkshire or the plains of Thessaly or the forests of the night where that tiger is burning so bright he doesn’t need a candle.

I began life in an orphanage following my mother’s death in childbirth. It’s such a dramatic thing to start with but I feel I have to say it at the beginning because it seems like, well, of course you were going to be a writer. You had that biography. Fatal hemorrhaging was what happened. The early loss of my mother, Helen Gregory was and remains tragic. Its downstream effects are still felt five decades later as new generations of my family come to understand why their older relatives are constitutionally morbid and fretful.

In time my father remarried and he and my stepmother produced three more children in the traditional method, and so in the end there were seven of us kids growing up in a house that was not, in any way, prosperous. I wonder if it’s any wonder that I grew up to be not merely a storyteller, but a storyteller who in my work is bewitched by the notion of abandoned children, of needy tykes, of babes in the wood, orphaned tooth fairies like in What-the-Dickens. Orphaned Snow Whites like in Mirror, Mirror.

Story was in my genes and in my environment. My father was a journalist in upstate New York and a well-known raconteur and my second mother was a poet. They were interested in language and reading and they were very skeptical of the newly emerging TV culture of the 1950s and 1960s. So they kept us away from the TV. So how could I not be a writer given that I had all those siblings that I needed distraction from, and my parents wouldn’t buy me a private playhouse or a horse or a personal valet. What else was there to do but write and take vengeance on them all?

Now I want you to consider a bunch of kids in the early 1960s playing so ferociously in an urban backyard that the yard has kind of bitten the dust, so to speak. Maybe a dozen kids between the ages of 13 months and eight years. One family provides about half the population of this playgroup so the oldest kid available from that family gets to be in charge.

What do we play? says everyone else. The boss kid looks around. There aren’t any bats and gloves. The jacks have gotten thrown over the fence. The neighbor’s dog is sad and wise. So for safety from us, he crawls under our back porch through the convenient hole that we dug to China the week before. Let’s play church says someone. The boss kid shrugs. He knows that hardly anybody likes to play church because only one person gets to make up the nonsense Latin and everybody else has to be quiet and holy. And being holy is no fun.

Let’s play house says someone else who shows a brand new birthday present, a plastic baby Sip-and-Drip, you know. But we already have a real baby in a stroller and our baby is much more talented. So the doll is launched over the fence to join the jacks in exile and playing house is out. Let’s build a tree house says someone looking up at the lilac bush that looms all of six feet. But there’s nothing to build there. I know, says the boss kid. Let’s play the Wizard of Oz. We go to it with a vengeance because the 1939 film aired on TV a night or two earlier. And as I say, since my parents were so strict about TV, when they would once in a great while lighten up and ease the restrictions then what we got had all the potency of gospel. The story is as real to us, as welcoming, and capacious as any house or library or church. Boss kid hands out the roles. Dorothy, Tin Man, Scarecrow, Glinda, Lion, Wizard, the Wicked Witch of the West. Everybody else can be Munchkins. Nobody wants to be Munchkins, they’re boring. So the baby and his diaper has to play the entire Munchkin population. But who can the extra kids be? Well you can be Captain Hook and you can be Peter Pan and Tinkerbell could be coming in the door says boss kid authoritatively. Besides, we need more than one bad guy. Let’s see what happens. It’s our story.

So they start out. Dorothy is still moping around Kansas, the back porch. Then the twister comes. Now the twister is played very well by the lilac bush. Dorothy stands in the middle of it twirling around breaking fronds in a realistic way and crying, whoa. The Witch goes by on her bicycle which is played by a tricycle. Captain Hook chases the Witch on his own tricycle. The twister is done. Dorothy’s house lands with a clump in Oz. Boss kid gets a great idea. Who needs Munchkins anyway. Let’s let the baby play the dead Wicked Witch of the East. Let’s put the baby halfway under the back porch with the little feet sticking out. Sadly his feet are too little to stay where they’re put so we had to stick his head out where the fascia board is running along the ground. Well it’s easy. There’s that hole from where we were digging to China last week. The baby doesn’t object. The baby can’t talk yet. The next door dog begins to whimper at having his sanctuary invaded. Now the story gets very exciting for a while. Tinker Bell announces that she alone has the power of life and death. And the story begins to take on the feeling of church even though we weren’t going to play church. Tinker Bell throws a small magic stone at people and they have to freeze in their tracks until Dorothy runs along and releases them. The Wicked Witch of the West is trying out the tornado for herself like a carnival ride. Whoa. The dog is singing along. The Cowardly Lion says, look, the Wicked Witch of the East is eating dirt.

The baby has turned and his face is in the ground. He’s not supposed to do that. He’s supposed to be dead. Don’t eat dirt, says the Cowardly Lion, who is the baby’s sister. She’s almost four years old and she knows how the world works. Bad baby. The baby is turning blue and trying to cry, but there’s too much dirt in his mouth. If he cries, mommy will come. We’re supposed to be babysitting him not pushing him under the porch.

We pat his head to try to make him stop crying. Now and the Cowardly Lion proves to have been well cast. She’s the first one to break out of character. She crawls upstairs to the kitchen on the second floor. Mommy, Joe is under the porch and he’s stuck and he can’t breathe. Stupid head, we all mutter. Mommy comes at a clip. The baby isn’t the Wicked Witch of the East anymore - it’s Joe, and he’s really stuck. Mommy tries to break the board with her hands. She can’t. Mommy runs. We didn’t know mothers could run. In a flash she is back with the first things she can lay her hands on, a big bread knife and a slotted spoon. Is she going to chop off the baby’s head? That’s not going to do much good. Is she going to kill us for suffocating the baby? She never uses the knife at all and until this day I don’t know why it was there. She attacks the ground with the spoons wooden handle. One mother working alone can dig to China faster than eight kids working all afternoon. She carves out enough earth so she can turn the baby around without wrenching his head off. She clears the dirt out of his mouth with her finger. She is swearing so bad that she can’t ever play church with us again no matter what even if we wanted her to which we don’t.

The game is ruined and it was going so well. Dorothy never gets back to Kansas. The Wicked Witch of the West is still on the loose. The story is still open. It’s very unsatisfactory. Besides, the boss kid gets punished the worst and he never understands it. We’re always blamed for not playing with Joe and look what happens. The first time we let him play with us he tries to commit suicide. It’s not our fault. I don’t know what happened to all those kids but I will tell you the boss kid became a novelist.

Now until I began to adopt my own children, I have three of them, I spent a lot of time every year speaking to children about writing. Once I arrived at an elementary school to spend some time with some fourth and fifth grade writers. There had been a crisis in the kindergartens that morning. Burst water mains or escaping gerbils or something. And the principal asked me, would I mind just stopping off at the library on my way upstairs and talking to the kindergartners for 15 or 20 minutes. Why don’t you tell them the average day in the life of a writer she said grimly. Maybe that’ll hold them.

I made my way to the library where about 40 little kids malingered in various stages of anomie and despair. The librarian and teachers calmed the little ones down and said, now this nice man is going to tell us all about being a writer. Can anyone tell me what a writer is? Well no one could. Lower lips wobbled. I concluded at once that telling them this story of an average day in my life might possibly turn them off the alphabet for good. So I decided instead to tell them about an unusual day.

Do you want to know where I went last week, I asked them. Nobody nodded which I took as a mandate to continue. First I put my secondhand IBM Selectric II typewriter in my car I said. Then I turned the ignition key and the car went, brn, brn. And I got on the highway and I headed toward the mountains in Upstate New York. I made a lot of interesting sound effects to show those kids how the bald rear tire first went pop, pop, pop, pop, pop. And then bump, bump, bump, bump, bump. And then brrrrr. And then blew out, blp, leaving me without a spare on the side of the Mass Pike.

Well, I had to thumb a ride to the next tollbooth to call for help. When a truck slowed down and pulled off the road a ways ahead I ran up to it. I told the driver that I couldn’t leave my valuables in my car because it was old and it didn’t lock. He said he’d wait. So I ran back and I collected my typewriter while he waited. I heaved the heavy thing onto the tall seat and climbed up next to it. The truck driver looked alarmed. Why do you carry that thing around with you? he asked. I’m a writer. You never know when you might need to write something, I said. For instance, I probably should write you a thank you note for bringing me to the tollbooth. The conversation sort of dried up after that.

Eventually, I made it though, hours later than planned, to the chalet I had rented in Indian Lake, New York. I unloaded the car and I strolled out onto the deck. Now across the valley ranged some nice pine forested mountains. As the sun began to descend the mountains went pinkish. Back and forth on the deck chipmunks were skittering looking like rolled up balls of socks and skittering along. I was so happy I told the kindergartners, so relieved to be there at last that I opened up my mouth and just sang out at the hills, la lala, la lala la lala. Now there were some wolves who lived in the hills across the way and they heard me. They threw their heads in the air and they howled back, ra rara, ra rara, ra rara. And we kept up an antiphonal chorus for as much of the notch music as we could all remember. Then I went in and opened up my sleeping bag and laid down and went to sleep. Now that was one day in the life of a writer I told these kids. Now writers pay attention to the world I said. All artists do. But sometimes to make things sound better you change them. There was one part of the story that I made up. One part that didn’t really happen. Can anyone tell me what it is?

And the kids all chorused back at me, that the chipmunks looked like socks. Isn’t that great? Isn’t that curious? Wild wolves converse in the literature of 18th century chamber music seem more improbable than the metaphor chipmunks can seem like socks. Socks can seem like chipmunks. What a magic spell is a metaphor.

When we talk about fairytales, when we talk about writing of any sort, we talk about metaphors and the ability, as the Greeks say, to carry meaning across from one thing to another. Or in a sense to divide the line between things so that one thing becomes another. The moon is a ghostly galleon. There is no frigate like a book. I wandered lonely as a cloud. The house was made of gingerbread . . . Metaphor connects the dots. So here’s me and a bunch of kids in Saratoga, New York. I proposed to the fifth graders that they write something with an element of surprise in it so that sooner or later we as readers will be required to gasp: ah hah!

After fifteen minutes one girl tried to be called on so enthusiastically that she threw her arm out. Before I sent her to the nurse for an icepack, I let her read her story.

“When I think back to my best friend and the happiness we knew, tears leap down my face. Why did it have to happen? Why did God take her from me? For as long as I live I will remember her, the most wonderful companion anyone could have. I can see her now, her beautiful brown hair and dark darting eyes as if it was only yesterday. And I come to realize that God sent her as a guardian angel for me to befriend me in my time of loneliness, to look on from heaven above now that God has taken her away. For as long as I live I know I shall never again know such happiness with a hamster.”

The girl was really pissed off at the mucus-y snort that erupted out of my nose. When I could speak again, wiping my eyes and my chin, I just said just – you did it so well. It really did surprise me. This is serious, the girl pouted. I’m writing from the depths of my personal pain, and I’m not talking about my arm. I agree it hurts, I said. Fresh from her triumph, the girl flounced off to inflect more of her personal pain on the nurse. She had made a connection and she was going to make it work.

Storytelling, whether it be your own life story or some imaginary characters is about shaping the confusion and the contradiction of overwhelming detail into a metaphor that carries meaning.

Now here’s the oldest story that I still have a manuscript. I wrote it when I was 10. It’s not very good. It’s a – It’s not a fantasy. It’s nothing like what I write as an adult. It’s called The Hotel Bomb and begins one day in 1859, Bob Binder got a letter that said his wife who was staying in a hotel was about to be blown up by a bomb. Well, that’s not a bad start at least. The story goes down from there I’m afraid. I wish I could write that crisply today. Through a series of cliffhanger episodes, the story proceeds with a keen lack of logic. Bob and various friends rush to save his wife from the bomb in the hotel. On the third and penultimate chapter, the story reaches the crisis in which Bob learns that his wife is staying on the 50th floor of the skyscraper and that elevators have not yet been invented.

Incidentally, once I asked a group of second graders if they knew what a crisis in a story was. One toothy little kid raised his hand and said, “ I do.” . . . He said, “Ah, it’s when things get so bad you have to say, ‘Christ.’ Which more or less covers it. But Bob managed to save his wife by throwing the bomb out the window. And on the extra piece of paper on the back I lied rather extravagantly by advertising like on the back of a library book, other books by Gregory Maguire. Then I listed Crime and Punishment, War and Peace, Pride and Prejudice, Green Eggs and Ham. I wanted it to look like a series.

Art inevitably portrays the artist. It’s why we bother to try to teach children, all children to write. Not so that they will be artists but so that they might know themselves better even if they’re writing inanely like an intellectually lumpen seventh grade student I once had who only ever wrote one line of fiction, but it was a good line. Took him all semester to get to it. It was almost a portrait of his own feelings about himself as a student writer. He raised his hand on the very last day. I said you have to write one sentence or you’re going to fail, so he wrote one sentence. His whole semester’s work considered of this one line.

“Once there was a terribly, terrible dancer named Thud.”

Which just about covered it.

Now those of you who read The New Yorker might remember a couple of years ago there was a piece by Mary Gordon about a place called Storytown, a vacationland she use to go to in Upstate New York near Lake George. She said there were concrete displays of places like Cinderella’s pumpkin carriage and the house of the old lady built in a shoe and the Mad Hatter and the March Hare. I was there once. I went to that very place because my father had a press pass. He took his seven kids there. We were about the only kids there and it was pretty sad. Cinderella had a migraine and the Old Woman Who Lived In A Shoe scowled when we went up, all seven of us, to make ourselves at home in her footwear.

But here’s another metaphor for you. Storytown is like a kind of narrative arena or a matrix against which all narrative variations are possible and against which our own lives unspool. It’s the backyard where the Wicked Witch of the West and Captain Hook can meet and get married and have a pair of twins, little snookums and little hookums. We can’t help arranging the material of our moments and our years into some sort of shapeliness that suggests a meaning. Helping me make lasagna one night for a sick neighbor, my six-year-old Alex asked, “Mozzarella - is that a cousin of Cinderella?”

Now do you know that P.L. Travers, the author of Mary Poppins wrote that her Storytown was the bosom of her own family. And for those of us who write a little bit of memoir we know that our families are our greatest resource. She recognized the three Fates, you know the three Fates from Greece that have your whole life and all of history in their thrall. She recognized them as her great aunts and she wrote they were huge, cloudy presences with power it seems to loose and bind. Perched watchfully like crows on a fence at the edge of our family circle. One of them it was said, or rather it was whispered, the rumor being so hideous. One of them lived on her capital. What was capital, I wondered, wild with conjecture, full of concern. And the dreadful answer came bubbling up. It was herself, her substance. Each day she disappeared to her room. It was not to rest like anyone else, but secretly to live on her own person, to gnaw perhaps a toe, a finger, or to wolf down some inner organ. The fact that there was no visible sign of this activity did not fool me for a moment. A strange and dreadful deed was here and not to be denied. Aunt Jane stealthily nibbling at her own liver was at once her own Prometheus and her own eagle. The myth did not need to be told me. It rose and spoke itself. Mary Poppins is also on Broadway these days.

Travers concludes, I am glad, therefore, to have kept my terror whole and thus retained a strong link with a child’s things as they are. Where all things relate to one another and all are congruous. Hercules, the Frog Prince, and Joseph in his colored coat march with the child to Babylon by candlelight and back again. Now I’ll come back to Babylon here, and I’m coming to the close because I want to have some time for questions. But I’m reminded about this.

As a novelist I’ve been invited into many schools libraries across this great nation of ours and I’ve seen many dioramas. I’ve seen dioramas of Harry Potter and dioramas of Madeline and dioramas of The Silence of the Lambs. I love dioramas especially when they have been up too long and the mucilage begins to dry out and small plastic figurines lose their heads and trees fall over in the dust and despair and ennui overtakes even Harold and the Purple Crayon, especially when the actual purple Crayola crayon has melted into actual purple Crayola puddle, and the cutout figure of Harold is becoming unglued literally and curling up like a window shade feet first.

Once I carried to a potluck dinner party a salad I had made intending it to look like the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. But due to an accident on the highway I was 90 minutes late and my broccoli trees had collapsed into my half a melon lagoon pool. Their heads lie upside down in the Seven Seas Salad Dressing dip. And the cunning little walkways that I had elaborately paved with bricks of Laughing Cow cheese squares had begun to spread. And the marshy area made by putting tips of chives one by one into a base of cream cheese mud had slid against the piece de resistance, a statue of the Michelangelo’s David carved from an exceptionally well endowed carrot. Frankly, by the time I got to the party the Hanging Gardens of Babylon was a mess. It was a dump. I dropped the whole thing in the garbage.

So Babylon might end up being useful only as a metaphor like Zanadu, like Ithaca, like El Dorado, like Oz. Now I want to go back to where we started to the business of playing. In my novel, Wicked, the book continues the game that we played in the backyard in North Albany 45 years ago.

The green-skinned witch played by Margaret Hamilton in the film is, who guessed it, talented. At a gathering of students in the bar in the novel following the burial of one of their nannies, Elphaba, the least likely to succeed, the spikiest among them, is pushed to sing. And I like reading this one paragraph because it proves Elphaba could sing long before Broadway got a hold of her. I made sure she could sing. That was intentional to me because I thought she’s one of the few people in the movie that doesn’t get her own song so I made sure that she sang as part of the plot of the novel.

The room quieted down. Elphaba made up a little song on the spot. A song of longing and otherness. Of far aways and future days. Strangers close their eyes to listen. Elphaba had an OK voice. Boc saw the imaginary place she conjured up. A land where injustice and common cruelty and despotic rule in the beggaring fist of drought didn’t work together to hold everyone by the neck. No, he wasn’t giving her credit. Elphaba had a good voice. Later he thought the melody faded like a rainbow after a storm and what was left was calm and possibility and relief. You don’t need me to connect the dots in all this random material I suspect. In the wake of the most dreadful tragedies we can still sing. We have to. In singing we can revise the world. In telling stories to ourselves about ourselves however cleverly disguised in fiction, we can pour meaning into the contradictions and the mysteries of ourselves. We can reframe the parameters. We can propose justice. We can imagine peace. We can invent equity. We can surrender Dorothy, that goddess from the sky. She’s not coming back. We can do it for ourselves.

Some readers who read that passage of Elphaba singing in the bar will realize . . . it’s clear that what Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West is singing in this pub is Over the Rainbow. From her point of view, anyplace else would be better than Oz, and she’ll spend the rest of her life trying to make it so, retelling her story despite the fact that the reputation of a green-skinned witch will always proceed her and box her by its preconceptions.

Forty-five years ago the Maguire household is settled down. The Wicked Witch of the East is breathing nicely, safely in his crib, tired out from his starring role. The Cowardly Lion is taking a bath. She is singing Do Re Mi through a hole in the plastic by the spigot to her brother in the closet next door. Captain Hook is in his cowboy pajamas sorting his baseball cards. The slotted spoon is in the draw back to being a kitchen implement. The tornado of the lilac tree is outside in the dark forgotten awaiting its decimation next week when we try to build Noah’s Ark out of lilac wattle and Play Dough daub. The accident that nearly sophisticated his brother was really that, just an accident. It was happily averted. There’s plenty of time in the future to ponder culpability.

But meanwhile, what about Dorothy? She’s been left in Oz today stranded there in her play catastrophe by the interruption of real catastrophe. But not to worry. The book is opened. The original is unimpeachable, always available. You can go home to it. And really with books as places to go and to come from, there really is no place like home. Thank you very much.