Hear him roar: Gregory Maguire's newest Ozian adventure

When writing about local author Gregory Maguire, it's hard to resist using one particularly well-worn phrase: "Friend of Dorothy."

It's just too easy. Maguire is gay, partnered for 11 years to the man with whom he raises their three children, and casual readers probably know him best as the author of "Wicked", a novel that refined and redefined the people, places, and events that constitute L. Frank Baum's "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz". Hell, "Wicked" was even famously adapted as a Tony Award-winning musical, and it doesn't get much gayer than that.

In other words, avoiding easy puns is no simple task. Luckily, Maguire is kind enough to cut to the chase himself.

"I loved fairy tales. I read them all as a kid," he says. "Then, when I got to be a fairy myself, I went back and read them again."

Leaning back in the living room armchair at his home outside of Boston, Maguire chuckles at a moment as gold as a yellow brick road. But lest we stray too far from the appropriate path, he's quick to clarify the real significance of those tales to his young mind.

"I read them to find out how people survived," he says. "How they find virtue in themselves. How they find the strength and courage that they need to win out in the end."

Happily Ever Afters aren't always guaranteed in life, but Maguire has certainly enjoyed much success as an author. While "Wicked" gained initial popularity on the hook of humanizing the Wicked Witch of the West, it also set in motion a mythology of its own: Maguire continued the saga in 2005 with "Son of a Witch"; the latest installment, A Lion Among Men, was just released this week; and he tells Bay Windows that as soon as he finishes his current promotional tour he will immediately begin work on the fourth - and, he suspects, final - installment in the series.

"When I wrote "Wicked", it was intended to be a stand-alone book," says Maguire. "It would start with a person when they were born, and end however many pages later, on the day that they died. I intentionally left a lot of plot strands unresolved, because one of the ways we feel the death of a person is that we feel deprived of knowing what would happen to them, given the various complications in their life, if they had the time to sort them out."

Of course, those unresolved strands also allowed Maguire to continue building the original mythology he created. "A Lion Among Men", for example, investigates the life and times of The Cowardly Lion, whom Maguire casts as a government operative of the Land of Oz.

"In 'Wicked' and 'Son of a Witch', Elphaba and Liir [Wicked Witch of the West and her son, respectively] were iconoclasts working very hard to be themselves. That's not the case with the lion. He's working very hard to not be himself. He's working to fit in, and it's not a useful exercise."

Readers seeking the obvious allusion might read that as an oblique reference to a struggle with sexuality, but not so fast. Even while acknowledging the contention that sometimes exists between the Catholicism of his upbringing and his own life as a gay man, Maguire says reconciling the two came surprisingly easy.

"When it came time to wrassle with that, I did ask, 'What does this mean?'" says Maguire. "'Does this mean I'm bad? Corrupted? That I have no place in the church of my grandparents or my dead mother?'"

"It's not an argument that lasted with me more than a few months," he concludes. Though he still attends Catholic services at a progressive local church, he says he does understand how others may have experienced greater conflict with their faith. "I used to think people were exaggerating their stories of oppression from the church," he says. "But as those stories became more clear and open, especially over the last twenty years or so as we [in American society] have become more right-wing and militarized, I can sympathize far more easily."

It's certainly part and parcel of the political climate, with cultural anthropology being a main source of examination in Maguire's books, the "Wicked" series in particular. From the presidential campaign sign on his front lawn to the Human Rights Campaign sticker on the car parked in his driveway, it's obvious that Maguire is passionate about politics, a notion that shouldn't surprise readers of his work.

"There's a civil war about to break out, and it's over a commodity that everyone needs," says Maguire. He's not talking about the real politics on the nightly news, but of those taking place in "A Lion Among Men". "It's not over oil [in the book], it's over water."

"How much more topical could it be?" he smiles of the novel. "The banks are failing in Oz, the high courts are trying to decide who is going to be the next leader, and there are military maneuvers underway over oil."

"I mean, water!" he catches himself. Then chuckles. "It's all so fiendishly and regrettably recognizable."

But then, fairy tales often are. Even if not everyone picks up on the allusions.

"Somebody showed me an article once that listed the 10 Most Influential Gay Books of the Year," he recalls. "There was a letter to the editor from someone asking, 'Hey, what about 'Son of a Witch'?'" That installment in the 'Wicked' series saw its main protagonist engage in a hot and heavy tryst with another male character.

"The person asked, 'Doesn't anyone notice what Maguire is doing? He's making fantasy lands a safe place for gay characters!'"

Who would guess that of all places, Oz would need the help?

Gregory Maguire will appear on his national book tour for A Lion Among Men at the Brattle Theatre in Cambridge on Wednesday, Oct. 22 at 6 p.m. Additional local appearances are scheduled in Providence, R.I., and Portsmouth, N. H. For a full schedule and more information, visit www.gregorymaguire.com.