Author Gregory Maguire remembers attending a compact disc signing event for the Broadway musical Wicked, a blockbuster based on his novel of the same name.

Cast members were set up at a long table, and Maguire looked at the line and saw women clutching their CDs.

Gregory Maguire

“Every 16th woman would get through the line to Idina [Menzel] — they’d get to Elphaba — and they would burst into tears,” Maguire said in a telephone interview from his home in Concord, Mass. “Sometimes it was a young girl, and sometimes it was an older woman. But there was one woman — you couldn’t see what she looked like because she was wearing a burqa, the veil that goes from head to foot. I remember pulling my chair a little closer, and she said to Idina, ‘This is the first time since I’ve been in America that I’ve seen myself mirrored in anything at all.’ It never occurred to me when I was writing the novel that she would move so many different people. I mean, I knew she was a hero to me, but I was surprised that she moved so many people.”

Maguire will speak at 6 p.m. Saturday in Hubbard Hall on the Texas Woman’s University campus.

Hubbard Hall is located near the intersection of Bell Avenue and Administration Drive. The free lecture is the conclusion of the Denton Reads community book club season.

Denton Reads brings small groups together to discuss and study a selected title. It’s a partnership between the Denton Public Library and the University of North Texas and TWU libraries.

The 2009 Denton Reads title is Maguire’s bestselling novel, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West. The book is a reimagining of The Wizard of Oz. Only in this story, Elphaba, the green-skinned girl with supernatural powers and an allergy to water, is the protagonist.

Composer Stephen Schwarz (Godspell) adapted the novel into a musical that is still producing Broadway tours. The musical focused mostly on the relationship between Galinda the good witch and Elphaba, her college roommate. The women become friends, until Elphaba finally lives up to the suspicions surrounding her green skin and magical powers.

Maguire watched as audiences embraced the wicked witch, who really wasn’t born evil. Readers and fans of the musical came to know the iconic witch as an outcast who was branded a criminal — and wicked — before she’d done anything wrong.

Maguire’s novel revisited Frank L. Baum’s story and the classic MGM movie. Maguire said The Wizard of Oz was a huge part of his childhood.

“We came from a time when there wasn’t a lot of entertainment available to us the way it is now,” Maguire said. “With the movies, it was sort of a calendrical thing. It came out the same time every year, and it was something we all did. It was sort of a community event.”

The story captured the imagination of his whole neighborhood, he said.

“Just like children play house, and school and play war, we played Wizard of Oz,” he said. “You would do it so often that you’d get bored with it. And what do you do when you get bored? We’d improvise.”

The child’s play of adding scenes or events here and there stuck with Maguire as an adult, and he said he finds children’s stories especially fun to embroider.

“As a writer and as a grownup, I find that there is something porous about material for children. Probably because, as grownups, we think we know what’s best for children and what they can tolerate. So it’s not like I’m not going back to the Old Testament or Pride and Prejudice or The Brothers Karamazov. I went back to something that did leave things to your imagination.”

Baum, who wrote the novel The Wizard of Oz, was creating an American fairy tale. A Kansas farm girl, Dorothy Gale, is suddenly displaced to a land over the rainbow. She meets a scarecrow, a tin woodsman and a cowardly lion. And in the middle of the story is the wicked witch of the west.

“There’s a witch in a castle. That’s right out of The Brothers Grimm,” Maguire said. “We needed to trust that she was bad by the trappings of her evil, not because she has done anything bad. That said a lot to me. We rush to judgment about people whom we think are bad based on how they look and not by what they’ve done. With the witch, she was ugly and green, so of course she was evil.”

Maguire never understood the antipathy between the witch and the wizard, and that ended up being a plot point in his reimagining of the story.

“Even more important than the witch is the wizard,” he said. “I was also very puzzled that the wizard, who does terrible things and sends Dorothy and her friends off to the west, maybe to be killed, presented himself as an OK guy. When it is revealed that he isn’t a ball of fire and smoke, that he’s just a man, Dorothy tells him he’s a bad man. When he tells Dorothy ‘I’m not a bad man, I’m a bad wizard,’ she swallows it. That didn’t make any sense to me. The wizard clearly did some morally reprehensible things.”

Maguire will speak about his upcoming novel Matchless in Denton. The book is a reimagining of Hans Christian Anderson’s Little Match Girl. Once more, Maguire was drawn to a story about a character living in scarcity. He said he’s attracted to characters who find that ingenuity resolves their state of want.

“It’s almost a truism in stories that the engine that drives any narrative boils down to one sentence: What does the main character need?” Maguire said. “Whether it’s Elizabeth Bennett needing a husband, Scarlett needing food for her family, or Rhett Butler, or Ashley, because that’s whom she needed, in that way, knowing the poverty of the character makes them stand up more clearly for me.”

When he had written one-third of Wicked, Maguire said, he talked to a cultural anthropologist who had worked in Iran. He asked the anthropologist what he’d want to know when setting off for an isolated community.

“He gave me a list of 18 things: the relative differences between the station of men and women, how they got their health care, what their agricultural base was. I went back and added some of those details. Wicked is probably the work where I’ve done the most work creating a universe,” he said.

Ultimately, Maguire said, he wrote the book to explain through fiction where evil comes from.

“I didn’t know very much about the nature of evil when I started writing,” he said. “Here’s my conclusion, though: Every evil action is the act of someone who has something they can’t accept in themselves, so they have to go and annihilate the world.”

Maguire said he would come to Denton knowing that a community book club would generate a lot of different responses to the novel.

“Well, I imagine that in any group of people who read Wicked, there is going to be a healthy portion of people who say: ‘I don’t like this kind of book. It’s too long and too complicated,’” Maguire said. “And there’s going to be another group of people who say: ‘I don’t like fantasy, but this really moved me.’ I understand that myself. There are things that I myself don’t have a way to get into, you know? I want people to know that I understand that and I’m OK with it. I want people to know that everyone doesn’t have to like the book, and, well, thank you for having me.”

LUCINDA BREEDING can be reached at 940-566-6877. Her e-mail address is cbreeding@dentonrc.com .