Gregory Maguire's CRESS WATERCRESS

I met Gregory Maguire years ago at Kindling Words in Vermont. He is the super nice and humble creator of the New York Times Best-seller WICKED, that was turned into the award-winning Broadway musical of the same name. But he writes other stories too, of course. His latest is for the younger set, about a small rabbit named Cress. Gregory stopped by to talk about his thinking behind CRESS WATERCRESS (illustrated by David Litchfield, who I interviewed HERE). (The photos are of Gregory's writing studio.) My new novel, CRESS WATERCRESS, seems largely to be about grief and growing up. A rabbit family who, until the story begins has lived as a standard-issue family of four (Papa, Mama, big sister, baby brother), finds they have to move from their comfortable private warren when the father rabbit disappears and is presumed dead. They have to go downmarket, as it were, and take quarters in the shabby basement flat of a derelict apartment tree. As the season changes from late spring to early summer, Cress makes new friends, crosses the line with her mother once or twice, becomes fussed, lost, found, and fussed over. She sees that she can survive.
But one of the many strategies for her own survival that thread through the story is Cress’s observation that everyone else is making things—being creative. Her mother is a weaver. Lady Agatha Cabbage dabbles in dying her own fur. The hen escaped from a local farm can’t seem to help make eggs almost without thinking about it. “You just sit there until it comes out,” says the hen placidly, on how to make things.
And in the novel’s very final page, we see CRESS turning the page—as it is—and writing herself, writing about her lost father. The story of Cress’s survival is, in secret, this story: that only in trying to tell her grief can she get to the truth. In telling is the continuity of her father’s life; in telling is the continuity of her own. Under lots of levels of disguise—adventure and humor and the great floods of feeling that threaten to swamp the young—Cress’s story is the bildungsroman of a writer. She doesn’t feel herself aiming in that direction throughout her adventures, but that is where she is headed just the same. And why we have her story to read, when it comes to that.