On The Next Queen of Heaven

The Concord Free Press interviewed Gregory Maguire as The Next Queen of Heaven went to press. Set in the grotty upstate town of Thebes, The Next Queen of Heaven is a Christmas tale gone horribly wrong. Clocked by a Catholic statuette, Mrs. Leontina Scales starts speaking in tongues. Tabitha Scales and her brothers scheme to save their mother or surrender her to Jesus—whatever comes first. Meanwhile, choir director Jeremy Carr, caught between lust and ambition, fumbles his way toward Y2K. 

Only a modern master like Gregory Maguire can spin a tale this frantic, funny, and farcical. Novelist Ann Patchett calls it “an out-of-control carnival ride—terrifying, thrilling, a once-in-a-lifetime adventure.” And we agree.

Please describe The Next Queen of Heaven in a sentence or two.
In a flyspeck upstate NY town at the end of the second millennium, something dangerous is coming—either Y2K, salvation, or murder. Following an accident in a church basement, a fundamentalist family is knocked off its fundaments while the choir director in the Catholic church next door schemes to escape both his sorry past and his sorrier future. 

 Where did The Next Queen of Heaven come from?
In the late 1990’s I joined my sister at her church services at a modest Pentecostal church in New York. Admiring of the culture of belief as I am (when it doesn’t belittle others), I became aware of how my own Catholic iconographic sense saw and heard the images and terms of another faith tradition as bizarre—even though the traditions are far more like than they are different. The notion of a gay Catholic choir director on the outskirts of a protestant fundamentalist sect happened sometime in verse seventeen of “Blood, Blood, Blood (We’re all Washed in the Heavenly Blood).” 

How does this novel fit with your other work?
I don’t like to analyze my own work and I don’t want to give anything of the plot away. Nonetheless, I will hint that much of my work since playtime in third grade has revolved around taking the frame of a well-known story and telling or—or playing it—over and over in my head until something else emerges whose origins are recognizable and whose impact is surprising. In this regard I believe that Wicked and The Next Queen of Heaven actually share some genetic material.

You’ve mentioned that The Next Queen of Heaven is a novel about redemption, and that theme resonates throughout your work. Ultimately, who is redeemed—Jeremy, Tabitha, Mrs. Leontina Scales, all of the above?
I think everyone in the novel is redeemed, even the bad guys, to the extent there are bad guys—except perhaps Mrs. Leontina Scales, who is beyond redemption. At least by a novelist. 

Why did you choose to set the book in 1999?
When I was doing a doctorate at Tufts in the late 1980’s, one of my favorite courses was in Puritan literature. The brilliant professor, Jesper Rosenmeier, opened our eyes to the anxiety and panic in which the English colonists in New England lived. It seemed to me that some of that same panic and anxiety was mounting as we crested to the climax of the twentieth century, that picnic season of genocides and revolutions and world wars. 1999 is a curtain-opener as well as a curtain closer (as we learned in September of 2001). 

The Next Queen of Heaven Balances the sacred with a healthy dose of the profane. Did you worry about mixing religion and humor?
If God doesn’t have a pretty good sense of humor we’re all fucked. 

Why did you, a bestselling novelist, choose to publish with the admittedly unconventional Concord Free Press?
I admire that the books themselves as well as the publishing model seem to share a concern about raising questions of art’s inherent value and questions about the commodification of content. Certainly religion—and music, which enters into The Next Queen of Heaven too—raise some of these same questions, when churches themselves battle over who has the most legitimate or pure strain of faith. And the books look so cool. 

You have other work coming out this fall. Tell us about it.
I’m bringing out two volumes. The first is Making Mischief: A Maurice Sendak Appreciation, my illustrated essay of tribute to the master mythmaker responsible for Where the Wild Things Are and Really Rosie and Little Bear and The Nutshell Library, among dozens and dozens of other important and beautiful books for children and adults. In it I posit about Sendak something I have already insinuated, above, about myself—that writers and artists work with a germ of something valid and recognizable and grow their new stories again and again from recombinant sources. 

My other book this season is another example of the same. Matchless: A Christmas Story takes the famous Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale known as “The Little Match Girl” and enwreaths around Andersen’s classic tale three other chapters of new material, chapters that don’t contradict Andersen’s message but extends for a new century the deeply sad story of poverty and hunger and the hopes, in Andersen’s time and in ours, that consolation is nonetheless possible. 

Any final thoughts? 
Among the many working titles of The Next Queen of Heaven, the one that stuck the longest was Eating the Bible.

Bon appetit!