Gregory Maguire is best known for reimagining Oz in his books Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West and its sequel, Son of a Witch. About What-the-Dickens, he says, “I gave a writing assignment to some middle-school kids. I told them to write about the meeting between an impossible creature and an ordinary citizen. I did the assignment myself, and I came up with an ancient bedridden grandmother mistaking a lost tooth fairy for the Angel of Death. Eventually that story evolved — in the lighthearted, civilization-threatening way that stories do — into What-the-Dickens.” Gregory Maguire lives with his family outside Boston.