Finding Dorothy

by Elizabeth Letts

“You want me to emulate the behavior of a potted plant?” Maud said. “I think a potted plant would be a good place to start,” Josie said.

she were to have any hope at love, she’d have to find a man who could love her as she was, even though there seemed little likelihood that such a man existed.

From where she sat, people often preferred made-up stories to real answers.

Josie had taken to calling her “schoolmarm,” as that is where they both knew Maud would be headed if she obtained a diploma but no husband.

“But what need have you of a diploma—isn’t it possible to learn in any setting, and does the possession of a testimonial bearing a signature and seal make a man (or a woman, I should say) any better equipped with common sense?”

see no harm in it, as long as you remember that your diploma is an armamentarium against all of the poor outcomes of women.

“Hear me out! I try not to have flights of fancy. I try to do as other men do. I watch them and see how they concern themselves with the mundane matters of this world. They think about train schedules and dinner menus, bank accounts and calendars, and their minds seem to settle contentedly on these things—like yours does, Maud—but it doesn’t work like that for me. These ideas come to me, they crowd up my brain, and they want to go somewhere—they want to be expressed!”

“Oh, Kansas isn’t the state of Kansas,” Maud said. “Kansas is just the place you’re stuck in, wherever that might be.”

“Sometimes,” Maud said, “I was also angry at the Wizard. But the Wizard was right about one thing.” “What’s that?” “You always need to fix your own problems. Nobody else is going to fix them for you.”

The fight for all women has got to begin with the women closest to you.”

“Our Dorothy is not made of flesh and blood,” he said. “She’s fashioned from words and paper, pencil and script. But she has one quality that no flesh-and-blood child has. She’ll never grow up. She’ll never grow old. She’ll always be with us.”

IN ORDER to make a truly great story, you’ve got to put an entire life into it—all the heartbreak, all the glory.

just not the way you’re thinking of it. Magic isn’t things materializing out of nowhere. Magic is when a lot of people all believe in the same thing at the same time, and somehow we all escape ourselves a little bit and we meet up somewhere, and just for a moment, we taste the sublime.”

Finding Oz: How L. Frank Baum Discovered the Great American Story, by Evan I. Schwartz; The Real Wizard of Oz: The Life and Times of L. Frank Baum, by Rebecca Loncraine; L. Frank Baum: Creator of Oz, by Katharine M. Rogers; and Baum’s Road to Oz, edited by Nancy Tystad Koupal.