Two More Tales of Oz

The 2025 edition of Oziana, the International Wizard of Oz Club’s creative magazine, is now available for purchase through Lulu.

This issue contains two stories by me.

“The Piglets and the Tin Soldier” is another short slice-of-life tale inspired by L. Frank Baum’s Little Wizard Stories of Oz, taking a couple of his established characters and bouncing them off each other.

The Nine Tiny Piglets first appeared from the Wizard’s pockets in Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz and made small cameos in the Emerald City after that, never getting individual names. 

Captain Fyter, the Tin Soldier, marched onto the scene in The Tin Woodman of Oz. At one point in that book the heroes meet the piglets’ parents. Afterward the soldier says, “I hope I’m not too particular about my associates, but I draw the line at pigs.” So there was a natural tension to work with.

David Valentin created digital artwork of the Tin Soldier and his basket of piglets for this story of a journey through the Munchkin Country.

“The Missing Key” is a mystery featuring Snip, the button boy who was a protagonist of Ruth Plumly Thompson’s The Lost King of Oz. She introduced Snip sneaking into Mombi’s kitchen and then spying on her, establishing him as a curious kid. Several years ago, I used that trait to bring Snip into a story called “Invisible Fence.” More recently I realized that would make him a good investigator for a mystery.

In this story, Snip sets out to retrieve the wind-up key that’s vanished from Tik-Tok’s back. David Lee Ingersoll supplied the illustrations, including one of Snip pinned to the ground by string-wielding field mice, inspired by scenes in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and Gulliver’s Travels.

Turning Ojo into Woot

A recent online discussion about the relative ages of L. Frank Baum’s young male protagonists took me back almost twenty years to when Oziana magazine published my story “Woot Meets Yoop.”

Woot the Wanderer is one of the heroes of The Tin Woodman of Oz. He hikes around Oz, looking for distraction without danger—which of course makes it easy for a storyteller to get him into danger. In this story I had him run into Mr. Yoop, the caged and carnivorous giant from The Patchwork Girl of Oz.

As I recall, this issue of Oziana was being assembled in a rush to catch up to its annual schedule, so I offered to create illustrations for the story by digitally manipulating some of John R. Neill’s illustrations.

Most of the pictures I worked with came from The Tin Woodman of Oz and showed Woot. But one I wanted to use came from The Patchwork Girl of Oz and showed that book’s young hero, Ojo. This is where Neill’s tendency to draw the children in the Oz stories with quite similar faces became an advantage.

Here’s the picture of Ojo.

My oldest edition of The Patchwork Girl of Oz has no color printing, just line art, which was easier to work with. I removed Ojo’s Munchkin ruff and drew in Woot’s more ordinary Gillikin lapels. I shortened the tails of Ojo’s jacket to approximate Woot’s and added Woot’s knapsack.

Just as important, I stretched out the boy’s legs and body a little. Removing the ruff left plenty of room for a long neck. Because as Baum wrote him, and as Neill drew him, Woot is a bit older than Ojo, further into adolescence.

Here’s the resulting picture of Woot.

I just went back and superimposed these pictures to confirm the differences. With Neill’s standard young-person face at the same level, Woot is a little taller with longer legs. A teenager instead of a boy—at least as I picture him.

Making the Most of the Magic of Oz Manuscript

Back in 2005 I examined L. Frank Baum’s handwritten manuscript of The Magic of Oz at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas, comparing it to the finished book. I published my findings and analysis in an article for the Oz Club’s Baum Bugle called “The Magic Manuscript.” Since then, the Ransom Center has digitized the manuscript pages, letting everyone see how Baum worked.

My article noted how when Baum sat down to write his first draft for The Magic of Oz (or maybe The Magic of the Wizard of Oz), he hadn’t decided on important details, such as the name of a major character and the exact spelling of the crucial magic word. Those vary from one page to the next, and sometimes even on the same page.

Paradoxically, that study also showed how little revising Baum did on his way to publication. As he wrote, Baum wrestled with some small details, such as how to describe Ozma’s age. He later polished his phrasing in little ways, usually by hand and sometimes at the missing typescript stage. But that was fussing over small stuff.

Baum inserted one short episode while still writing in hand and later added another to tie off a loose end at the request of his publisher, Frank Reilly. A couple of times he deleted sentences from the first draft that opened plot possibilities which he had never followed up on. But the manuscript shows no other major rewriting—no shuffling scenes, no big cuts or reworking. At least at this late stage of his career, Baum stuck to the structure of his first draft.

Another question about Baum’s writing process that I addressed in that article was the sequence in which he drafted his last three Oz books. The most recent Baum biographies posited that he didn’t compose those books in the order they were published: The Tin Woodman of Oz (1918), The Magic of Oz (1919), and Glinda of Oz (1920).

In L. Frank Baum: Royal Historian of Oz, Angelica Shirley Carpenter and Jean Shirley suggested the sequence was Magic, Glinda, Tin Woodman. The first two were “a kind of insurance” for his family if he took sick, this book said, and he completed the third after gall bladder surgery in 1918.

The Magic of Oz manuscript makes that sequence untenable, however. The handwritten manuscript includes a mention of the Tin Soldier, a character introduced in The Tin Woodman of Oz. Baum therefore must have written Tin Woodman before Magic.

Baum’s Magic manuscript offers two more clues about the timing of his last books. He wrote two pages of his story on the back of an accounting of money raised at a local D.A.R. war relief event in June 1917. And on the first page a relative wrote, “This was next to the last book Father ever wrote. It was written in the fall of 1917.” Since Tin Woodman could not have come after Magic, Baum must have moved on to Glinda of Oz. In sum, he wrote the books in the order they were published.

COMING UP: Glinda of Oz and the end.

Woodsman, Spare This Retelling

Today’s New York Times offers Laura Collins-Hughes’s review of The Woodsman, an hourlong play inspired by The Tin Woodman of Oz:

A movement piece with puppets, James Ortiz’s “The Woodsman” is an elemental reimagining of L. Frank Baum’s world of Oz. The spectacle is handmade, infused with breath and light.

This is the Tin Man’s back story: how a regular human named Nick Chopper (Mr. Ortiz) came to be a rusting pile of metal in need of a heart. The story, laid out in a spare spoken prologue in this largely wordless piece, involves the witch who rules this part of Oz. Her only apparent vulnerability is an aversion to sunlight.

When Nick falls in love with her barefoot slave Nimmee (an appealing Eliza Simpson), the witch schemes to prevent their union. She enchants an ax to cut off chunks of Nick, one by one. With prosthetics to replace them, soon he is wholly made of tin. Without a heart, he can no longer love. . . .

Mr. Ortiz’s puppets are fanciful and gorgeous: the witch, with her pinched face and dowager’s gown; the crows, whose wings in motion are all taffeta susurration; a fabulous golden-eyed monster, a cross between a tiger and a bear. (Oh, my.)

That would be a Kalidah, shown above.

Alas, Collins-Hughes concludes, “With so many pieces well in place, it seems churlish to complain, but one significant flaw holds ‘The Woodsman’ back: The storytelling isn’t clear enough. The visual language can be muddled, and important bits are sometimes rushed.” She obviously hopes a future staging will improve.

How Much Can Change in Two Years

Eric Gjovaag’s Wonderful Blog of Oz notes an Ozzy challenge on Jeopardy last night, and notes that the “answer” was inaccurately worded in two ways. The more interesting error was that, having died in 1919, L. Frank Baum was in no position to publish or manage any active verb a year later.

I’d seen this challenge in the show’s daily New York Times ad, and also noted that inaccuracy. In addition, I was struck that the category for this challenge was “1920s LIT.” Glinda of Oz was published in 1920, and thus indeed entered the cultural discourse of that decade. But it could only reflect the previous decade when Baum wrote. Like Billy Budd, which Herman Melville left unfinished when he died in 1891 but came into print in 1924, the book is part of two cultural eras.

Of course, a lapse of two years between composition and publication doesn’t mean much for Glinda. Hey, authors today have to expect to wait at least that long! (Good thing they can work on their book trailers.) But in one respect I think we can see that time gap affecting Baum’s last three Oz books.

Baum apparently wrote The Tin Woodman of Oz, The Magic of Oz, and Glinda of Oz one after another in 1917-18. He finished Magic in the fall of 1917, and Glinda in February 1918 (as I reconstructed events in an article for The Baum Bugle a few years back).

All three of those books depict soldiers or war, none in particularly favorable terms. They don’t show the boosterism of Baum’s Army Alphabet and Navy Alphabet rhyming books from 1900. We don’t see any military as an efficient source for good, like Glinda’s army in The Marvelous Land of Oz (1904).

Instead, Baum’s last two books revolve around wars motivated by egotistic, greedy manipulators. The Tin Soldier in the preceding novel is a stiff personality, not particularly useful, and harder to love than the Tin Woodman. We never see the harmless bumbling of Ozma’s army in Ozma of Oz.

However, larger events soon changed the environment for those books. In mid-1917 Woodrow Wilson decided not to keep us out of war after all. Baum’s eldest son, Frank Joslyn Baum, rejoined the army. (He’d previously served in the US attempt to subjugate the Philippines.) Both personally and politically, poking fun at warriors probably became harder for Baum.

I think we can see that atmosphere affect The Magic of Oz, even though the World War was over by the time it was published in 1919. At one point a villain plots to turn each of several monkeys into “a giant man, dressed in a fine uniform and armed with a sharp sword.” The “sword” suggests Baum pictured the sort of comic-opera soldiers who had appeared in his previous stories. But John R. Neill drew those giants as modern US soldiers straight off a recruiting poster.

Similarly, Magic shows the Nome King conning animals into a war that’s in nobody’s best interest, the way people against US entry into the World War described that situation. Yet Baum’s dedication says:

I dedicate this Book to the Children of our Soldiers, the Americans and their Allies, with unmeasured Pride and Affection.

Baum’s manuscript indicates that he added that line months after writing his story.