By Christine Phelan, Sun Correspondent

WEST CONCORD -- Gregory Maguire smells poop. He looks around, picks up his youngest, and peers into the back of her diaper, taking a whiff. "Must just be a little gas," he says to her. She nods solemnly.

These days, Maguire's newly remodeled West Concord home is a flurry of scampering feet, stray Legos, a tangle of plants and happy noise. With three children Helen, 2 1/2, Alex, 4, and Luke, 6 he and his partner, painter Andy Newman, have swapped upper-crust activities for the likes of a minivan, pint-sized socks, and a horde of stuffed animals on unmade beds.

The two Gregory is "Baa" and Andy "Dada" face the same issues as most working parents struggling to balance two careers, raise their children, and maintain the health of their own relationship while staying just ahead of the infinite details of daily life.

Come June, however, they plan to do so for the first time as a married couple.

Author Gregory Maguire, right, with his partner, Andy Newman, and their children, from left, Helen, 212, Alex, 4, and Luke, 6, at their home in West Concord. "Someone told me once that raising children is a little bit like herding puppies, but I think it's more like trying to pack an octopus in a suitcase," Maguire says with a laugh.Sun photo by Julia Malakie

Maguire, the acclaimed author of more than 15 books, is finishing the seventh and final installment in his ever-wacky series for kids, The Hamlet Chronicles, as well as a book of comic essays, Leaping Beauty and Other Animal Fairy Tales, due out this fall. His other books include the recent Mirror, Mirror (2003), Lost (2001), Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister (1999), as well as a host of other popular, offbeat children's titles.

It was his first book for adults, however, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West (Harper Collins), that inextricably linked Maguire to the genre for which he's arguably best known. In it, Maguire tells the unlikely story of the misunderstood queen of pea-green during her girlhood at sorcery school, an unpopular intellectual and devoted animal-rights activist prone to criticism of Oz's totalitarian regime who lives with a superficial blonde socialite named Glinda.

When it was published in 1995, the book garnered immediate cult status among those intrigued by the author's Tolkien-like otherworldliness and those who were drawn to its political bent. Maguire has been a darling in both the gay and feminist communities ever since. A popular Broadway musical based on the book opened last October and a new edition of the book, the cover tied to the musical and its pointy-hatted protagonist, is due out later this month (March).

Maguire is, as he says, "at the top of his game."

That the book's message that things aren't always as straightforward as they might appear at first blush is even more timely against the backdrop of current events isn't lost on Maguire. And the marginalization of the heroine Elphaba (derived from Lyman Frank Baum's initials, the author of the original Oz) or "Elphie" for short offers a sympathetic character for anyone ever maligned, misunderstood, or driven to the outskirts of life. In short, mostly everybody.

Growing up in a strict Irish Catholic family in Albany, N.Y., Maguire, too, "loped along the edges as a child, always looking in with big eyes." Drawing the obvious parallel, but without putting too fine a point on it, Wicked also provides a launch for Maguire's own feelings of marginalization as a gay man by an institution he is as devoted to as his family the Catholic Church.

"I find myself very irritated at the Catholic Church that I love and support at the amount of energy they're spending to suggest that believers should not examine their consciences and come to their own decisions about the morality of the issues at stake," he says, in a not-so-veiled reference to the recent Supreme Judicial Court ruling that affirmed the right of gay couples to marry under Massachusetts' constitution a move that the church has spoken against and that is under review by the Legislature.

"I would love to invite Archbishop (Sean) O'Malley to come and have dinner here and listen to how well our children say their prayers, to see how courteous they are, when they're young," Maguire says.

"That courteousness," he adds, "is the beginning of their charity," which will carry them through life.

As for the ceremony in June, Maguire, 49, and Newman, 48, are finalizing plans for a back-yard gathering at their Concord home, imagining a tent and, rather than gifts, a sort of potluck of food and champagne. And though they've had months to settle into the idea (the two made the determination to marry before the SJC ruling in November), Maguire confesses that he is still "surprised to hear (myself) saying" that the two plan to marry.

"Even five years ago I would've had a different opinion," he says. "But times change and people change, and I've gone from thinking 'why would I want to' to 'why should I not?'"

Maguire and Newman, however, haven't needed a wedding to affirm their commitment to their children and to nurturing their family. Their brood of adopted children two from Cambodia and one from Guatemala are testament to that.

"We decided that if we're going to be parents, we're not going to do it halfheartedly," he says. "At this point in their young lives it means much less to (the children) that they have two fathers. That's much less significant than the fact that they have two parents who work at home, and who are both involved."

As for the cornerstone of the family, its parents, Maguire believes in formalizing the commitment that binds them.

"The church says there's such a thing as 'baptism by fire,' and that one actually can have the graces of the sacrament of baptism by dint of the experience, even if there's no priest there to perform the ritual," Maguire says.

"If that's so, I feel entirely convinced that there must be something called 'marriage by fire,' whether the church gives its blessing or not, when there are two people who've sacrificed as much as we have ... in order to raise these orphans and build a family for them and for ourselves. If that's not marriage by fire, if that doesn't confer a sacramental blessing, well, I'd be very surprised to get to St. Peter's gate and find out otherwise."