Kate DiCamillo is an award- winning author of more than 25 books for children. She has won the Newbery Medal twice, as well as the Boston Globe Horn Book Award, and the Geisel Award. She was appointed the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature in 2014.
DiCamillo is beloved for her picture books, beginning reader books, and novels. Her characters are quirky, tender, fierce, and always heartfelt. Her stories are full of friendships, adventures, loss and difficulties, but always include hope and kindness. Whether the characters are fantastical creatures, such as the little mouse Despereaux in The Tale of Despereaux or realistic, such as Opal and her famous dog Winn-Dixie, they are always memorable.
Kate DiCamillo was in Madison, WI to present the 2019 Charlotte Zolotow Lecture as part of the Wisconsin Book Festival. The audience was largely composed of teachers with a few young readers clutching their books in hand mixed in.
Before the presentation began, we were informed that rather than accepting her speaker’s fee, DiCamillo had asked that instead it be used to purchase copies of her latest book Beverly, Right Here to be donated to seventh graders throughout the state. She definitely has a heart for teachers and students and several times throughout the evening she acknowledged teachers.
“How many of you read to your students?” she asked. Almost every hand went up.
“That’s great,” she said, “it matters so much. I lived for those few minutes every day when my teacher would read Island of the Blue Dolphins to us after lunch.”
Though DiCamillo seems larger than life, she is actually quite small. She was relaxed and casual in jeans and funky red glasses, which she put on in order to read, joking that at 55, she needs them.
Her talk was entitled, “What Stories Have Given Me” and she shared many stories with us.
“I had every intention of becoming a writer after college. Instead I worked in a greenhouse- in Florida, in the hot summer. There was relentless heat and humidity. It was a bubble of heat and I felt stifled.” She was stifled, and it would be eight more years before she began writing.
Her writing career began because she moved to Minneapolis and got a job in the children’s book section of a book warehouse. She began reading the books, starting with picture books, and became obsessed. She devoured novels such as The Watson’s Go to Birmingham 1963, Catherine Called Birdy, Skellig, and The Giver. It was Bridge to Terabithia, that changed her life. As she read the story about Jess, who realizes that he can change and become friends with a girl, “I realized that at any time, we can choose our life. We can choose to change who we are.”
“Books,” she said, “tell us who we can become.”
She shared a quote from the novel Coraline where Neil Gaiman paraphrases writer G.K. Chesteron:
“Fairy tales are more than true – not because they tell us dragons exist, but because they tell us dragons can be beaten.”
She acknowledged that books have been inspirational to her, “Stories tell us what is possible.” She continued, “No matter what you have done in your life, you can change. There is always a path to redemption, a way to change. You can conquer dragons.” Those themes appear often in her books.
We also got some insight into DiCamillo’s writing process.
“I’ve been writing two pages a day for twenty-five years. I started at thirty. It may not sound like much, but you have to make a deal with yourself about what you are willing to do and then stick with it.”
Here are 6 other tidbits about writing and her advice to student writers:
How do you know when a story is done? Let go of the idea that you can make it perfect. When you get to the point where if you keep on going you are going to make it worse, stop.
Only show your creative work to people who are safe and can be trusted with your work. It takes a while to know who those people are.
There will always be feedback and critics. It stings. Go through the criticism and pay attention to the parts that give you an “A ha” feeling. You’ll know if it is good advice. Ignore the rest.
For students, the hardest part of writing is often revision. No one ever gets their writing right the first time. If you want to make any kind of art, let it come out imperfect. Then rewrite. I rewrite 7-8 times. I’m happiest in about rewrite 5 because then I know the story and what it is supposed to be.
Your instinct may be to hold yourself apart from the story. In order to get a good story, you have to be open and vulnerable to get at the real feelings.
My characters are not based on real people, but all the people I’ve met show up in my stories in some small way because at some point my heart has connected with theirs.
It was clear by the final applause that Kate DiCamillo’s heart has connected with her readers.
Are you a Kate DiCamillo fan? Have you read her books with children? What have her books meant to you or to your students? We’d love to hear about it!
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