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Conversations with Kate DiCamillo

Written on: November 16th, 2009 by: in Blog Posts

Lucy and I went to Borders today to see children’s author Kate DiCamillo, who was signing copies of her new book, The Magician’s Elephant. DiCamillo spoke to a spellbound crowd of more than a hundred (at least) kids and parents, talking at length about her creative process and the craft of writing, fielding smart questions from young and old alike, and giving serious and thoughtful answers before signing books for what probably ended being a couple of hours, because the author took time with every visitor, and was charming and chatty- all in all a wonderful event and a great afternoon.

Here are some selections from the conversation between the author and her readers:

• The inspiration for Edward Tulane? The gift from a friend of a large, elegantly dressed, and “kind of creepy looking” toy rabbit: “Every time I walked into the living room I kind of shrieked, because he scared me…I had a dream of him underwater…your standard issue naked rabbit dream and I thought that there was a story there.”
• DiCamillo doesn’t script her books in advance, and doesn’t know how they are going to end- preferring to create or discover a character and follow them through the story. In the Magician’s Elephant she was “waiting to meet someone in a hotel in New York, and almost literally saw this magician before me…I knew that he was a washed up magician, that he wanted to do real magic. I had my notebook with me, I got it out- I knew right away that he would conjure an elephant and by the time I met this friend I was fairly electric with the story and I knew it was something that I wanted to do.”
• On naming characters: “Names kind of pop into my head. Naming is easy, partly because I grew up in the South, and there are a lot of strange names down there.” The name Decalloo came at five a.m. because when she is writing “you do anything you can to make yourself laugh, and Decalloo made me laugh.”
• What was the inspiration for the Tale of Desperaux? “I find the world inspiring… my best friend’s son asked for a story of an unlikely hero with exceptionally large ears.
• Favorite part of writing? “when I’m done…Every morning when I wake up I think that I can’t do this, so it’s the first thing that I go and do- and then for the rest of the day I think ‘Wow! I got that done.'” When she finishes, she doesn’t feel that she has written a masterpiece, but “I do feel that, wow, I didn’t think that I would get to this point but I did…you’re never going to make a perfect book, and if you hold onto it you’ll never be able to put it out into the world…you do the best job you can do, kind of like raising kids.”
• Favorite Author and book? Difficult to answer, but right now E.B. White and Charlotte’s Web “the most perfect book ever written…You don’t say ‘that’s a great children’s book’, you say ‘that’s a great book.'” she’s currently reading The Elegance of the Hedgehog, by Muriel Barbery- a book that she was initially resistant to reading and “went into with a great deal of resentment” because all of her friends told her that she was going to love it. She also recently finished, and loved, Elizabeth Strout’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Olive Kitteridge
• DiCamillo is very happy with the film adaptations of her books, and of the idea of making films of children’s books generally: “Lots of people who would never find their way to your books find their way there, and by virtue of finding their way to your book they find their way to other books. I’m very fond of Hollywood for that reason alone.”
• Finally, talking about all of the “sad parts” in her books: “I was always annoyed as a kid when I read a book that had nothing to do with the way I saw the world, which is the world is a beautiful place but also really a hard place, and so when tell stories I want something that for me as a reader deepens my understanding of the world. I think that it’s a lie to not put sad things in books.”

All of DiCamillo’s books are available from the Delaware Library Catalog- click here for a list, and to read reviews or place a hold. Booklist gave the following review to the Magician’s Elephant:

Although the novel explores many of the same weighty issues as DiCamillo’s previous works, characters here face even more difficult hurdles, including the loss of loved ones, physical disabilities, and the cost of choices made out of desperation and fear. The profound and deeply affecting emotions at work in the story are buoyed up by the tale’s succinct, lyrical text; gentle touches of humor; and uplifting message of redemption, hope, and the interminable power of asking, What if?

To learn more about Kate DiCamillo and her work, you can visit the author’s blog.