Kate DiCamillo's Blog, page 3

Answers to your questions April 2015

Alysha ChristianI'm a teacher whose favorite time of the day is Read Aloud time. My kids often beg me to read to them for a whole day. If you could choose any children's novel to read to a class of

Winn-Dixie!
Opal!
Because of Winn-Dixie is a musical at the Delaware Theatre Company!
Is that the coolest thing ever?
www.delawaretheatre.org
Photo by Matt Urban/Mobius New Media

From the Candlewick team: have you seen the new paperback covers coming for all of Kate's novels?

http://www.shelf-awareness.com/issue.html?issue=2482#m28016


The Magical Menagerie of Kate DiCamillo - Shelf Awareness for Thursday, April 9, 2015 | Shelf Awaren
www.shelf-awareness.com
Welcome to the Web site for Shelf Awareness: Daily Enlightenment for the Book Trade, the free e-mail newsletter dedicated to helping the people in stores, ...

From the Candlewick team: Now it's your turn to ask questions again! Submit your questions for Kate as comments on this post by Saturday, April 19, and Kate will answer as many as she can!

Some questions kids asked me in this weeks batch of letters:

Do you live in a castle? Why did you make Edward have to wear a dress? When you dream, do you dream in color or black and white? How old are you? Can you write a book where Mercy Watson goes on vacation? What do you want to be when you grow up? Do you like soup? When you were a kid, did you have deep-down dreams? Have you ever broken your collarbone? Do you think that Edward really, truly learned his lesson? Why didnt Despereauxs m...

Here is one of my favorite quotes about making art. Its from Howard Ikemoto:

When my daughter was about seven years old, she asked me one day what I did at work. I told her I worked at the college - that my job was to teach people how to draw. She stared at me, incredulous, and said, "You mean they forget?"

We do. Forget.
We grow up, and we stop taking chances.
We get busy.
We doubt ourselves.
We forget.
I think about this every week when I open the mail.
Kids send me their drawings; the...

Last week, we got a tremendous storm here: purple skies and dark clouds and lightning. I sat out on the back deck and watched it roll in.
It was dusk. The bats were outflitting back and forth.
There was a wren working on a nest up high in a pine tree.
The clouds kept changing. The sky got darker. The lightning flashed.
The wind picked up.
The rain finally started.
And I sat there in a deck chair with nothing in my handsno book, no phone, no notebook, no camera, no intention, no plan.
I was ju...

This picture was taken over a decade ago.
My mother and I were at the beach, on Pine Island.
The water is so shallow there that you can walk out in it forever, and still have it come only to your kneecaps.
The last time my mother and I were there together we saw dolphins.
You get older, and what you do is remember.
You remember standing beside your mother.
You remember dolphins.
You remember light and more light.

Here is a picture of Henry when he was a puppy.
He is 13 years old now.
His eyelashes are turning grey.
He has a big wart on top of his head.
Hes diabetic.
He barks at things that arent there, and doesnt see things that are right in front of him.
He loves walks, breakfast, lunch, dinner, patches of sun, belly rubs.
He still likes to play tug-of-war.
I remember a cartoon I saw once of a dog with a page-a-day calendar.
The dog was pulling off the top sheet, which said NOW, and below that was an...

A friend gave me this button for my birthday.
Bibliophile.
Yep, thats me.
Books are comets, compasses, blueprints, bellwethers, sextants, stars.
I would be lost without them.