Kate DiCamillo's Blog, page 8

It snowed Thanksgiving night.
In the morning, the world was layered in white, and I went for a walk and discovered a chair sitting on a street corner.
I stopped and considered it.
How many Thanksgivings has this chair seen? What conversations has it overheard? How many people have sat in it and rested their arms on its arms and waited and hoped and wished? What cats have curled up in its seat? Who has hidden behind its broad back? How many sleeping babies has it known? Has this chair ever se...

A SMALL THANKSGVING STORY
One Thanksgiving, a long time ago, I was driving down Highway 27 in Central Florida.
It was early in the morning.
The highway was layered in a dense, low-lying, patchy fog.
I was twenty-nine years old, and I wanted to be someone other than who I was. I had no idea how to do that--how to change, how to start, how to begin.
But here it was Thanksgiving morning and I was headed to my mother���s house and I was driving in and out of dense fog and it all seemed very sym...

I was out walking early the other morning. It was very cold. There was snow on the ground and a fingernail moon up high in the blue sky. I walked past a little white house.
An old man was sitting on the front steps of the house, staring up at the sky.
I turned and looked where he was looking.
���Geese,��� he said.
They were up high, forming a ragged V.
They were headed right, directly south.
���I heard them from inside,��� said the man. ���And I thought it would be a good thing to come out...

I was in Decatur, Georgia last week for the On the Same Page program.
The kids in Decatur were reading Because of Winn-Dixie, and several of the schools that I visited had made video montages and bulletin boards of students together with their dogs. I was standing in front of one of these bulletin boards, admiring all the smiling dogs and the smiling kids, when a boy came up and stood next to me.
I said to him, ���This bulletin board makes me so happy.���
And he said, ���Why?���
I said, ���I...

Last week, I was on the way to a friend���s house for dinner and the traffic was terrible���stop and go, and stop and go.
Plus, I was stuck behind a semi.
The sky, that beautiful Midwestern dusk, was almost entirely obscured.
I was grumpy, agitated.
I was going to be late.
I craned my head to try and see around the semi, and what to my wondering eyes should appear?
The most glorious and astonishing full moon I have ever seen.
It was massive, luminous.
The highway curved.
The moon disappea...

I spent the weekend doing a massive, intensive rewrite of a novel.
Since I always re-type when I rewrite, my hands and shoulders and arms are sore.
But my heart feels pretty good.
In an interview in the magazine Shambhala Sun, the writer George Saunders talks about the process of rewriting and how ���in revision, the characters mysteriously become fuller, because as you reconsider them you���re actually loving them more . . . When you go through this process, you���re making the prose tighte...

For years, I���ve held on to a card that has a photograph of a dog with his head out the window of a car. He is looking ahead. His fur is blowing back, and his face is the epitome of happiness.
I���ve kept the picture to remind me that sticking my head out the window of life and meeting the world with as much joy as I can muster is a pretty good idea.
Here is a picture of Henry from last weekend.
He was putting his face into the autumn wind blowing across Ten Mile Lake.
Every time I look at...

In the afterword to her beautiful novel, Home of the Brave, Katherine Applegate writes ���Someday, you will find yourself adrift in a place where you feel you don���t belong, with people who don���t understand who you are . . . But if you are lucky, someone will reach out a hand when you���re most alone and say, ���I���ve been lost, too. Let me help you find your way home.������
I have been lost more times (and in more ways) than I can count.
Someone has always held out a hand to me.
Maybe...

I was sitting in the airport. It was very, very early in the morning, and I was writing in my journal when someone came on the loudspeaker and said, ���Will the person who left their little box of inspiration at Checkpoint C please return to claim it?���
I stopped writing.
I wondered if I had misunderstood.
The announcement came on again, ���Will the person who left their little box of inspiration at Checkpoint C please return to claim it?���
I looked at the older gentlemen sitting beside me...

I did a signing at the St. Louis Public Library this past weekend, and I talked with a seven-year old who said that she hated reading, until she read Because of Winn-Dixie.
���Thank you for getting her to read,��� said her mother.
I said, ���She did that for herself. I���m just lucky that I got to be a part of it.���
The girl gave me a very solemn look and said, ���Why don���t we say we did it together?���
What a beautiful, generous sentiment.
���Why don���t we say we did it together?���
T...