Kate DiCamillo and Me (again)

Today I’m reprinting an 11-year-old blog post as a way of celebrating a marvelous event: Kate DiCamillo awarded me a scholarship. The author, one of my personal heroes, selected an excerpt from my current novel manuscript, What You See, (listen up, publishers) for the Herman W. Block scholarship. It’s a $5,000 award she sponsors each year for a new student in Hamline University’s MFA program in writing for kids. For those who have not read Because of Winn-Dixie, Herman W. Block was the founder of the library in India Opal Buloni’s little town. Here’s what she said about the first three chapters of What You See: “emotionally riveting, detail-laden, deeply felt—in essence, everything you want fiction to be.”

Yes, I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.

Here’s what I wrote lo, those many years ago. And every word is still true.

Kate DiCamillo and me

(first published Jan. 29, 2014)

No, I don’t know Kate DiCamillo. That was just a come-on. I never met her. 

But if I did, I would thank her for what she has done for me. She changed my life.

I began writing my first novel shortly after I read Because of Winn-Dixie to my children. When the story was done, I closed the book, my face wet with tears, and there I was, 10 years old again. Or maybe 11. 

My children, who had shed a few tears themselves, were staring at me. I sobbed loudly.

My feelings for India Opal Buloni and her scraggly dog, for her dear, struggling and emotionally frozen father, and for the ragtag, beautiful collection of people Opal collects around her took me back to the way I felt about books when I was a kid. They way I inhaled them, devoured them, lived them, cried over them, merged with them. 

Winn-Dixie was my second encounter with Ms. DiCamillo’s fiction. My first was the Newbery-winning The Tale of Despereaux, recommended to me by a bookseller in the local indie bookstore. It was strange and slightly dark and different from most of the children’s books I’d read, and my kids and I adored the wordplay. It was my first hint that there had been a flowering in children’s literature since the golden age of my youth—the 1970s. I could still offer my kids Sterling North and E.B. White and L.M. Montgomery and Judy Blume—of course!—but I began to learn that there was lots more to explore. For me as well as for them.

I adore books. I majored in literature and have continued to read and write ever since. I published my own first book—nonfiction—in 1993. I’ve been a (mostly) faithful member of a book club for a dozen years. But my relationship with novels has never been as intense as it was when I was in 4th, 5th, 6th and 7th grade. This was underscored for me when I responded to a Facebook game where we were asked to share the books that had changed us the most. All the novels on my list were ones I read as a child.

What is it about those years, the middle grade years, that makes books such powerful companions? Again, I got the answer from Kate DiCamillo.

She was being interviewed on NPR earlier this month after her selection as the Library of Congress’s national Ambassador for Young People’s Literature. (She followed that this week with another Newbery Award. Fantastic.) “I never sit and think,” she said, “‘I need to write to 10 and 11-year-olds.’ . . . I think that I am a 10- or 11-year-old at heart, so it's never anything that I have to do to connect to that. It's just a part of me and part of—I'm always writing towards the child that I was and that I am, that brokenhearted, wondering, hopeful kid, you know?”

Listening, I wondered, “Why was she brokenhearted?”

I looked up her biography on Wikipedia. It’s pretty sparse. But the seed of a broken heart is there: her father left. Or, rather, her mother left, with the kids, apparently for Kate’s health, and her father never joined them as planned. It made me sad just thinking about it.

But I didn’t really need to know this. It’s not extraordinary. Many children grow up with an empty space where one of their parents should be. But even for the luckiest child, one with an intact family, a safe home, a welcoming neighborhood, growing up can be heartbreaking.

Sometimes our broken-heartedness is inherited. That was the case for me, I think. My childhood was full of fresh air, open space, good schools, loving parents and shelves full of books. But my mother had a deep sadness, the residue of her own traumatic wartime childhood. I felt that. It shaped me.

For others, the broken heart comes from poverty. From being teased or excluded. From loss. From illness. From alcohol. From moving. 

But there doesn’t need to be a traumatic event to break a childish heart. Passing from childhood to adolescence means losing so many illusions. It means learning that your parents are flawed. That you will make mistakes, and sometimes they will hurt people. That you have to take responsibility for your mistakes. It means learning that some people won’t like you, and you may never know why. It means getting hurt.

We all get hurt.

Books about others who have been hurt, who are lonely, who have broken hearts but who survive—they help make the passage possible. And while I enjoy a rollicking adventure once in a while, I will always find the greatest satisfaction in a book that makes me cry. A book that appeals to my own brokenhearted 10- or 11- or 12-year-old...and gives her hope. 

After I put away Because of Winn-Dixie, I found I had some ideas for a story of my own. I began to write.