From the July/August 2004 issue of The Horn Book Magazine

Kate DiCamillo

by Jane Resh Thomas

he’s a firefly, this Kate DiCamillo, and who would want to catch a firefly? Having caught one in a jar, who would think that this captured thing was what he was after? I like my fireflies best in the wild, on the wing, out there in the tall grass at the edge of the woods. This account, on behalf of Kate’s friends, is therefore only a glimpse.

She’s a loyal friend, our Kate. She forgives us our failings, which remind her that we are as human as she. Our wooden legs amuse her. They provide her with proof that, as she suspected, life is not only a dire enterprise but also a hilarious joke, a game played by half-wits, all of us, doing the best we can — a best that, at best, is farce. At the same time, she witnesses the paradox that a man or a mouse may transcend absurdity and rise to heroism.

Kate takes delight in the incongruities of mankind, that glorious ruin. Nothing pleases her more than a man dressed up in an Easter Bunny suit smoking a cigarette out behind the strip mall. Well, one thing pleases her more — the ramshackle wreck who enters the restaurant where she and I are eating sandwiches. As he sits down behind me, Kate’s eyes sparkle at the incongruity between this unfortunate and the grandiose view of humanity with which we all delude ourselves, but she observes with such empathy that tomorrow she will make of him a poignant anti-hero, a revelation of our universally woeful condition.

She’s a scamp, Kate DiCamillo is, who loves to scare the horses and shock the prigs. She can belch like a truck driver, and the most outrageous remarks issue from her mouth, but those who prove to be neither horses nor prigs hear the wisdom and tenderness that follows. A phone call or an e-mail comes from her that begins, “Listen to this!” Then, in the manner of someone presenting a Ceylon sapphire in a satin-and-velvet box, she offers a gift: a paragraph from Isak Dinesen, a story from Russell Hoban or George Saunders or Alice Munro. Kate is better acquainted with contemporary literature than anyone else I know. “Listen to this!” she says, and we do listen, for what follows might be something as wonderful as lines from Antonio Machado’s poem “Last Night,” in which the speaker dreams that bees have built a hive in his heart and are “making . . . sweet honey from my old failures.” Writers need the promise that Machado’s dream offers, as they struggle to overcome their failure to gain acceptance for their work and to satisfy themselves. The promise means so much to Kate that she commissioned a friend who has a gift for needlework to stitch Machado’s lines into a woolen wall hanging, which Kate then gave away to a writer friend.

Five years before I met her, Kate confronted a question like the one Mary Oliver asks in “The Summer Day”:

Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

Kate answered that if she were ever going to write, she had better begin.

Having begun, she was a dogged worker. To make a living in Florida, she directed shuffleboard at a trailer park, or said, “Look down, and watch your step,” to a never-ending line of thrill seekers at Disney World. Such jobs, of course, were never her real work. In the seven years since she and I met in Minneapolis, she has earned her bread at a book warehouse, sold hotdogs at a park, and tended the children’s department at a used book store. Her many menial jobs enabled her to rent a small apartment and to feed herself, primarily on bean sandwiches. (Her cooking skill might add up to boiled water or a fried egg, if she owned a kettle or a skillet.) She didn’t have the cash, though, to buy a cup of coffee in a shop, or enough to repair the defunct heater in her tin-can car when the temperature in Minneapolis was thirty degrees below zero.

Her true work was her writing. Before she went to the book warehouse every morning, she woke up at four thirty to write. Every morning, without fail. She read about writing. She studied the methods of the writers she read. She collected rejections, 470 at last count. (Yes, 470. The bees have made sweet honey indeed from her old failures.) When Because of Winn-Dixie found her, she was ready for it. She knew then how to write it and how to cope with rejections and lukewarm editorial responses. At about the same time, she won a large grant from a Minnesota institution, the blessed McKnight Foundation, for a short story she wrote for adults.

When Because of Winn-Dixie came along, Kate said she had found her voice and her métier. The first time she read from the novel in my hearing, it was worthy of publication. Before anybody else had laid an eye on it, the work was so astonishing in its voice and originality and in the quality of its craftsmanship and the depth of its emotion that I said to her, “You’re going to be famous.”

Among her many virtues is the fact that Kate never writes the same book twice. Her versatility has enabled her to depart in voice and mode from each of her successes, with The Tiger Rising, and The Tale of Despereaux, and the several other books that are progressing now toward publication. Yes, she continues to write, every day when she isn’t in a plane or a hotel, for what has her success won her if not the wherewithal to write whatever her spirit moves her to say?

Kate DiCamillo’s friends rejoice in the recognition the world has given her. We try to protect her from writer’s envy, including our own, and from her own highly developed devotion to duty, for she is beloved among us. As Mr. White told us, in Charlotte’s Web, “It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer.” We are grateful that sometimes Kate casts her firefly light on us.

Jane Resh Thomas’s fifteen books for children include Behind the Mask: The Life of Queen Elizabeth I. She is a member of the faculty of Vermont College’s MFA Program in Writing for Children and Young Adults.