25 Years After ‘Winn-Dixie’, Kate DiCamillo Still Believes in the Power of Books (Exclusive)

Craving a good story is second nature for author Kate DiCamillo. As a child, she waited patiently every day of second grade for her class’s designated reading hour. Books were a crucial part of how she was raised, by her mother in Claremont, Fla.

“I loved Paddington [Bear], I loved Stuart Little,” the bestselling author, 61, recalls to PEOPLE. “I loved Harriet The Spy. I remember carrying that book around with me, with a notebook, even though I wasn’t consciously thinking, ‘I want to be a writer.’ I was thinking, ‘I want to be a spy.’”

“I was a kid that just read without discretion,” she adds. “But as much as I love to read, I never got it in my head that it was something that human beings did. Books seemed magical and complete … 8-year-old me didn’t think, ‘That’s what I want to do.’”

Now, it’s been 25 years since DiCamillo’s debut novel, Because of Winn-Dixie, was first published. As a new anniversary edition of the beloved middle grade book hits shelves on Sept. 30, the author is paying tribute to that inner child who guided her writing from the start.

“People ask all the time, ‘Who do you write for?’” DiCamillo says. “That’s a really difficult question to answer, but it is not even that I write for — I write with that child. That kid is still very much there — more there than ever, in a strange way.”

DiCamillo’s writerly origins began, of all places, in the children’s section of The Bookmen, the book distribution warehouse where she worked after moving to Minnesota in 1994.

“It was just a matter of time before I started to read the books that I was surrounded by all day,” she says. “I just fell in love with what you could do with the children’s book.”

After a period of writing short stories for adults, DiCamillo began the novel that would become Winn-Dixie — and found her stride in creating for children.

“I remember thinking as I was working on it, ‘This is what I’m supposed to be doing,’” DiCamillo says. “I just felt like, ‘This is where I’m supposed to be as a writer.’”

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Two decades later, and DiCamillo still can’t fathom the reach of the novel, about a girl named Opal who rescues a stray dog wreaking havoc in a Winn-Dixie supermarket.

“Part of it is, maybe, the magic of dogs, but it’s also the magic of community,” DiCamillo says. “We all long for community, and I think that Opal in that book is the one that actually, with the help of Winn-Dixie, brings that community together.”

Winn-Dixie would inspire the 2005 film of the same name starring AnnaSophia Robb, but also a new generation of fans. DiCamillo still receives letters from readers every week. One child wrote that they kept a copy of Winn-Dixie by their bed, so they could read a chapter every time they felt afraid during the night.

“I can speak to books being able to comfort us and make us feel safe,” DiCamillo says. “I am still that reader that I was as a kid. I’m still voraciously consuming books, but the ones that really impact us as kids, we carry with us for the rest of our lives in a way that we don’t carry anything else.”

Understanding the wonder of childhood books is what’s pushed DiCamillo this far. The author, whose wide-ranging bibliography also includes titles like The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane, The Tale of Despereaux and the Mercy Watson series, still holds onto a lesson she learned early on in her career.

“You can’t write to make other people happy,” she says. “I was very aware of this after Winn-Dixie came out, and it did so much better than anybody [anticipated]. I thought, ‘I’m going to have to write something like that so that people will keep on loving me’.”

“I finally figured out with The Tale of Despereaux that the only way I was going to survive as a writer was if I went in a totally different direction and didn’t write to please.”

It’s no surprise, then, that DiCamillo’s latest project is based upon one of her earliest interests. Since 2023, the author has written the Norendy Tales series. Set in the magical land of Norendy, the middle grade novellas call upon DiCamillo’s love of the fairy tales like “The Juniper Tree,” she explains.

The series’ last book, Lost Evangeline, is also out Sept. 30. Featuring illustrations by Sophie Blackall, the novella wraps up the trilogy that DiCamillo largely wrote during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“What I discovered about myself is how much I need the fairy tale,” DiCamillo says of penning the trilogy. “I need it. It’s not just the 8-year-old me. It’s the grown-up me, and it’s also the writer me. I need that comfort and challenge of the impossible.”

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DiCamillo is still chasing that challenge, all these years later. With her rescue dog, Franklin, by her side, she’s already at work on her next book, set in a “time period that I don’t normally work in.” 

“Each novel seems impossible in a different way,” DiCamillo says. “The only thing that you learn from one story to the next is, ‘I managed to do this once, maybe I can do it again.’ I’m only happy when I’ve got a story to work on. So I hope I get to keep on doing it for the rest of my life.”

Lost Evangeline and the anniversary edition of Because of Winn-Dixie are now available via Candlewick Press, wherever books are sold.