GLOW IN THE DARK

What Kate DiCamillo understands about childhood.

- CASEY CEP

Three winters in a row, Kate DiCamillo went into the hospital, never sure if she would come home and always a little scared to do so. One of those winters, when she was four years old and the air outside was even colder than the metal frames of the oxygen tents she'd grown accustomed to having above her bed, her father came to see her. He was wearing a long black overcoat, which made him look like a magician. "I brought you a gift," he said, pulling something from his pocket as if from a top hat.

DiCamillo studied the red net bag in her father's hands, then watched as a set of wooden figurines tumbled out of it: a farmer, his wife, a cow, a pig, a chicken, a barn, a sun, and a moon. All the pieces were roughly the same size-the pig as big as the barn, the sun as small as the cow. Her father began arranging them on the hospital sheet, which was white and crisp as paper. He told her a story about them, then asked if she could tell him one in return. She did, and, for the first time in a long time, she was not afraid of him.

That was half a century ago, but, DiCamillo told me recently, she feels as if she's never really stopped moving those pieces around. She has written more than thirty books for young readers, and is one of just a handful of writers who have won the Newbery Medal twice. Novels such as "Because of Winn-Dixie," "Flora & Ulysses," "Raymie Nightingale," "The Beatryce Prophecy," and "The Tale of Despereaux" have endeared her to generations of children who see themselves in her work-sometimes because her human characters are shy or like to sing or have single parents as they do, but more often because their yearnings, loneliness, ambivalence, and worries are so fully, albeit fantastically, captured in the lives of her magical menagerie: a chivalrous little mouse, a poetry-writing squirrel, a "not-so-chicken chicken," and more than one rescue dog.