Because of Winn-Dixie
Because of Winn-Dixie
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Kate DiCamillo on Because of Winn-Dixie
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
Homesick, petless, and listening for a voiceThe book’s origin was ordinary and specific: DiCamillo had moved from Florida to Minneapolis, landed in an apartment building that banned pets, and found herself in the middle of a record-breaking Minnesota winter without a dog for the first time in her adult life. Those two absences, the warmth she had left and the animal she could not have, fused into a single need.
I wrote Because of Winn-Dixie because I was homesick for Florida (I live in Minneapolis) and because I wanted a dog and couldn’t have one (I lived in an apartment building that didn’t permit them). It allowed me to go home and to spend time with a dog of the highest order.
The book did not begin with a plan. It began with a sound. DiCamillo was almost asleep when she heard something she could not account for, and the next morning she simply wrote toward it.
One night right before I go to sleep, I hear a girl’s voice, with a southern accent, saying, ‘I have a dog named Winn-Dixie.’ When I got up the next morning, I just started with that sentence. I followed that voice because she sounded like she knew what she was talking about.
Before writing this book, DiCamillo had spent years writing short fiction for adult readers. What shifted her toward children’s literature was a single book she encountered while working in a warehouse, picking and packing orders, surrounded by thousands of titles she had not written.
I took the book home and I typed up some pages to get an idea of how long a chapter was, and to get the feel of language. And then I wrote Because of Winn-Dixie.
The book she typed from was Christopher Paul Curtis’s The Watsons Go to Birmingham, 1963. DiCamillo was not studying it academically. She was trying to get its rhythms into her hands before she started.
How she wrote it
Discovery over constructionDiCamillo’s process leaned on perception rather than architecture. A college professor had read her student work aloud and told the class that what made a piece worth their attention was not the sentences but the quality of looking behind them. That lesson about seeing people who are usually passed over became the structural principle of this book.
Because of Winn-Dixie is the result of that effort. It is a book populated with stray dogs and strange musicians, lonely children and lonelier adults. They are all the kind of people that, too often, get lost in the mainstream rush of life.
The book’s protagonist, India Opal Buloni, a ten-year-old girl newly arrived in Naomi, Florida, with her preacher father, was not assembled from character notes. DiCamillo has consistently described her arrival as something closer to recognition than invention.
India Opal Buloni seems so real to me, I don’t think I could have made her up. Rather, I feel like I discovered her.
Her expectations when she finished the manuscript were calibrated by what she had witnessed daily in the warehouse: most books moved a few thousand copies and were then liquidated. She had no reason to expect otherwise. What she did allow herself was a description of what she hoped the book was.
This book is (I hope) a hymn of praise to dogs, friendship, and the South.
The book has sold over nine million copies. The parenthetical hope held.
Among all the characters she has created across more than two dozen books, DiCamillo has been asked many times to name a favorite. Her answer loops back to where her career as a novelist began.
If you insisted, I would pick Winn-Dixie. Because everything that has happened to me as a writer has happened because of that dog.
The personal thread
What she walked through, and could not have walked backTwenty-five years after publication, DiCamillo returned to the book in a series of anniversary conversations. The distance gave her a way of describing what the experience had done to her that she could not have articulated while it was happening. The book had been a passage, not a product.
Because of Winn-Dixie [paraphrased from audio] like a golden doorway that I got to walk through. Because of this book, I was able to write other books. I was able to connect with people. I was able to understand what it was that I was supposed to be doing in the world.
The response to the book also changed what DiCamillo understood about the exchange between a writer and a reader. Readers did not simply receive the story; they gave something back. That reciprocity reshaped her sense of what writing was for.
If I’ve done my job right and put my heart and my fears and my questions on the page, if I’ve told a story right and well, the reader can be aware of me asking those questions, worrying those worries, putting my heart there. And then it’s a place for both of us to be together and it makes you feel less alone as a kid.
What she wants us to sit with
Less alone, and held against somethingAsked what she hopes readers carry away from her work, DiCamillo does not reach for theme or moral. She reaches for a feeling, and she applies the same standard to every book she has written, not only this one.
I hope the same thing that I hope with every story I write — that readers will close the book and feel less alone and more hopeful.
Her books contain genuine darkness: loss, loneliness, adults who cannot give children what they need. DiCamillo does not soften that. But she writes within a conviction she borrows from another children’s author, one she treats as a professional obligation rather than a sentimental preference.
It’s Katherine Paterson who said when you write for kids, you’re duty-bound to end with hope. That’s what you need to offer kids. So it makes me more hopeful to write for this age.