This is Goodnight Stories for Rebel Girls.

Hi, Rebels.

This is Goodnight Stories for Rebel Girls, the interview.

I'm your host, Avery.

And today we're talking to writer and children's book author Kate D. Camillo.

Hi, Kate. Welcome to the show. I'd love if you could start by introducing

yourself to the audience. My name is Kate DiCamello and I get to write books for kids for a living. So I

think I'm the luckiest person in the world. You've talked a lot about how you channel your eight-year-old self when you're writing for your characters.

What do you remember most about being that age yourself?

My mother used to drive a bunch of us neighborhood kids to the library.

I was in my bare feet, and that's what I think of when I think of myself as eight years old,

a barefoot child in the library, getting to select a book.

That's really sweet.

And during that time, what was a book that really mattered to you?

I read everything I could get my hands on.

One of them was Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhue, which is basically a primer on how to be a writer.

I love Stort Little, the story of a mouse

who kind of acts like a human that really captured my imagination. I loved Paddington the Bear.

There were so many books that mattered to me in so many different ways. It sounds like you were a pretty

big reader, your whole childhood, but at what point did you know that you wanted to pursue a career yourself in storytelling?

So it wasn't until I was in college that I started to really think that I wanted to do it, and that was because a professor said to me that I should consider going to graduate school for writing.

And that's when I really latched on to the idea.

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