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Welcome book lovers. I'm Charlie Gibson. Good to have you with us for another episode of the bookcase with

Kate and Charlie. I'm Kate Gibson. I am his daughter slash co-host. Well, we have today

a wonderful author, much honored, who happens to be your neighbor, right? Well, yeah. I mean,

I'll tell you the story of how I came across this author. I used to work at Twin Cities PBS. I used to do sort of small writing presentations on this local show on Friday night. It's called Almanac. And it's a really small, sweet local show. It's been around forever. And this author would come on every time she had a new book. This blonde-haired sort of short, diminutive woman would come on,

sort of a high voice, and she would talk about a book. And I would go, oh, that's nice that the,

you know, local author gets time on the local TV show and whatever. And I said something to the

executive producer, and he's like, do you understand she's like a really big deal? And I went and I

bought The Tale of Despero the next day, and I read it to my daughter. And at that point,

I was a bona fide, true blue Kate Di Camillo fan. I'm a huge fan. I've now read almost everything

of hers. And I was so excited to talk to her. If her bibliography and the name of all her books was

printed in the front of her books, I think they'd some taste be longer than the books themselves because she has written so

many wonderful books, primarily aimed for children.

And she has been, well, she has enough awards that you'd have to have 50 fireplaces in her

...