Songs, Stories, and Self-Discovery with Kate DiCamillo and Sophie Blackall

A podcast interview with Kate DiCamillo and Sophie Blackall discussing Lost Evangeline: A Norendy Tale on The Growing Readers Podcast, a production of The Children’s Book Review.

What happens when a two-time Newbery Medalist and a two-time Caldecott Medalist come together to create magic?

In this deeply personal conversation, Kate DiCamillo and Sophie Blackall discuss their collaboration on Lost Evangeline, the third tale in the Tales of Norendy collection.

Kate reveals how she carried the seed of Evangeline’s story for 15 years before discovering the key that unlocked it, while Sophie shares her joy at illustrating a world filled with everything she’s “itching to draw”—from sea serpents to marmalade cats. But the conversation goes far beyond craft, exploring how creating children’s books becomes a form of self-healing, why songs are appearing more frequently in Kate’s work, and the universal longing for parental approval that surfaces even in a story about a girl the size of a mouse.

Whether you’re a writer, illustrator, parent, or simply a lover of beautiful books, this episode offers rare insight into the creative partnership behind some of children’s literature’s most beloved works—and the personal journeys that make them possible.

Subscribe to The Growing Readers Podcast to ensure you never miss an episode celebrating the creators shaping young readers’ lives.

Listen to the Episode

Show Notes

Lost Evangeline: A Norendy Tale

Written by Kate DiCamillo

Illustrated by Sophie Blackall

Ages 7+ | 160 pages

Publisher: Candlewick | ISBN-13: 9781536225525

Publisher’s Book Summary: This captivating original fairy tale set in the world of The Puppets of Spelhorst and The Hotel Balzaar features an exclusive color illustration and gilded edges on the first printing.

When a shoemaker discovers a tiny girl (as small as a mouse!) in his shop, he takes her in, names her Evangeline, and raises her as his own. The shoemaker’s wife, however, fears that Evangeline has bewitched her husband, so when an opportunity arises to rid herself of the girl, she takes it. Evangeline finds herself far from her adopted father and her home, a tiny girl lost in the wide world. But she is brave, and she is resourceful, and with the help of those she meets on her journey—including a disdainful and self-satisfied cat—she may just find her way again. Return to the magical land of Norendy in this third original fairy tale by renowned storyteller Kate DiCamillo, perfect for savoring alone or for reading aloud with someone you love. Graced with exquisite black-and-white illustrations by Sophie Blackall, this timeless story of a girl and her father will make you believe in the impossible.

Buy the Book

Other Books Mentioned:

Thumbelina by Hans Christian Andersen: ⁠⁠Amazon⁠⁠⁠ or ⁠⁠⁠Bookshop.org

Lost Evangeline by Kate DiCamillo, illustrated by Sophie Blackall: ⁠Amazon⁠ or ⁠Bookshop.org⁠

The Puppets of Spelhorst by Kate DiCamillo, illustrated by Julie Morstad: ⁠Amazon⁠ or ⁠Bookshop.org⁠

The Beatryce Prophecy by Kate DiCamillo, illustrated by Sophie Blackall: ⁠Amazon⁠ or ⁠Bookshop.org⁠

The Borrowers by Mary Norton: ⁠Amazon⁠⁠ or ⁠⁠Bookshop.org⁠⁠

About the Author

Kate DiCamillo is one of America’s most beloved storytellers. She is a former National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature and a two-time Newbery Medalist. Born in Philadelphia, she grew up in Florida and now lives in Minneapolis.

For more information, visit

About the Illustrator

Sophie Blackall is the acclaimed illustrator of more than forty-five books for young readers and a two-time Caldecott Medalist. Born and raised in Australia, she now lives in Brooklyn.

For more information, visit

Credits:

• Host: Bianca Schulze
• Guests: Kate DiCamillo and Sophie Blackall
• Producer: Bianca Schulze

Read the Transcript

Growing Readers Podcast: Interview with Kate DiCamillo and Sophie Blackall (continued)

much for Evangeline to bear. She stamped her foot, the one that still had a shoe on it, in frustration. “We find ourselves thrown together because you caught me in a net,” she said, “not because of some wily enchantress called fate.”

So the book also has a really powerful line that’s “We do not always get what we want in this world.” So with all of that, that quote that I read, Kate, talk to me about this idea of fate that comes up. And also, how do you hope young readers might relate to Evangeline’s determination? Because that’s what I love most about her.

Kate DiCamillo: Yeah, well, I don’t know. I can only tell you how I listened to that, which was, here is a good person for me to keep in my mind as I proceed through these days of—it’s just that refusal to let somebody dictate who she is and how she will move through the world. And it is a refusal that is in every fiber of her being. It is not in any way a manufactured bravery. She’s outraged. And I find it quite bracing, I have to say. So I hope that a kid does too. Don’t ever let somebody tell you who you are and what you can do and who you can become in this world, you know.

Bianca Schulze: Yeah, I love that. Sophie, do you want to add anything to that?

Sophie Blackall: What I love about this story and I think all of Kate’s stories is that the villains are multi-dimensional and you almost always have some level of empathy for them. And I think this is definitely the case with Evangeline. And right at the beginning the shoemaker’s wife says, “Be content with what you have. There is no point in thinking things would be different someplace else.” And that’s very understandable. She’s afraid. And most of the villains are acting out of fear. I think Stumpfhauf is acting out of avarice. And he’s maybe the exception. I’m not sure—does he have any redeeming qualities, Kate?

Kate DiCamillo: I was thinking, I don’t really know that he does. I guess the redeeming quality is also very closely linked to his avarice, which is he can recognize when something is extraordinary and you can get a buck out of it.

Sophie Blackall: Right. But Gristle, who is the manservant who sort of captures Evangeline or bargains for her or manipulates the situation so that he can take her, is really only acting on orders. He wants to please his mistress, Mrs. Penrith Smith, and she’s only acting out of fear of her own mortality. She wants to live forever. And so these are not good people necessarily, but they’re not wholeheartedly bad either. Their vices are understandable, and I think as a reader we can see ourselves in all of them a little bit, as well as we can see—hopefully—that we should not be afraid and that there is a big world out there and that we should take a leap and be curious and go to sea and open our hearts to a stranger who might come unexpectedly into our lives and provide us with unspeakable joy we didn’t know existed.

Kate DiCamillo: Well that’s kind of beautiful. Can we end there? Because who’s going to top that?

Sophie Blackall: But I have more questions.

Bianca Schulze: Do you know what’s funny? Because the next thing I wanted to go into was all of those side characters. You might have kind of already answered my next question, but I am really fascinated by the side characters who—it’s almost like they believe they’re not fit for heroics and they’re more interested in attending to their own survival. And then of course there’s that amazing marmalade cat, which is like such a great character with his “expect nothing of me” attitude. So Kate, why don’t you talk about those supporting characters and what they lend to the story?

Kate DiCamillo: It’s funny because I’ve never really thought about them now as this cast of characters, which I now have as you ticked them all off. And they are all reluctant to turn around and face what is before them, while Evangeline is very, very good at turning around and facing, you know. She accepts the way things are and faces them, and everybody else seems to be in a state of denial one way or another. Muffle, and of course not the marmalade cat, but—excuse me. It’s interesting because I’ve never considered the secondary characters as a whole, and they do stand in sharp contrast to Evangeline herself. All of them.

Bianca Schulze: Yeah. Well, there’s something else I’m completely obsessed about—Kate DiCamillo and the fact that she has this list of words in her notebook just waiting to be used in a story. Because I know this, when I’m reading a Kate DiCamillo book now, I’ll come across a word and I can’t stop but think to myself, like, was this one of the words from her notebook? So I started noting down some of the really rich vocabulary words. And the ones that kind of I managed to pencil in were “palliative,” “euphemistically,” and “penury.” I actually had to Google “penury.” So how often do you think about vocabulary, Kate, when you’re writing? And what do you feel when you finally find the right space in a story for one of your special saved words?

Kate DiCamillo: I never think about vocabulary when I’m writing. I don’t think about vocabulary until we’re at this point where the book is poised to go out into the world, and then I hear all the words that I can’t pronounce. But I know them. I know them as a reader, you know, and I love them and I carry them around. I carry them around like jewels in my pocket. But I don’t think, you know, they’re never consciously—okay, I’m going to use this one here or that one there. Rather, I have them and they show up when they need to show up.

Bianca Schulze: Yeah. I just—now it’s stuck in my head that I know you have it. So when I see these words, I just can’t unsee that maybe it came from your notebook.

Kate DiCamillo: Right. You know, so many things. Sophie, do you keep a list of things that you think could become stories? Do you have a—

Sophie Blackall: I do. I do scribble things down and I also keep words. Did you know that Anne Frank kept a notebook of beautiful sentences when she was in the annex?

Kate DiCamillo: No.

Sophie Blackall: Yeah. Isn’t that good? She just wrote down beautiful sentences.

Kate DiCamillo: Wow, wow. And boy, there’s a great title for something—”Beautiful Sentences,” right? Just to call it that. Yeah. And often, you know, the words that are in the back of the notebook that I carry around are just things that I make up. Like, Stumpfhauf was back there for a long time. And Louisiana’s Way Home—I had carried around “Elf Ear, Nebraska” for, I don’t know, from notebook to notebook I transferred it. And then it’s just like, this is where Elf Ear shows up, you know? I would like to see Sophie draw Elf Ear, Nebraska on a map. Yeah. I can see—I’m going to move a little bit because they’re doing yard work out there. Okay.

Bianca Schulze: You’re fine. Kate’s creating a to-do list for you, Sophie. You’ve got a little character to create and a map to draw.

Sophie Blackall: Well, I’m there for it. It’s a terrible thing. I have to curtail myself because I want to make—when I read The Hotel Balzaar, I wanted to make little books in walnut shelves. Basically every book I read of Kate’s makes me want to go and make things instead of doing the work that is on my desk. One day we’ll have all the time in the world to make tiny shoes and little beds and walnut shell books.

Kate DiCamillo: Not Evangeline.

Sophie Blackall: No, no. It’s like pinning down the butterfly. I think that’s the—yeah, yeah, yeah.

Kate DiCamillo: Yeah, no, I totally get it. I get it.

Bianca Schulze: Sophie, just like I said, you know, I feel like there are things that just read so—like this is definitely Kate DiCamillo’s story. But I feel the same way about your artwork. I think the artwork in this book is so distinctly Sophie Blackall to me. I don’t know what does that mean—maybe like timeless, like a classic feeling, but really fresh at the same time. Like from your ribbons that swell across the page depicting light from the lantern, and at other times those ribbons are Evangeline’s singing voice. And of course, the characters have the classic rosy cheeks. You use, I think it’s called—I’m not an artist in any way—but like that hatching technique where there’s just the lines. And you said earlier that you’re influenced maybe by some Japanese block prints, I think is what you said before, but just tell me about creating such detail because that detail adds such a beautiful movement. And just when did you become the artist that did that technique that kind of—I don’t know if it’s always hatching or but just these fine lines that just create such a movement and a shape and a pattern that feels classic, like I’ve seen it before, but also so distinctly you.

Sophie Blackall: There are many lovely things. Thank you, Bianca. I think that’s the goal, is to have it look familiar and coming, as I said before, on the coattails of all of these other beloved illustrators, but also seeming fresh. I really enjoy working in black and white for these books, even though, like you, I kind of see them in color. But there is something to distill these lines and shapes down into just a monochromatic gray and black that feels like getting to some kind of truth. That seems very grandiose, but that’s what I think about it. And it’s also—it’s quite time consuming and laborious doing these little—I’m waving my pencil in the air—these little pencil marks. But I just have such a nice time when I’m doing that. And it really feels like I’m living in the story when I’m spending time—and I said very similar things when I was talking about doing the drawings in The Beatrice Prophecy—that they sort of evolved. And I do go into a little bit of a dreamy trance and then I look up several hours later and there’s Evangeline on the page. It’s a lovely thing. Which is not to say it’s all dreamy and easy. For me, the sketch process where I’m wrestling an idea onto the page is just miserable, terrible torture. No one knows how hard it is. It’s awful. Some people are really good at it. Their pencil is an extension of their hand, which is an extension of their brain. And they just move swiftly across the page. But for me, that path is torturous. But then when I’m really just giving everything shape and tone and light and shade, that’s the joyful part where it comes alive.

Bianca Schulze: Yeah, yeah. I think what I hear from both Kate and Sophie is just the joy that even though there are parts that are laborious or hard or tricky or, you know, carrying a story around for 15 years before you’re able to complete it, it’s like you couldn’t really do anything else. It’s just in you both to create this kind of work. I don’t know. Does that ring true?

Kate DiCamillo: You know, I feel like—Sophie, I’d be really curious to see how you answer that because I’m going to come at it kind of sideways and say that it is this thing where I have gotten to become—that I have access to my best self through telling stories and access that I might not otherwise have had. So I have insight into myself, insight into my better self. And that all comes from—you said, Bianca, that there’s this joy in it. There is, but so much of it is terrifying. And you always—it’s that thing of wondering if you’re going to—I’ll have this image in my head for the rest of my life now of standing in the field and thinking, how am I going to make a loaf of bread from this? And so it’s always terrifying. But what you get after you’ve grown the wheat and threshed the wheat and ground the grain and milled the flour and made the bread, you have a loaf of bread that connects you to the land, to everybody else, and also more deeply to yourself. And that is extraordinary and a real gift to get to do that. It’s like this golden loaf. Yeah.

Sophie Blackall: That was lovely, and we could end right there, except I’ll just ruin it and add on to say that all of those things are true and that what we’re ultimately making is a story. And just as Kate’s books are in many ways often about stories and the way that telling stories equates to survival—Evangeline saves herself by telling the cat a story and she saves herself by imagining herself at sea and the shoemaker imagines the stories, the adventures at sea—and it’s all the telling of the stories. It’s the sharing of the stories. It’s the passing down of stories and how they connect all of us and link us all. And of course it’s what we’re ultimately making, and if you can’t escape your immediate circumstances, you can open a book and you can transport yourself to sea or to anywhere. And there are few things ultimately more rewarding than that.

Kate DiCamillo: There you go. That’s beautiful.

Bianca Schulze: So, so beautiful. Well, I want to, as always, end by sharing my deepest gratitude, but before I go on my spiel, is there anything that either of you want to add to the conversation or do we want to end beautifully? Sophie has her hand raised. Sophie, go ahead.

Sophie Blackall: Kate, I have a question for you. In so many of your books, there are songs and characters sing songs, there are songs that are refrains throughout stories. And I just wonder what your relationship to music is and if at some point you have a composer in mind to make all of these beautiful lyrics that you’ve written to songs, to turn them into songs. I want to hear these songs.

Kate DiCamillo: Yeah, that’s so interesting because what I was working on this morning has a song in it. And Sophie, you’ve read that collection of fairy tales that I’ve worked on and there are a lot of songs in there. And it’s something that I’ve noticed about how there seem to be more and more songs in what I write. And I don’t know what it means. I have a very complicated relationship with music in that my father was somebody who late in life taught himself to play the piano very well. And then I expressed an interest in the piano and was put through brutal lessons and hated it and was very good at it, which was a terrible combination. And so it’s weird because I think I’ve—you know, I can’t read music anymore. And there’s got to be some psychological reason for that because I was a really good piano player. So it’s like the music that got kind of beaten out of me as a kid is resurfacing now in the last part of my life. And I think that that’s what the lyrics are about. And I had never articulated that to myself until right now. I have thought, it’s curious that there are just more and more songs. But so thanks, Sophie. Thanks for the therapy session.

Bianca Schulze: Yeah, and I’m so glad you asked that question because when I was reading the songs in this too, I wanted to be able to hear them the way that Kate hears them, you know, because as we’re reading the words, we’re putting our own interpretation and our own level of musicality, which on a spectrum of zero to ten is going to be varying for so many people. I had wondered that, so I’m really glad that you asked that.

Sophie Blackall: I have another therapy question and we can say—Bianca can say enough. And Kate, you can say I don’t want to answer this. But I was thinking about the part when Evangeline is—the cat has reluctantly agreed to give her a ride back and they are out under the sky and Evangeline is—she’s filled with joy. There are the stars above, but she also can’t help thinking how proud her father is going to be when she finds her way home. And it kind of—it makes me a little teary just thinking about it now because even as a 54-year-old growing up, there is a little part of me that I think will never stop seeking my parents’ approval, even though it doesn’t come very easily from either of them. I tell myself I don’t need it. But then there’s a little part of me that’s always—I hope they’re proud of me. And we’ve talked before about complicated relationships with parents, but this was a particularly beautiful father-daughter relationship. And I wondered about that thing about wanting our parents to be proud of us. And if you thought consciously about that or if that was something that just slipped in.

Kate DiCamillo: No, I didn’t think consciously about it. And we have talked about our parents, and you know, my mother went out of her way—”Don’t let her get a big head.” That was the way that she always operated with me. And my father, I was doing basically what he wanted to do, which was to write and didn’t get to do. And so there was resentment on his part. And it is really—it’s that thing of, I said this earlier, Sophie—it shows up again and again in my work, that telling the story to heal yourself. And that is, with each story, I make myself more complete to the point where I can put a healthy father-daughter relationship in there that satisfies me on a subconscious level and I’m not even aware that I’m doing it. But all the stories that have preceded it where I’m working toward that are the ones—those are the things that have allowed me to do it. You know, the storytelling, the stories have healed me.

Sophie Blackall: Ugh.

Bianca Schulze: Yeah. That was a great question again, too, because when I was reading, I thought of Casey Cep’s amazing article. Sophie, I don’t know if you’ve read this article.

Sophie Blackall: Yes.

Bianca Schulze: And I was thinking about how this may have been a healing story for you to have created, Kate. So, wow, those were amazing questions, Sophie. Would you like to be a co-host? Who should we interview next? I know.

Sophie Blackall: No, I just want to talk to Kate all day.

Kate DiCamillo: It’s just—yeah, I’m humbled and gobsmacked by those questions. Yeah. Thank you, Sophie, thank you.

Sophie Blackall: Thank you, Bianca, for letting us have these conversations.

Kate DiCamillo: Yeah, a safe place, a safe place to talk about things that matter. And do you know, all I can think is how long—I’ve thought two things. One, that when I go up there tomorrow morning to write, I’ll envision the field. It makes me think of Isak Dinesen and “Sorrow-Acre.” Do you know that story?

Sophie Blackall: No.

Kate DiCamillo: Anyway, that, but also that whole notion of just being able to heal yourself through—I mean, do you feel that, Sophie, with the art that you’re completing some part of yourself that—

Sophie Blackall: Yes. Yeah, definitely. Definitely. Definitely. Yeah.

Bianca Schulze: I am going to have my little spiel now to just tell you both how grateful I am for you sharing your insights, not just about Lost Evangeline, but just about yourselves and creating art. Your stories and illustrations continue to create magic for readers of all ages, inviting us to squint a little and see the extraordinary in our ordinary world. Kate, your words build bridges between childhood wonder and life’s deeper truths in ways that resonate with everybody who reads them. Sophie, your illustrations breathe such life and emotion into characters that step right off the page and into our hearts. And together, you’ve created another timeless tale that will surely inspire readers to find their own courage and chosen families. So thank you for bringing Lost Evangeline into the world and for spending this time with me and the listeners on the Growing Readers Podcast. We can’t wait to see where your creativity takes you next and most selfishly, where your creativity takes us next. So please keep creating and sharing stories that help us all feel a little less alone in this big, crazy, wild world. Thank you to both of you.

Kate DiCamillo: That was beautiful. Thank you. Thank you to both of you.

Sophie Blackall: Thank you, Bianca. Lovely to talk to Kate.