Kate DiCamillo channels Hans Christian Andersen in ‘Lost Evangeline’

Of the title character in “Lost Evangeline,” it is said she “lived a great life of the imagination.” You could say the same about Evangeline’s creator, Kate DiCamillo.

The beloved, Minneapolis-based writer has created more than three dozen books, including two that won the coveted Newbery Award, “The Tale of Despereaux” and “Flora & Ulysses.” Her latest, “Evangeline,” concludes a trilogy of fairy tales set in the mythical land of Norendy, which are linked by characters who flit from book to book (its predecessors are “The Puppets of Spelhorst” and “The Hotel Balzaar”).

Evangeline grew out of the notebooks DiCamillo always keeps with her, with ideas for characters, conversations overheard on airplanes and the like. Described as being “as small as a mouse”, Evangeline is tiny — which, it turns out, is not the only thing she has in common with her creator. The following conversation was edited for clarity and concision:

Q: You’ve said that you sometimes write a book when you need it. Was that true of “Evangeline”?

A: I had this concept and title for — I can go back through my notebooks and answer this definitively, but it was for 15 years at least. I would take it out, do a draft and it was like, “No, that’s not working.” All the drafts got thrown away. The concept and the title just wouldn’t go away and then everything snapped into place when I got the opening thing about her father being a shoemaker.

Q: Why did that detail unlock everything?

A: You can see the house but you can’t figure out how to get into it at first, is how Ann [her friend Ann Patchett] and I always talk about it. I’ve been at this thing long enough now that I knew if I made my mind receptive, I could figure out how to get in. In another way, it’s interesting that the shoemaker element was what unlocked it for me because my father’s father was a shoemaker. So that has a resonance for me, just that word does. And it is not irrelevant that I am a small person in a big world.

A: I didn’t think of it either until somebody who had read it said, “Of course you would write about a small person, being a small person.” You reveal yourself, whether you want to or not. As we’re talking about this, I’m thinking, “OK, there’s the shoemaker element, the small person in a gigantic world.” Going to sea? I have never wanted to go to sea. But wanting to become yourself in the world? That’s basically what Evangeline is doing and that’s something that is very much me.

Q: At the end of “Evangeline,” there’s a sweet note about Denmark, which pops up often in your books, starting with the word “Norendy” coming from Danish writer Isak Dinesen’s work, right?

A: Denmark is very resonant for me because of Dinesen. I’d like to go to her home, which is now a museum. And also because Hans Christian Andersen, another big influence on me, is from there.

Q: He loved a shoe! I like the idea that shoemakers build things people need when they go off on adventures.

A: I never really made this connection, speaking of Hans Christian Andersen, but shoes were a real preoccupation of his. His grandfather was a cobbler, same as my grandfather was a cobbler. It’s very interesting, but also I feel like, “Ooh, don’t look at that too closely.”

A: So much of what I have learned is don’t turn and look at that thing directly. Just keep moving forward.

Q: It’s about staying instinctive?

A: Yes. It’s funny because I was over at Hamline, their MFA in writing for children, I did the commencement address and I talked to the graduates about how, in every setting, when you do a reading there’s either an adult or a kid who wants writing advice. I said, “For all of us, there’s still that hope — and it’s certainly true for me — that somebody is going to tell you how to do it." I said the same thing I always say: This is how I do it and it doesn’t mean I’m telling you to do it that way. There’s only one piece of absolute writing advice I can give and that’s the only way you’re doing it wrong is if it’s something you want to do and you’re not doing it.

Q: This is the third “Norendy tale,” which was billed as a trilogy. But there are many characters that I’d like to know more about. It’s as if their lives exist beyond what you’ve put on the page so far. Might we get more tales?

A: I’ll say this very carefully so I don’t mess with my own process: Some of the peripheral characters from these three fairy-tale novellas are in my notebook where I keep a running list of stories I want to tell. Because I feel like if I tap on them, I can get them to talk to me. I don’t know what format that would take and I won’t say which characters from these three. But they’re there.

A: I know that poem. I don’t “know it, know it” but I know him and that name. It’s somewhere in the recesses of my brain but I never — now, I’m going to, when we hang up, go do my research. In a weird way, it’s like “shoemaker” being resonant for me. I didn’t stop to ask why. I just knew it resonated. So I’m working with it subconsciously. It takes me back to the same thing I say all the time: I don’t know what I’m doing. And that’s terrifying and also great. If I knew what I was doing, I’d mess it up.

Q: There are mice in lots of your books, including this one and “The Tale of Despereaux.” Are you on some kind of pro-mouse crusade?

A: When I found a mouse in the basement a couple years ago, I screamed and was up on a chair. Although at the same time, I was thinking, “So cute, so cute.”

Q: It seems you are drawn to them ...

A: As long as the house isn’t infested by them, yeah. I remember with “Despereaux,” interviewers would say, “Why mice? Why are there so many mice in children’s books?” And it was one of those things that seemed so obvious to me. As a kid, that’s how you feel: small, powerless. Adults make you feel like you’re in the way, you’re a nuisance.

A: It was this thing of, “Here’s the grown-up who was read it as a child and who has then given it to her child.” That, to me, is mind-boggling: to be presented, sometimes, with the grandmother, the mother and the daughter. So: three generations. “My mother read this to me, now I’m reading it to my daughter.” That goes also to my point about it doesn’t have anything to do with me anymore. It belongs to the readers and I’m just lucky enough to be a part of it.

Lost Evangeline

By: Kate DiCamillo. Illustrated by Sophie Blackall.

Publisher: Candlewick, 147 pages.