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Ilene Cooper: So tell me about the movie. How exciting was that?

DiCamillo: I saw sketches. I was kind of kept in the loop, but I didn't have to do any work, which was great. So I saw periodic sketches, I saw promotional stuff. And then I saw a wonderful disk of some partially animated scenes, which was just fabulous. And then I saw the movie itself, right at the end of the Thanksgiving weekend and just loved it, which was a wonderful situation for me to be in.

Cooper: Have you had a chance to see it in a theater?

DiCamillo: I have, I went with a bunch of friends in Minneapolis the weekend that it opened.

Cooper: And that must have been great.

DiCamillo: Yeah, it was probably the most unsettling moment of the whole thing, the most surreal moment—the moment when I actually had a little bit of vertigo was doing promotional stuff in New York and Fifth Avenue was just jammed with people. And we're all trying to stay together, the crowd is on the corner, I look down and there's a kid in a stroller clutching a stuffed Despereaux. And I literally felt dizzy because it was just so surreal.

Cooper: It's the second time around because—

DiCamillo: It is the second time.

Cooper: —Winn Dixie was a movie.

DiCamillo: Yes, Winn Dixie was a movie and I was involved and worked on the screenplay quite a bit. But it was a quieter kind of thing. This came out with, you know—

Cooper: Hoopla.

DiCamillo: —hoopla. I'm not working on anything new yet. I finished up an adult short story and I had just finished a novel right before the winter started. The novel that I finished is called The Magician's Elephant. It's about a magician.

Cooper: And an elephant. (Laughing)

DiCamillo: That joke never gets old.

Cooper: It doesn't, I don't know why. You would think it would.