It was the late 1990s, and Kate DiCamillo was discouraged about ever having a writing career. Working as a “book picker” fulfilling orders at the Bookmen distribution company in Minneapolis, she had accumulated more than 450 rejections for her short stories and other writing. She was tired; her legs ached from standing all day. She belonged to a writers group where award-winning children’s author Jane Resh Thomas believed in her. But nothing was happening.

Then came the phone call that changed her life.

“I took the call in my boss’s office on the third floor of the Bookmen, among the remainders,” DiCamillo recalled during a conversation from her home in Minneapolis’s Linden Hills neighborhood. “They told me they wanted to publish ‘Because of Winn-Dixie.’ I couldn’t believe it.”

Minnesota author Kate DiCamillo celebrates the 25th anniversary of her novel “Because of Winn-Dixie” Aug. 19, 2025, at The Riverview Theater in Minneapolis. The event includes showing of the film based on the much-loved novel. (Courtesy of Dina Kantor)

She learned her manuscript had been found by a young editor in a pile on the desk of someone on maternity leave and the editor fell in love with the book.

DiCamillo’s tender/humorous story is about Opal Buloni, a lonely, motherless girl living with her father in a small Florida town who befriends a smelly, dirty dog she names Winn-Dixie after the grocery store where they meet. As the unlikely pair roams the streets getting to know people, Opal creates her own community.

When the book was published, DiCamillo couldn’t have known it would become a beloved story. It won an American Library Association Newbery Honor, a remarkable achievement for a debut author, and was made into a film starring Jeff Daniels, Cecily Tyson and Eva Marie Saint.

DiCamillo is celebrating the 25th anniversary of “Winn-Dixie” on Aug. 19 at the Riverview Theater in Minneapolis, presented by St. Paul’s Red Balloon Bookshop. Tickets include a paperback edition of either “Because of Winn-Dixie” or “Ferris,” a story about Ferris Wilkey’s summer before fifth grade when his little sister wants to become an outlaw, his Uncle Ted is writing the history of the world in the basement, and Grandma is seeing ghosts.

” ‘Ferris’ and ‘Because of Winn-Dixie” are almost bookends of my whole writing life,” DiCamillo says. ” ‘Ferris’ is the first book I wrote that starts with a complete family, with parents in place.”

“Because of Winn-Dixie” led to a career during which DiCamillo has written more than 60 books, with more than 43 million in print. She’s one of six authors to win two Newbery Awards, for “The Tale of Despereaux,” about a mouse who loves a princess, and “Flora & Ulysses,” featuring a squirrel who gains powers after being sucked into a vacuum cleaner.

“The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane,” detailing the adventures of a china rabbit, was produced by Minnesota Opera, and her series about Mercy, a toast-loving pig, was adapted for the stage by Children’s Theatre Company. As if that isn’t enough, DiCamillo is a former National  Ambassador for Young People’s Literature appointed by the Library of Congress.

DiCamillo, 61, is sort of stunned to be meeting the second, and a few third-generation, readers of “Because of Winn-Dixie.”

“The first time this happened, it was flat-out unbelievable, overwhelming,” she recalls. “I was doing a signing, and a woman told me she was a fourth-grade teacher whose fourth-grade teacher had read it to her. A youngster handed me an old copy, telling me, ‘This was my mother’s book when she was a kid and my grandmother read it to her, and now my mother is reading it to me.’ It was a moment of gratitude for me.”

In the beginning

DiCamillo grew up in a small town in Florida. Her parents — dad an orthodontist and mother a teacher — were divorced, and she lived with her mom.

Their house was filled with books, and young Kate read everything from “The Secret Garden” to “Wuthering Heights.” She majored in English at the University of Florida in Gainesville, where professors told her she had writing talent.

“All through my miserable 20s, I talked about writing, called myself a writer, and sat around wanting to be discovered,” DiCamillo revealed in a 2023 Pioneer Press interview. “At 29, I figured out I wasn’t going to get published unless I wrote something. So I adopted an (athletic) exercise philosophy about it, writing two pages a day. And I still do that.”

DiCamillo was about 30 when she followed a friend to Minnesota, figuring her boyfriend would ask her to marry him if she moved north. That didn’t happen, and this native of the Sunshine State arrived during one of Minnesota’s coldest winters with no job and no socks. She thought she’d freeze to death the first time she had to gas up the car.

Despite the weather, DiCamillo stayed and got a job at the Bookmen, where she learned a lot about the publishing industry and discovered children’s books.

“When I read Christopher Paul Curtis’ 1963 book “The Watsons Go to Birmingham,”  I thought I could do something like this, and I started writing ‘Because of Winn-Dixie,’ ” she recalls.

Then, everything in DiCamillo’s life came together quickly. In 1998, she received a $10,000 McKnight Foundation grant, her first short story appeared in a literary magazine, and “Winn-Dixie” was sold. A few years later, she won the Loft’s first award for children’s writing.

A big inspiration for the story of Opal and Winn-Dixie came from DiCamillo’s longing for her dog and Florida.

“At the time, I wasn’t aware of assuaging those longings. The story just came,” she recalls. “In retrospect, I see this is what I was doing. It was a terrible winter and the first prolonged period of my life without access to a dog. What a child like Opal longs for is community and feeling embraced and loved. I think about the dogs and people in my neighborhood interacting. You see how you can make community and, in a weird way, a blueprint about how to be in the world. We need each other and we forget that. Opal’s story shows us what we need and want.”

And then

(Courtesy of Candlewick Press)

After “Winn-Dixie” was sold to Candlewick Press, DiCamillo stayed on for a while at the Bookmen, where bookstore owners and librarians shopped. One day, she mentioned to Michele Cromer-Poire, then co-owner of the Red Balloon Bookshop, that she had a book coming out.

“Michele hosted my first signing at the store, and it was wonderful,” DiCamillo recalls. “They had a cake showing the book cover. That was huge. My best friend I grew up with came and a third-grade teacher told me she never had such an enthusiastic group of kids.”

DiCamillo quickly learned that being a newbie author facing a class of students is not without pitfalls. She vividly remembers her first school visit for “Winn-Dixie:”

“The teacher introduced me as the person who wrote the book and said they were going to talk about the themes. I thought, ‘We are?’ I had no idea about themes, and I was supposed to talk intelligently. The class decided the themes were family, forgiveness and friendship. I raced to my car and wrote it down so I could tell the next class what the themes were.”

That anecdote illustrates DiCamillo’s insistence that she doesn’t worry about the age of her readers or things like themes when she’s writing. She just tells stories.

As DiCamillo’s career took off, she became comfortable talking with her young fans and parents. At just over 5 feet tall, she is almost eye-level to some of the kids, and she takes them and their questions seriously.

“Talking with everybody, answering questions, that’s what I like,” she says. “That’s what I’ll do at the 25th anniversary celebration.”

Holly Weinkauf, owner of the Red Balloon, says DiCamillo’s books are a staple in her store, where she has hosted many events for Kate. She’s watched the magic happen between author and young readers.

“Kate is so good at doing events, so good at responding to the kids,” Weinkauf says. “She thinks about it as being there for them. She listens carefully and always answers with a great sense of humor. The kids know she is for real. She takes it seriously but doesn’t take herself too seriously.”

When it comes to Dicamillo’s writing, Weinkauf is a fan:

“She writes great stories with so much feeling about complex and often difficult topics with care that makes them very accessible. And she writes with the exact amount of words. She really focuses on the heart of the story she is telling.  And there is so much hope in her books. We need her gifts.”

And now?

DiCamillo has been as busy as ever lately. The third in her Norendy Tales series, “Lost Evangeline,” has just been published (after “The Puppets of Spelhorst” and “The Hotel Balzaar”). She’s working on a novel and has finished her contribution to a book of loosely-connected fairytales to be published by Candlewick. In April, “Orris and Timble: Lost and Found” was published. It’s the second in an early chapter book trilogy about a rat and an owl who are best friends.

Kate also spends time reading the dozens of letters she gets from young readers. One of the most often-asked questions is whether she will write a sequel to “Because of Winn-Dixie.”

“Much as you can say what you will or won’t do, I don’t think I will ever write a sequel,” she replies. “If I had been at a bigger publisher, I might have been pushed to do it, and I probably would have. Candlewick never did that. They embraced whatever direction I wanted to go. So I tell my readers that things didn’t turn out exactly as Opal wanted, but she is happy, safe, and loved.”

DiCamillo seems a little incredulous when the topic of retirement is raised.

“What does retirement even mean? I don’t know,” she says. “Why would I retire? I want to keep on writing.”

If You Go

What: 25th anniversary celebration for “Because of Winn-Dixie”

When/Where: 5 p.m. Aug. 19, Riverview Theater, 3800 42nd Ave. S., Mpls.

Program: Screening of the 2005 movie based on the book, Q&A with  Kate DiCamillo and book signings.

Cost: $20, includes paperback copy of either “Because of Winn-Dixie” or “Ferris”

Ticket information: redballoonbookshop.com

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It’s time once again this year for the Perseid meteor shower, and most years, it’s a marquee stargazing event, but not this year. You can blame it on the moon, which will be washing out most of the “shooting stars” of the Perseids. The Perseids peak on Wednesday morning after midnight, but at the same time, the heavens will also be filled with a bright waning full moon that’ll visually wash out the sky, even in the countryside. For sure, you’ll still see some meteors, but many of them will be lost in the moonlight bath. In years when the moon isn’t a factor, you may see over 50 meteors an hour. You may see only about half as many this year or fewer.

A meteor. (Mike Lynch)

Meteor showers occur when the Earth, in its orbit around the sun, runs into a trail of small debris left behind by a comet. Comets are mainly dirty snowballs of ice with embedded debris that, for the most part, have highly elongated orbits that take them from the far outer regions of our solar system to the inner neighborhood near the sun. As they swing close to our home star, the dirty snowballs at least partially melt, liberating and littering small bits of debris, usually ranging from dust grains to pebble-sized.

As Earth swings into these debris trails, the debris gets gravitationally sucked into the Earth’s atmosphere and burns up. The meteors are slamming into our atmosphere with speeds as high as 44 miles per second. Much of the light streaks that we see as meteors are not so much because of incineration but rather the temporary atomic destabilizing of the column of air they’re coming through.

Even though the Perseids will be “moonwashed” out this year, it’s still a lot of fun to lie back on a reclining lawn chair, roll your eyes all around the sky, and see how many meteors you can spot. Again the best time to watch for them will be Wednesday morning from about midnight to the start of early morning twilight. You’ll probably also catch a few falling stars on Monday and Tuesday morning as well. There’s a great app called NightCap that turns your smartphone into an astronomical camera. It costs around $3, but it is so worth it. It has a mode that allows you to take a photo of any part of the sky, and it detects and photographs meteors. It’s wonderful!

While you’re out in that lawn chair trying to view the diminished Perseid show, there’s going to be a fantastic celestial conjunction, or what I like to call a celestial hugging, between the very bright planets Jupiter and Venus in the predawn hours of Aug. 12. Moonlight will have no effect on the spectacle! It should be a stunning site! About a couple of hours before sunrise they’ll rise together above the eastern horizon less than a degree apart. That’s less than the width of your finger held at arm’s length. They’ll resemble cat’s eyes, although Venus will be much brighter than Jupiter. You’ll be able to see Venus and Jupiter, along with Jupiter’s moons, in the same field of view with binoculars or a small telescope. You can also capture a wonderful image of the planets using a smart photographic telescope, such as the ZWO SeeStar 50 or SeeStar 30.

(Mike Lynch)

Both planets will still be visible well into morning twilight before fading out as sunrise approaches. Obviously, both planets are not physically close together but are nearly in the same line of sight. It’s a lot of fun if you get a chance to watch the two planets approach each other in the early morning hours leading up to Aug. 12. Next week on Aug. 19 and 20, as the planets separate from each other, the waning crescent moon will be close by. That’s worth setting the alarm for!

Mike Lynch is an amateur astronomer and retired broadcast meteorologist for WCCO Radio in Minneapolis/St. Paul. He is the author of “Stars: a Month by Month Tour of the Constellations,” published by Adventure Publications and available at bookstores and adventurepublications.net. Mike is available for private star parties. You can contact him at mikewlynch@comcast.net.

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“America’s AI Action Plan,” unveiled by the White House on July 23, aims to accelerate the innovation of artificial intelligence by dismantling regulations and privatizing infrastructure. What the plan does is conflate innovation with deregulation and frame AI as a race to be won rather than a technology to be governed.

President Donald Trump signed three executive orders to ensure that the federal government approves data centers as quickly as possible, promote the exporting of AI models for the sake of American dominance and guarantee that federally supported AI systems are “ideologically neutral” and reject “wokeism and critical race theory.”

In its 24 pages, the plan does not mention “ethics” at all and cites “responsibility” once, in the context of securing AI systems against adversarial attacks. The “Build World-Class Scientific Datasets” section is the only part of the action plan that explicitly mentions human rights: “The United States must lead the creation of the world’s largest and highest quality AI-ready scientific datasets, while maintaining respect for individual rights and ensuring civil liberties, privacy, and confidentiality protections.” However, without protection measures, there is no encouragement for responsible use and deployment.

For example, the plan prioritizes a narrow interpretation of national security without addressing critical ethical needs such as the protection of vulnerable populations, children, neurodivergent individuals and minorities — issues that the European Union AI Act addresses.

And the plan’s only nod to misinformation is framed as a free speech issue. Instead of trying to address it, the plan suggests that references to it should be eliminated: “Revise the NIST AI Risk Management Framework to eliminate references to misinformation, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, and climate change.” Placing misinformation, DEI and climate change in one bucket suggests that these very different things can be treated the same way. The implications of this policy include that Google search, now enabled by AI, might censor references to these topics.

The plan also contains significant accountability gaps. By rejecting “onerous regulation,” the administration effectively green-lights opaque AI systems, prioritizing deregulation over transparency. It does not incentivize processes to help us understand the results produced by AI, enforceable standards or oversight mechanisms.

For example, when AI systems discriminate in hiring or health care, there is no clear answer to questions such as: How did this happen? Who is responsible? And how can we prevent this in the future?

The plan delegates oversight to private corporations, relying on self-policing as a substitute for governance. This hands-off approach mirrors a broader deregulatory playbook: During a May 8 Senate hearing led by U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, the Republican from Texas hailed “a light-touch regulatory style” as a key strategy.

This approach to data governance also raises serious concerns about fairness. While it calls “open-weight” and “open-source” AI the engines of innovation, it mandates that federally funded researchers must disclose “non-proprietary, non-sensitive datasets” used in AI research. This creates a double standard: Academic researchers and institutions should share data in the name of transparency, while private corporations are free to hoard proprietary datasets in their ever-expanding data centers. The result is an ecosystem in which public research fuels private profit, reinforcing the dominance of tech giants.

Indeed, rather than leveling the playing field, the plan risks entrenching imbalances in access, ownership, possession and control over the data that powers AI.

Furthermore, by ignoring copyright, the plan invites the unchecked scraping of creative and scientific work, which risks normalizing extracting data without attribution and creating a chilling effect on open scholarship. Researchers might ask themselves: Why publish clean and reusable data if it becomes free training material for for-profit companies such as Meta or OpenAI?

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During his introductory remarks at a White House AI summit, Trump provided the rationale: “You can’t be expected to have a successful AI program when every single article, book or anything else that you’ve read or studied you’re supposed to pay for.” However, before the recent wave of deregulation, AI companies had begun forming licensing agreements with publishers. For instance, OpenAI’s two-year agreement with The Associated Press signed in 2023 showed that publishers could license high-quality, fact-checked archives for training purposes and also allow their content to be displayed with proper attribution in AI-generated outputs.

Without a doubt, the plan can turbocharge corporate American AI — but likely at the expense of the democratic values the U.S. has long worked to uphold. The document positions AI as a tool of national self-interest and a driver of global divides. While Americans have the right to want to win the AI race, the greater danger is that they might win it on terms that erode the very values the nation has for so long declared to defend.

Mohammad Hosseini, Ph.D., is an assistant professor in the Department of Preventive Medicine at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine. He wrote this column for the Chicago Tribune.

The Flame night club in downtown St. Paul lived up to its name in August 1950.

A fire that started inside the club, which was housed on the ground floor of the Hotel Jewell on Fifth Street, ripped through the five-story building on a Sunday afternoon.

Firefighters quickly gave up on saving the hotel and focused their efforts on rescuing guests and preventing the flames from spreading to neighboring structures.

“Dense smoke pouring from the building made the State Capitol only a blurred image to spectators on the scene,” the Pioneer Press reported the next day. “At Lexington baseball park, spectators standing on the roof could see only the top of the First National Bank building poking up through a layer of smoke.”

Although no one was seriously injured by the blaze, the hotel — located where Osborn370 is today — was reduced to a burned-out shell standing in a pile of rubble.

With losses estimated at $275,000, it was one of the most destructive fires in St. Paul history.

‘Looks like there’s a fire in there’

The fire was first reported about 3 p.m. by a passing motorist, who saw smoke escaping from the offices of the St. Paul Hockey Club, which shared the first floor of the Jewell with the Flame.

“You’d better send someone to the hockey club office,” he told the dispatcher. “There’s smoke coming out under the door and it looks like there’s a fire in there.”

The hockey club and the Flame were both closed, but roughly 85 people were registered at the Jewell.

Hotel staff quickly began evacuating guests while firefighters rushed to the scene. Most of the Jewell’s occupants were able to leave safely, but some made dramatic escapes down fire department ladders.

Thousands of curious onlookers flocked to the burning building as firefighters deployed 30 hoses at once to hammer the flames with at least 6 million gallons of water.

The St. Paul Fire Department summoned all 410 of its personnel to duty — even some who were on vacation rushed back to battle the blaze. They worked late into the night, extinguishing flare-ups with the help of firefighters from neighboring cities.

Totally gutted

A pair of Minneapolis firefighters arrive with hoses outside downtown St. Paul’s Hotel Jewell to aid the city’s fire department in battling the blaze that destroyed the building on Aug. 13, 1950. (Ted Strasser / Pioneer Press)

By morning, the Jewell had been totally gutted and two of its exterior walls had collapsed. Demolition crews worked for more than a week straight to tear down the building’s remains and clear rubble blocking Fifth Street.

In the days following the fire, officials determined the cause was likely a discarded cigarette or faulty wiring in the Flame, which was known at the time for drawing big-name musical acts to its stage.

The owner of the Flame later told St. Paul Dispatch columnist Oliver Towne that he was on a flight home from Chicago when he saw flames from the plane as it passed over downtown.

“My God, that’s my investment going up in smoke,” he screamed.

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