MINNEAPOLIS — Kate DiCamillo was walking down a south Minneapolis street when she realized she had to write “The Hotel Balzaar.”

It was in the early days of the pandemic. DiCamillo— a walker, as much as she’s a reader and a writer — was giving others a wide berth.

“This was back when we started to think you shouldn’t pass somebody on the sidewalk. You should give each other the whole side,” recalled DiCamillo, author of “Because of Winn-Dixie,” “Flora & Ulysses” and many more.

With the world looking grim, her mind turned — as it often does — to the importance of stories.

“I thought, ‘What do I need? I need a fairy tale,’” said DiCamillo. “The next morning, I started on ‘Balzaar.’”

“The Hotel Balzaar,” in which a lonely girl named Marta befriends an eccentric countess who lives in the same hotel and who regales Marta with wild tales, is her third book this year. It takes place in the fictional land of Norendy, which first appeared in last year’s “The Puppets of Spelhorst.”

DiCamillo talked with the Minnesota Star Tribune about the origins of her latest book, which of her characters she’d like to live with, how telling stories staves off evil and the kind of friendship that pops up often in her books.

Q: This is the second tale in the land of Norendy, and another is coming next year. Did you know from the beginning it would return to the world of “Puppets of Spelhorst”?

A: It all came after the fact. But I knew it would be the same length. It’s going to be another fairy-tale novella. And that’s when Candlewick [her publisher] and my editor said, “Let’s have these be in a magical place that’s here and not there, that is this world but only if you squint.”

Q: The book is filled with beautiful illustrations by Júlia Sardà. Do they inform your storytelling or do they come later?

A: The text is done and then the Candlewick design person and my editor work together to figure out who’s going to do the art and they work with her and I see the art as it comes in and I’ve never been so utterly gobstopped by it. All I could say was, “Yes, yes, yes.” As to what it does for the story, as I said, it’s like the prose becomes a launching pad. The story still exists without the art but it’s like this art lifts off into the stratosphere, using the text.

Q: With the countess telling her tales to Marta, tales that become increasingly important to both of them, I kept thinking of that Joan Didion quotation about how we tell each other stories to survive. You know the one I mean?

A: Yes. There’s also a quote that makes me think of, which I think is Carl Jung and I won’t get it right but I’ll get the gist of it: Evil exists because people don’t get to tell their stories [”The reason for evil in the world is that people are not able to tell their stories.”]. Yes, we’re telling stories to survive. Yes. For me, personally, that is so explicitly what was going on as I wrote this book. It was that moment of walking — it was March of 2020 and it was like, “I’m not going to get through this unless I have a fairy tale to write.” I’m telling this story to survive and that is true within the confines of the story as well.

Q: And the idea is that storytelling is a way to show empathy?

A: Empathy and thinking. If you have those things, anything is possible if you’re willing to sit with somebody. We tell each other stories to feel seen. It’s like, “This is who I am,” and, as I write these stories, “This is who I can become.” That’s what books do for me, again and again. They show me I can change, that I can become a different person, that I can occupy the world in a different way.