While his name is often synonymous with classic picture books such as Waiting, a Caldecott Honor book, Kevin Henkes has been penning works of middle-grade fiction since the late 1980s. His most recent novels have focused squarely on the Miller family, following the small, exquisitely human lives of Billy Miller and his younger sister Sal. Now his youngest sister appears in her own title, Poppy, (Greenwillow Books, Oct. 6), but her world has taken a somber turn since the adventures of her siblings, due in large part to the death of their father. Henkes answered our questions via email.

Poppy returns young readers to the world that was started back in 2013 with The Year of Billy Miller. Was it always your intention to keep telling the story of this family, or do subsequent installments surprise even you?

I hadn’t planned on writing a sequel to The Year of Billy Miller. But more than any other characters from my novels, Billy and his family were hard for me to let go of. They kept nudging me until I succumbed to the persistent pressure. I’ve loved having them in my life all these years.

When you wrote the first book, your children seemed to be the models for Billy and Sal. Have the characters kept up with your own children, or has one set passed the other in age by now? 

When I wrote the first book I was thinking so much about my kids at those ages (Billy, 7; Sal, 2). It’s hard for me to believe that in Poppy, Billy is a freshman in college and Sal is a freshman in high school. Even harder to believe is that my kids are now 28 and 31.

Do you plot out your novels in advance, or do you write as it comes?

I write one draft, very slowly, sentence by sentence, going back and changing things as need be. But I don’t use an outline and I have no idea how I’m going to get where I need to end up. I continually surprise myself.

E.L. Doctorow once observed that writing is “like driving a car at night: you never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” Eventually, I get to the point where there really is only one way for the story to go—it’s inevitable. So far, anyway, I’ve always found my way home.

How do you make a character intelligent and aware of the world yet hampered by the limitations of their age? 

That’s one of the challenges of writing about young kids. They have deep feelings, keen awareness, and strong opinions, yet they often can’t quite express themselves clearly or make themselves understood. That’s why I love being able to write about a character’s inner life. As an author, I can reveal a character’s thoughts even if he or she can’t communicate them in a successful manner.

If history is a guide, it seems likely that there will be a second Poppy story in our future. Is that something that readers can look forward to?

I think Poppy is the end. I feel it in my bones. In Books for Living, Will Schwalbe said that if you want to know what a novel is really about, just read the last word. The last word of Poppy is “forever.” That seems fitting. A good place to stop.

Betsy Bird is a librarian and writer in Evanston, Illinois.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of the story misstated a quote by E.L. Doctorow.