One question commonly put to writers is, “Where do your ideas come from?” I’ve always sensed an attitude that this question is embarrassingly naive, but I happen to think it’s an excellent question, a wide portal into the artist’s mind. One element of the answer, for me, is: from other stories. In fact, I wish every novel I’ve ever loved had a registered pedigree, some record of the literary genes flowing through the writer as his or her words took shape on the page. In that spirit, here’s a sampling of books, nowhere near comprehensive, that have shaped the way I think about storytelling in general, about novels in particular, and especially about novels set on farms or in rural environs.

So Long, See You Tomorrow, by William Maxwell

So Long, See You Tomorrow holds a special place in the list of influences on Familiaris and The Story of Edgar Sawtelle. For one thing, Maxwell wrote about homes—houses, apartments, farms—with great tenderness, as if such places and the everyday objects contained by them were magic. (In some of his stories, items of furniture discuss and worry about the inhabitants when they are away.) So Long, See You Tomorrow is so drenched in a sense of place that you can open it at random, as I just have, and find sentences like this: “To the indifferent eye it is like every farm kitchen for a hundred miles around, but none of those others would have been waiting in absolute stillness for Cletus to come home from school, or have seemed like all his heart desired when he walks in out of the cold.”

And then there is a dog named Trixie, whom Maxwell introduces by writing, “But first I need to invent a dog, which doesn’t take very much in the way of prestidigitation; if there were cattle there had to be a dog to help round them up…. The attraction between dogs and adolescent boys can, I think, be taken for granted.” The story proceeds to dip into Trixie’s mind every once in a while, without making a big deal of it. (It was a big deal, though: Literary legend has it that Maxwell took a fair amount of heat from his coworkers at The New Yorker for incorporating a dog’s point of view.) But nonchalant mastery is characteristic of Maxwell’s writing: He routinely accomplished the near-impossible with a near-impossible degree of understatement. Reading Maxwell’s Trixie gave me some hope that I might invent another dog, Almondine, who would come to stand for all Sawtelle dogs in The Story of Edgar Sawtelle. One of my original ideas for Familiaris was to tell the story of the “ordinary” dogs whose special talents combined, over many generations, to make Almondine possible.