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A final memory: one afternoon, now years ago, as I was struggling to revise a draft of Edgar Sawtelle , my partner, Kimberly, gave me this advice: Imagine someone reading Edgar's story on a long train ride home from work. That was all she said, nothing more, yet it is probably the single most useful bit of writing advice I've ever gotten. Before she turned away, I'd already filled in the details: that person was a man, and he'd had a dispiriting day at work; he'd grown up in the country, but now he worked in the city, and on that particular day he was feeling as if he'd lost his way in lifeā€”that his life had been reduced to a train ride from here to there and back, over and over again. I understood that the man was not me, exactly, but rather some version of me, and because this was so I could remind him: you were once connected to the wild world. Don't forget what that was like. I could see him, alone in his train car. As the fluorescent ceiling lights gradually superseded the dusk outside, the window glass became a long, black mirror. The man's head was bent over his book. I badly wanted to talk to him, but it was impossible, and eventually, when I had watched him long enough, I turned my attention back to the manuscript and got to work.

These memories reflect, I'm sure, some of my lifelong preoccupations, one being the extraordinary quality of our relationship with dogs, because The Story of Edgar Sawtelle is unabashedly a dog story. A love story, in fact. Writing it has given me a chance to consider how intertwined our species have become. How, over millennia, we've changed dogs and how dogs, in turn, have changed us. How the rituals and obligations of animal companionship also grant moments that transcend human experience. Another preoccupation of mine, not unrelated to the first, has to do with the nature of wildness in the human character. We glimpse it in ourselves every day, from the surge of emotion that rises from nowhere to the flash of inspiration we can't explain. Even memory itself, the very core of our identity, remains slyly feral, heedlessly retrieving all manner of incident and image, indifferent to whether its discoveries are burdens or gifts.

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