Last week I mentioned that every story springs from the writer's own longing. Even the most careful readers would find it impossible to assemble the facts of my life from my stories, but they would have little difficulty peering into my soul. The longing each story is built upon provides an exceedingly transparent window.Some elements of my stories come from small, if once deeply felt, moments of longing. For instance, Erthly, the town where Little Dog, Lost plays out, is based loosely on the one in Illinois where I grew up. However, our town had no mansion such as the one that stands at the center of Erthly. Where did I get such an idea? From a stately home I often passed in a nearby town. On a deeper level, though, the mansion in the story comes from my own youthful longing.The most important feature of that mansion—I assume today I would see it only as a rather large house—was a round tower at one corner with a witch's hat roof. Oh, how I wanted to live in the round room I knew must exist at the top of that tower! I wasn't much interested in the rest of the house, but I longed for that tower room. More than a half century later, my heart remembered that longing and the mansion with the round tower found its way into Little Dog, Lost.Another longing of mine found a place in that story. In the town where I grew up most of the kids I knew had grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins living close by. In fact, one boy had an uncle a year younger than he right there in our school. That fascinated me. To be older than your own uncle! To have him a grade behind you in school! All my uncles were old . . . forty at least. And all my relatives lived far, far away. My mother's mother lived in Minnesota, a trip that took us all day to make during my father's vacation time from the mill. My father's parents were in California, and during all the years I was growing up we visited them only twice. Aunts and uncles and cousins were flung all over the country. None lived, in Mark's terms in Little Dog, Lost, "close enough to count." And so that desire to have extended family close by is part of the yearning out of which the story is built.And at the very center of the story lies another source of longing, a deep one. All the years I was growing up I wanted a dog. I spent my entire childhood, in fact, wishing for, begging for, longing for a dog. My parents always explained very carefully, very reasonably, why we couldn't have one: They both worked. The dog would be left alone too much. Even though we lived on the edge of our small town, there were still leash laws, and it wouldn't have been fair to keep a dog on a chain. And on and on. I learned only after I was well grown that the real reason a dog had been forbidden was that my father didn't like them. The truth was that he was afraid dogs. And so in Little Dog, Lost, despite Mark's needing a dog, his otherwise very reasonable mother has refused for years to let him have one. Guess why.I have spent my adult life satisfying that particular longing. There has hardly been a time, in fact, when I haven't had a dog of my own, sometimes two. The one I have now, a ruby cavalier King Charles spaniel named Dawn, sleeps at my feet as I write this. But though the longing is satisfied now, the little girl who dreamed of having a dog never quite goes away.I play her out through Mark in Little Dog, Lost.It's the way writing stories—deeply felt stories—works. And longing is what makes stories come alive . . . for the writer as well as for the reader.