How a Real Dog Became a Children’s Book

Finley was a dog long before she was a character.

She was my black Lab, my sidekick, and the very enthusiastic participant in ordinary days that somehow had a habit of becoming adventures.

A trip to the park. A day at the lake. Meeting someone new. Exploring somewhere unfamiliar. Finley approached all of it with the same combination of curiosity, enthusiasm, and absolutely no concern about whether any of it was supposed to become a story later.

Eventually, I started seeing those days differently.

What if Finley could help tell the story?

Before Wright & Co. Market, before The Reading Room, and before I started building a collection of books around her, I spent more than 15 years teaching science.

One of my favorite things about teaching was watching curiosity take over. A student would ask a question, one question would become three more, and suddenly we were somewhere far more interesting than where the lesson had started.

Finley has always explored the world a little like that.

So when I began imagining children's stories, she made perfect sense as the character at the center of them.

A familiar friend for unfamiliar things

The idea wasn't simply to write stories about a cute dog having adventures.

I wanted Finley to experience the kinds of things children experience, too.

Sometimes those are wonderfully ordinary things: going to the park, visiting a farm, planting a garden, spending a day outside, or discovering something new.

Sometimes they're experiences that can feel a little uncertain at first.

Meeting new people. Going somewhere unfamiliar. Visiting the doctor or veterinarian. Trying something for the first time.

Finley gets to be the familiar friend who goes first.

She can be curious. She can hesitate. She can discover that something isn't quite as scary as it seemed. And then she can keep exploring.

Because childhood is full of firsts, and sometimes a new experience feels a little easier when you've already watched a friend do it.

Turning Finley into Finley

Of course, putting a real dog into a children's book means deciding which pieces of the real Finley belong on the page.

The answer turned out to be most of them.

Her curiosity stayed.

Her affection stayed.

Her tendency to investigate absolutely everything stayed.

And the stories began borrowing from our real adventures together, then wandering just far enough beyond them to become their own little worlds.

That became The Little Adventures of Finley.

One story became another. Then came coloring pages, activity ideas, and more places for Finley to explore.

Somewhere in the process, I realized I wasn't simply making a book.

I was building a series.

And apparently, a Reading Room

That's one of my favorite things about creating something without knowing exactly how large it might become.

You follow the first idea.

Then you follow the next one.

Eventually you look around and discover you've accidentally built an entire room for them.

The Reading Room at Wright & Co. is becoming that place for Finley's stories, coloring books, activities, paper goods, and the other curious little ideas that grow out of them.

But underneath all of it is still the same real black Lab who started the whole thing.

Finley doesn't know she's an author’s muse.

She mostly knows that when I grab my keys, there is a statistically significant possibility that we're going somewhere interesting.

And really, that's probably all she needs to know.