“Western Massachusetts felt like a character to me and I was excited to write it,” says Heather Abel. Abel, who teaches creative writing at Smith College, says that her new novel, “The Emilys,” sprang from the setting in which she lives. After taking her daughter on a historical tour of Northampton and learning about the region’s involvement with abolitionism Abel says she found herself pondering history. “How did the past keep its fingers in the present? How were my daily mundanities of motherhood shaped by the social and ecological changes of my valley?”

In “The Emilys,” a mysterious condition leaves some people unable to tolerate sunlight, forcing them into isolation reminiscent of Amherst’s reclusive bard, Emily Dickinson. Doctors and some local residents think it’s all in their heads, but the book’s mothers bond over trying to help their children.

“I wanted to center women’s stories and mother’s stories — and even children’s stories — because I’m always curious about the lives of women,” says Abel. “A few readers have told me that although there’s darkness in my book, they end it feeling hopeful. That makes me so happy! I believe that although we are living through extraordinary crises, we have the capacity to care for each other in extraordinary ways. That’s what I was trying to offer in this book.”

Heather Abel will read at 6 p.m. Wednesday, July 29, at Buttonwood Books in Cohassset.

Julie Carrick Dalton found her muse in Concord. A journalist, beekeeper, and organic farmer, Dalton says she loved the forest from her earliest days. “I grew up as one of those half feral children running around the woods and my house was surrounded by forest,” she says. “I spent a lot of time back there, and I had a tree that was my favorite tree. And when I was about 13 years old, the land was developed and they cut down. It was really traumatic for me. It felt like a death.”

In “The Forest Becomes Her,” Dalton created a main character, 13-year-old Polly, who could respond more forcefully to the loss of a beloved forest. “It kind of gave me a way to revisit my childhood,” she says. “And Polly is more of an active character than I had been. So in a way, it was kind of like rewriting my own story, which was cathartic for me.”

Dalton, who has lived in Massachusetts since 1996, says she was also inspired by Emerson’s essay “The Over-Soul,” in which the great transcendentalist ponders the unity of all things and the divinity to be found in the natural world, whether that’s Walden Woods or simply the tree in your own backyard.

In her novel, Polly is joined by Hazel, a woman in her thirties, and Stella, a woman in her fifties, in their shared commitment to the last remaining oak tree in a neighborhood that’s being developed for housing. All three, Dalton points out, are going through some kind of “transfiguration within their own bodies” — puberty, childbearing, menopause — which “makes them sensitive to the grief the land is feeling,” she says. As for the air of magic that wafts through the book, Dalton adds that she was “trying to dig into that childhood sense of wonder. I almost think of it as a reverse haunting: instead of people haunting a place, it’s more like the absent forest haunting the people that now reside on the land where the forest used to be.”

Julie Carrick Dalton will read at 6 p.m. today, July 15, at the Boston Athenaeum.

Benny B. Peterson grew up in Arlington, and now lives in Washington, DC, where their novel, “The Maidenheads,” is set.