Max Porter’s second novel, Lanny, is the semi-mythic story of the disappearance of a boy in a rural English village. It follows his widely acclaimed debut, Grief Is the Thing With Feathers. Porter, 38, until recently editorial director of Granta Books, lives near Bath with his wife and three sons, aged 10, seven and four. This interview took place by phone.

How’s it going?
I can’t believe it’s only Wednesday. It’s fine, I’m learning to be patient. I can do maths with the four-year-old, but I’m struggling after that. I made an obstacle course for them today. It’s crazy. But then, you know, I spoke to my mate yesterday who is a GP for homeless people and is in ICU [intensive care unit] now and he is describing apocalyptic scenes. And I’m here thinking well, next door’s magnolia is looking good.

I suppose Lanny emerges somewhat out of that sense of the fragility of the beautiful surface of life
I suppose so. In that if you are engaged with being alive on this planet just now and especially raising children, then if you are not terrified about the future half the time, you are not paying attention. What is weird about Lanny is that I realised some of what it was about after I had finished it. Certainly the environmental elements of it. Lanny himself has that easy proto-environmentalism that all children are born with.

The malevolent spirit in the book, Dead Papa Toothwort, would have lived and breathed Covid-19…
Yeah, you would be jogging through the woods and he would just cough it out.

The book seems to channel some of the atmosphere of certain rooted mythic novels. I was reminded of Alan Garner. Did you have him in mind?
I came late to Alan Garner, in my 20s. I have a Quaker Welsh side in my family, so I was always drawn to The Owl Service, and the idea that those Welsh myths were bubbling under my own life. But those weren’t really sort of foundational texts for me. Likewise, someone else asked me if The Piper at the Gates of Dawn chapter in The Wind in the Willows was a reference point. But again I’d hardly thought of that at all.

But you see the connections?
Yes, I am becoming worryingly pagan in my reading. I have been reading about contemporary animism, and if you strip out all the stuff about druids and rune tattoos, it makes a lot of sense. It’s funny, I just read Bill Bryson’s terrific book about the body and the fact is, bang-up-to-date science is saying the same things about our relationship with our environment that ancient indigenous people understood. There was a review of Lanny that said “beware: mystical thinking” and I’m thinking yeah, we could probably do with a bit more of that.

You studied art history and I understand that your writing always starts with drawing – at what kind of scale?
Just now the art projects are quite grand. I’m making presents for everyone I know who works in the NHS, with collage and paint. Generally, though I am hunched over my notebook with a black fine-liner pen. I might start with two diagrammatic figures or the idea of a building. And then out of that I might get a sentence or two, or at most a paragraph and then when I sit down and write they are my raw material.

Did that habit come naturally?
Pretty much. The great truth I learned from John Berger, who I had a huge reading crush on, was that to put art and writing in separate buckets was to completely misunderstand how the brain worked. Art is where I begin thinking from. I am never going to be a writer who just sits down and writes paragraphs of prose.

You want to surprise yourself?
Yes, you want to not be in control, always. Also I am a worrier. I find that writing allows me to worry about stuff better and in more detail.

There is plenty of scope for anxiety at the moment.
Yes but the page should be the place where you do that much better than you do on Twitter or whatever.

Lanny grew out of a long poem you wrote based on an inspiring friendship between a child and an older neighbour. Was that autobiographical?
Yes, there were a few people like that. I did art lessons with my next-door neighbour Pam, who was a lovely woman who taught at the local prison. I had a really nice grandfather who taught me how to do watercolours and stuff like how to make arrows. And mainly there was my godfather, Tony, my best mate, who makes beautiful things with his hands and just gives them away. He is a working definition of the good life for me. I wrote to him a while ago and told him I was sorry this beautiful tray he had made me was all stained now, and he wrote back to say: “Great, that’s how it should be”. I’d like to think my books can be lived with in the same way.

You are interested in oral poetic traditions. How far back do you go?
Quite far. I’m reading this great new translation by Gwyneth Lewis and Rowan Williams of The Book of Taliesin. And also this incredible Ethiopian spiritual text The Harp of Glory, which is a kind of Chaucerian love song to the virgin.

Which book or author do you always return to?
Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban. I first read it in my late teens – my brother gave it to me and said don’t panic in the first 20 pages. And it was true, the first pages were like smoking a really bad joint, but then after that you are syntactically and emotionally and politically absolutely held in the book’s spell. I have reread it three or four times since. The way it changes is unbelievable; it is a living thing.

• Lanny by Max Porter is published by Faber (£8.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £15