It’s spring, and Windham County is blooming with seven new books by six local authors. Some are fiction. Some are nonfiction. Some are self-published. Some are published by major publishers. Some are published with a hybrid model that falls somewhere in between.
Putting all of them together, it makes for a bountiful crop:
• Cheryl Wilfong, of Putney, who has self-published 22 books, has just put out a new historical novel, Long Haul.
• Peter Gould, of Brattleboro, has two books coming out, the just-published young adult novel Red Nose Girl and the soon-to-arrive adult novel Part for he Hole.
• Anna Monders, of Brattleboro, has just released her first book, Tested, a young adult science fiction novel, and has a picture book also soon to come out.
• James Grout, the founding director of Brattleboro’s High 5 Adventure Learning Center, has just published When in Doubt … Give Them Your Heart: Stories About Connecting, Empowering and Leading by Example.
• Meanwhile, Grout’s colleague at High 5, Ryan McCormick, the organization’s education program manager, has just published Edge of Leadership: Guiding Educators and Students on a Journey of Meaningful Connection, Empowering Skill and Collective Leadership.
•And Deborah Lee Luskin, who just a few months ago put out Reviving Artemis, about her experiences in the woods while learning to hunt, has re-released her 2010 novel Into the Wilderness, described by the Rutland Herald as “a fiercely intelligent love story.”
The need to write
In 2026, people read their phones. They read their social media. They read short-form pieces. But Americans are reading fewer books than ever before, and various recent studies and surveys have shown that between 40% and 50% of American adults have read no books in a given year.
People aren’t reading books for pleasure anymore. So why are so many people here writing them?
“I’ve recently realized that we each need an audience for our creativity,” Wilfong said. “My grandmother painted ceramics and sold $82 worth one year. She was disappointed. My mother quit oil painting because she was only giving her painting away. I embrace giving my creations — my books — away.”
In other words, she continued, “writing books is a money sink.”
“I have never made money, never even come close to breaking even,” Wilfong said. “I would rather have an audience than earn money.”
Wilfong said she self-publishes for three reasons. The first is that she knows how to do it. The second is that she’s 78 and doesn’t have time to find an literary agent. The third is that when she does talk to agents, she finds they are interested in fantasy, vampires, and dystopia, “and that’s not me.”
“Young agents are not interested in grey-haired writers,” she said.
Monders, who moved here in 2022 and works at Brooks Memorial Library as an accounts clerk, laughed when she said it took “14 years of pigheaded perseverance with no guarantee of success” before she found an agent and a publisher in Aladdin, an imprint of the Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division.
“It’s like, I need[ed] to write this book,” Monders said. “And so I did.”
Gould, a beloved clown, actor, and director who has already published five books — some self-published, some released by “the Big Five” publishers, historically the dominant traditional book publishing firms in the U.S. and worldwide markets.
He simply loves the process of writing.
“It’s having an idea and writing and rewriting and rewriting and rewriting and then having a book and getting it out there in the world,” Gould said. “It’s almost reward enough. That’s why I’m doing it.”
Luskin said books have been her best friend since she was a child.
“I started writing at an early age, and it was a way to find out what I thought,” she said. “I wanted to be like Jo March and Jane Eyre and David Copperfield. I thought, ‘Oh, I could be the hero of my own life.’”
Luskin said she writes because she has thoughts and opinions — “and also, I write to figure out what I think.”
“Having two books published within six months has changed me a little bit,” she said. “I feel more secure as a writer with two books. It’s like I feel more secure as a grandmother with two grandkids.
“My DNA, my influences, have another generation. And my grandchild might, if she has children, she’ll tell them about me,” Luskin said. “And maybe my memory will be a blessing.”
What’s the score?
Monders’ colleagues at Brooks Memorial Library are so proud of her achievement that at a recent launch party the library gave away 25 copies.
She said the idea for a novel based on fighting the social inequities of the world she describes in Tested came out of that world.
A 2018 article in MIT Technology Review, “Forecasts of Genetic Fate Just Got a Lot More Accurate,” “talked about doing genetic testing on babies and giving them a report card of what their genetic potential was for all these different things, like health and social capacity and intelligence,” recalled Monders, who has a scientific background.
The article described how “we could track kids according to their genetic potential.”
“And, of course, my head starts doing, ‘Well, what if? What if we live in a world where this testing is common? What if our options are in life are strongly limited or directed by the results of that genetic testing?’ So that was the kernel.” Monders said.
At the same time, she was living in an area hit hard by wildfire smoke from southern Oregon, describing “how horrific it felt to not be able to go outside and breathe for six weeks in a row in the summer or longer,” Monders said. “And so, environmental catastrophe was in my head. It felt very apocalyptic.”
In Tested, Monders creates a society that has gone through some sort of environmental collapse and decides to funnel its resources into people with the best genetic potential.
The rest of the population, with low genetic scores, are second- and third-grade “Fectives,” or untouchables.
“The genetic report card, the GRC in the story, is that all-important number that determines your path,” she said. “I’m imagining that the number of Mikayla, my heroine, is a 94, which is an elite score.”
When Mikayla rebels and begins questioning her society, the book takes off.
“In most books like this, the heroine is in the underdog class,” Monders said. “Mikayla is in the elite class and has to face and integrate into her understanding what’s actually going on for everybody else. She is really shaken from what she discovers, and so she has to figure out how she feels about that and what she’s going to do about that feeling.”
Giving your heart
For 23 years as the executive director of Brattleboro’s High 5 Adventure Learning Center — which has the core philosophy of “Connect. Empower. Lead. Be the Example” — Jim Grout has been training leaders, be they famous sports figures or the superintendents of public schools.
When in Doubt … Give Them Your Heart is the summation of his experiences and his career. It is full of short stories about connecting, empowering, and leading by example.
“That’s pretty much our mantra at High 5,” Grout said.
“I tried to use the stories as a jumping off point, as a primer for people,” he continued. “Each chapter has reflection questions. So what can the reader learn as a teacher, as a coach, as a leader of any kind, and how would it have real value for them as opposed to just some historical compilation of youth stories?”
In one of his stories he tells how Patrice Bergeron, recently retired hockey legend and team captain of the Boston Bruins, first came to find his voice during a High 5 leadership weekend.
The entire team came to Brattleboro for the leadership course just before the start of the 2010-11 NHL season and ended up winning the Stanley Cup.
“Yes, we helped win championships,” Grout writes. “But more importantly, we helped build teams of good people, who led each other — and themselves — to something greater. Team building does indeed work.”
Grout’s book is getting positive reviews from people who want to evolve their leadership skills.
“I’m getting some great feedback from even retired people who said, ‘Jesus, I wish I had this back in the day when I was managing this,’” he said. “But the most encouraging news so far is that people have found real value in its pages. And when I usually sign the book, I put my name and I say, ‘I hope you find value in these pages and make good things happen in the world.’”
Grout left his leadership position at High 5 in 2022 when he was diagnosed with leukemia. After a stem cell transplant, he started writing the book, using the energy that the drug prednisone provided.
He’s now 3½ years past the transplant and doing well.
“I guess things happen for a reason, but being given the opportunity to write the book was very, very gratifying,” Grout said. “I wanted to capture something from the history of High 5, but not a past history as much as a living history. Why are we doing what we’re doing for 25 years, and how can we continue to do it for 25 more?”
Grout will lead a discussion/presentation of the book on Thursday, May 7, at 6:30 p.m. at the Village Square Books in Bellows Falls.
Learning how to lead
Edge of Leadership, written by High 5’s Ryan McCormick, offers an exploration of leadership for “students rooted in connection, experiential learning, and real-world application,” according to a press release.
The book is designed for educators, facilitators, youth development professionals, and “emerging leaders seeking to foster authentic growth in themselves and others.”
It emphasizes that transformation happens through everyday interactions — small, often overlooked moments where connection, trust, and courage take root.
“The work of leadership is deeply tied to supporting young people in vulnerable, formative moments and helping them navigate challenges with confidence and connection,” said McCormick, who manages the Edge of Leadership program at High 5 and has spent decades developing leadership experiences for young people and educators.
“People sometimes hesitate to call themselves leaders, often associating leadership with authority, specific titles, or certain personality traits,” he continued. “This approach invites us to redefine leadership on our own terms.”
McCormick pointed out that “quiet support, active listening, thoughtful decision-making, or leading by example can all be just as influential as more traditional forms of leadership.”
Not clowning around
Red Nose Girl is hot off the presses for Peter Gould, who has spent a long career honing how to tell a story.
Gould claims, for example, that he took his abilities as a clown from a handshake from one of the greatest.
“When I shook Charlie Chaplin’s hand, I was infected by the Spirit, and it sat dormant in me for a while, but not that long,” Gould said.
Red Nose Girl tells the story of two young Vermonters in the 10th grade. Lettie is white, while her best friend, Trevor, is Black and gay. The book tells Lettie’s story of how a school project leads them to confront the for-profit prison system in Vermont and, actually, everywhere.
The book makes the case that young people need to be listened to, Gould said, because they are some of the Vermonters most affected by the punitive carceral system. The state Department of Corrections contracts with the for-profit CoreCivic to house prisoners in Mississippi, further straining family units already in upheaval.
The adult novel Gould expects hot off the presses any day now, Part for the Hole, is about a mild-mannered high school teacher who decides to rescue at gunpoint the National Endowment for the Arts, all by himself. The book has been called “Sublime” and “Surrealistic.”
Gould will do a reading of Part for the Hole at Brooks Memorial Library at a time to be posted soon.
Love in the Vermont woods
Luskin’s reissued book, Into the Wilderness, is a love story set in a Vermont county much like Windham. It tells the story of New Yorker Rose Mayer, 64 and widowed for the second time, who doesn’t know what she’s going to do for the rest of her life.
Her only son wants her to join him in Vermont for the summer and then live as a housekeeper in his house in New Jersey.
“And she does come to Vermont, and she meets Percy Mendell, who is the county extension agent, who spent all his life visiting farms, helping out, getting dinners, helping families, keeping up with births and deaths, rolling up his sleeves and helping out when he needs to,” Luskin said.
The novel is set in 1964, a year before every town in Vermont stopped sending a representative to the Vermont House, a system that let a town of 63 people wield the same voting power as Burlington, with 30,000 people. A lot of Vermont politics and political history is enmeshed with this love story.
Luskin is now writing her third book as she publicizes Revising Artemis and Into the Wilderness. Between writing books, writing a column on Substack, attending conferences, and speaking to groups, she has achieved perhaps her deepest goal: “a writer’s life.”
Healing power
Wilfong’s historical novel, Long Haul, is based on family stories and is centered on the influenza pandemic of 1918-19.
When it strikes rural Indiana, George, her ancestor, a Hoosier farmer, develops a “long haul” kind of illness. The book is about his relationships with his wife, children, and grandchildren — especially his Christian Science daughter, who doesn’t believe in sickness, death, or masking.
“I wanted to write about my father and his nine siblings,” she said. “I imagined the kindly influence their grandfather had on Dad’s oldest brother.”
But then, her writing plans “got hijacked by the grandfather — my great-grandfather. His obituary, on the front page of the small-town newspaper, says that he died of complications from the Spanish flu.”
As she was writing, Covid had just started, “and there was my story,” Wilfong said.
Although she has already self-published 22 books, none of them were fiction.
“After writing memoir, essays, a gardening blog, and three Dharma books, fiction was a completely different kettle of fish,” she said. “What a steep learning curve.”
She says she “stumbled around for a while,” then took a year-long First Draft Manuscript class in 2021 at the Pioneer Valley Writers’ Workshop, based in Northampton, Massachusetts. “Six revisions and five years later: Voilà!” she said.
She is planning a sequel to Long Haul, based on the life of her great-grandmother.
“It will take place from 1921 to 1927,” Wilfong said. “His widow’s journey. Oh! The shame of a working middle-class woman in 1921!”
And, Wilfong said, “if I live long enough — I’m 78 — I will eventually get around to writing the book I originally wanted to write, about my Dad and his nine siblings.”
This Arts item by Joyce Marcel was written for The Commons.