I am honored to be featured on Barney Smith’s Vermont Artists and Authors podcast, StoryComic, Episode 361.

I had a delightful time talking with Barney about Vermont’s most famous writer, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, and my book Green Mountain Stories, a collection of 28 stories by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman. Originally published in 1887 under the title A Humble Romance and Other Stories, it’s now in print 136 years later under what appears to have been the title that Freeman and her editor, Mary Louise Booth, had agreed upon: Green Mountain Stories.

You can hear more about Freeman and the book’s backstory in Barney’s interview. I emphasize the fact that Freeman is a Vermont writer, and that Green Mountain Stories is made in Vermont.

■ I hope that Green Mountain Stories brings great inspiration to readers across Vermont.

■ I hope that each of the 262,852 households in Vermont buys a copy.

■ I hope that each of the 185 public libraries in Vermont buys at least one copy.

■ And I hope that each of the 250 public schools in Vermont figures out a way to incorporate at least one Mary E. Wilkins Freeman short story into their curriculum. They will find many suitable ones in Green Mountain Stories–stories on par with the best in American Literature, right up there with Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Sarah Orne Jewett, Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, Sherwood Anderson, and William Faulkner.