By any reasonable accounting, I am a Vermonter. I’ve spent roughly three-quarters of my life in the Green Mountain State. I fumbled my way through middle and high school and (briefly) college in Chittenden County. I’ve held down steady jobs and been fired from a few others. I own a house. I pay taxes. I vote, even in primaries and midterms. I can use a chainsaw, drive a tractor and shoot a rifle.
Yet, for all that, I am not a real Vermonter. And I never will be.
For starters, I wasn’t born here, which is the first and most basic criterion determining which Vermonters are or aren’t “real.” More rigid interpretations suggest one’s family must run several generations deep to qualify — though how many is never clear. (I suspect our friends in Vermont’s Indigenous communities might have some thoughts on the matter. But that’s a column for another day.)
So what is a “real” Vermonter, really? In an age when identity is at the core of so many social and political quandaries, it’s worth asking. And, as with most of the day’s thorniest issues, the past is a good place to seek answers.
In 1983, Vermont intellectuals
Bill Mares and Frank Bryan released the first of many collaborations, a collection of cheeky essays, lists and quizzes called Real Vermonters Don’t Milk Goats. The title riffed on Bruce Feirstein’s best-selling humor book Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche, published the year before. But instead of satirizing American masculinity, Burlington neighbors Mares and Bryan trained their considerable wits on Vermont tropes — perhaps inventing a few along the way. Chapter headings advise that real Vermonters don’t ski at Stowe, shop at the co-op, drive Volvos or wear L.L.Bean boots. Other sections outline real Vermonters’ belief systems, political values and their list of all-time enemies — watch your back, Maine.
Originally published by the New England Press, the slim tome was a local sensation, selling between 50,000 and 70,000 copies. It put Mares and Bryan on Vermont’s cultural map.
Journalist and photographer Mares was an insatiably curious polymath who served as a state legislator and was a high school history teacher, avid beekeeper and brewer, among myriad other pursuits. He died of cancer in 2024, and his 18th and final book, 2050: Vermonters Take a Swipe at the Future, was released posthumously last year.
Bryan was an esteemed political science professor at the University of Vermont for 36 years until his retirement in 2013. Now living out of the public eye in rural Vermont, he is still regarded as one of the country’s preeminent political scholars and thinkers.
Also: Neither was a real Vermonter. Mares was from Texas. Bryan grew up in Vermont but was born just over the border in New Hampshire. They were flatlanders or — as Mares’ wife, Chris Hadsel, put it — “Vermonters by choice.”
Earlier this month, Onion River Press published a 43rd-anniversary edition of Real Vermonters Don’t Milk Goats. Hadsel has organized several book parties that will take place around the state over the next two months, including an official launch this Sunday, September 27, at the Alchemist in Stowe, hosted by Rusty DeWees. (She also noted that copies of the book will temporarily be limited for a week or two, due to a printing error.)
Why mark the 43rd anniversary?
“Well, why not?” Hadsel replied in a recent phone interview.
As a real Vermonter might say, “Ayuh.”
The new version contains all the original material, including Bryan and Mares’ numerous footnotes and artist Howard Johnson’s illustrations. Because some of the references are dated, especially for anyone born after the 1980s, Hadsel and others wrote additional footnote explainers to clue younger readers in to the importance of people such as late local radio DJ Rusty Parker. New footnotes also fill us in on the fates of some Vermonters, real and otherwise, at whom the original book poked fun. For then-Burlington mayor Bernie Sanders to be fully embraced as a Vermonter, Bryan and Mares wrote, he “must (1) renounce socialism and (2) shed his accent.”
“That’s one they got wrong,” Hadsel joked.
Some of the humor in Real Vermonters might ring quaint to more cynical modern sensibilities, but much of it still resonates. Among the list of “What Real Vermonters Dread the Most” are reappraisal, zoning and “A weather report that begins ‘Only a dusting is expected…’”
The updated edition closes with two new essays about the authors. Don Hooper, a Statehouse colleague who illustrated and coauthored with Mares the 2021 book I Could Hardly Keep From Laughing: An Illustrated Collection of Vermont Humor, writes about his late friend, while UVM colleague Richard Watts profiles Bryan.
Both essays affectionately sketch the book’s authors as thoughtful men who cared greatly for their adopted home state and reveled in its quirks and authenticity. That fondness helps explain why a book playfully mocking Vermont was such a hit: We tease the ones we love.
Another, more subtle thread running through both the original book and its additions is that being a Vermonter actually has nothing to do with where you’re born. A real Vermonter can be from anywhere — the Northeast Kingdom, New York City, a village in Mexico. It’s what you do when you’re here that counts. ➆
The original print version of this article was headlined “Getting Real | What Frank Bryan and Bill Mares’ 1983 Humor Book Has to Say About Present-Day Vermont”
This article appears in September 23 • 2026.
Got something to say?
Send a letter to the editor and we'll publish your feedback in print!
