Their familiar places put them in a creative state of mind

A realm of desolate roads where snow lingers well into April, it is also Mosher’s home. He distinctly remembers his first glimpse of Lake Willoughby’s cliffs, and how glacial they appeared. Four decades later, the image resurfaced in his prose: “She sipped her fortified tea and looked across the narrows at the soaring cliffs of Kingdom Mountain’s west side. In places, springs seeping out of the escarpment had frozen to a glittering aquamarine.’’

Ann McKinstry Micou, who studied the state’s literature for the 2005 book “A Guide to Fiction Set in Vermont,’’ discerned two primary themes: an outsider’s struggle for acceptance, and the impact of change on traditional values and lifestyles.

Crime novelist Archer Mayor might be the exception. Though his fiction is also imbued with a sense of place, he is more apt to dwell on the mundane: the Brattleboro storm drain, for instance, where a street bum hangs out in his novel “The Ragman’s Memory,’’ or the rundown buildings of Bellows Falls. Although Mayor’s hero, detective Joe Gunther, is based in Brattleboro, he spends the entire narrative of “Borderlines,’’ the second in Mayor’s detective series, in St. Johnsbury, and is often on the move.

Besides Brattleboro, Mayor says, “I’ve also chucked people over the edge at the Rock of Ages [granite quarry], off the ferry into Lake Champlain, and down the tube of the Harriman Reservoir glory hole. In the book I’m writing now, number 22, there will be a scene at the erstwhile greyhound park in Pownal.’’