Writers, the good ones, take full ownership of their words — their printed words. Off duty, away from the keyboard, a looser standard often kicks in. Poets, novelists, essayists, journalists; get a few beers into them, and, like anyone, they’ll often begin to exaggerate, grouse, opine, spout off.

What follows is pure unapologetic spouting off, with reflections I’ve been stockpiling, but which haven’t made their way into a full-fledged column. The end of the year is a good time to get these off my chest — the unserious, the half-serious, the very serious.

Since I’m not much of a one for bull sessions or bars, I’ll even invent a new genre to pull this off: the “mini op-ed,” or, for longer reflections, “the short-short non-fiction novella.” Some of you, without realizing it, have probably composed an example or two in your heads while listening to the news this morning or driving to work. Here are mine:

Enough already! For all the mystery over whether J. D. Salinger did or did not leave behind a cache of unpublished writings, isn’t it time we let the poor man rest in peace? He wrote charming stories that decades ago had a vogue, and one enduring classic for teenagers, before committing that most traitorous of American sins — turning his back on fame, which of course led to even more fame. All the rest should be silence. American literature needs to find itself another recluse.

Whenever I feel nostalgically sad about not having little kids around to read out loud to anymore, all I have to do to snap out of my mood is remember hearing my little girl, after my reading Goodnight Moon to her for the ninth time in a row (or, worse, The Berenstain Bears), utter the most terrible words a 4-year old can utter at bedtime: “Again, Daddy. Again!”

Now that Nobel Prizes in Literature are being given to songwriters, how about bending the rules and awarding one posthumously to Stan Rogers, the extraordinary Canadian singer/songwriter who could use words as wonderfully as any novelist or poet. For his devoted fans, his death in l983 at the age of 34, in a fire aboard an Air Canada flight, was truly the day the music died. Listen to his Second Effort to begin to understand.

Publishers make a lot of money by publishing immortals who have been dead many years; go into any bookstore to the “Classics” section and you’ll see what I mean. They don’t pay advances or royalties on these books, the authors and their heirs having been dead many years.

So here’s my proposal. Publishers could skim the 10 percent off the list price of these classics they would normally pay an author for royalties, and use the money to establish a fund to publish new authors and experimental, non-commercial work in inexpensive editions, thereby harnessing the genius of Tolstoy, Proust and Austen to give young talent its chance.

How on earth did H. L. Mencken, the legendary old newspaperman and critic, ever become an idol of the alt-right?

How adorable was that little girl, who, when I was invited to a local middle school last winter to talk about one of my stories, sat in the very front row, huddled to the point of invisibility in a puffy down parka, listening intently to everything I said. When it came time for questions, she raised her hand, and in a voice so soft and gentle I had to learn forward to hear, asked, “Mr. Wetherell? Do you ever get any hate mail?”

Does anyone still read Pearl Buck? I’d really like to know. She was a huge name when I was a kid; there can’t be many people my age who weren’t required to read The Good Earth in school, her novel about Chinese peasants. She was one of the rare Americans to win a Nobel Prize in Literature, and regularly topped lists of Most Admired Women. If you bring up her name with anyone under 60, you’ll be met with looks of incomprehension.

Or how about other big names from her era? John Marquand, William Saroyan, Erskine Caldwell, James Farrell, John O’Hara, Edna Ferber, etc. There seems to be a sell-by date of about 40 years, beyond which, if academia or Hollywood doesn’t take you up, your work becomes as defunct as a dead white dodo.

The crowning touch in making downtown White River Junction the arts center it aspires to be would be for a brave/foolish soul to open a good independent bookstore on the corner where the Polka Dot diner used to be.

Historical novelists looking to understand the past should drive up onto the wild upland west of Groton on Vermont’s Route 302, and spend some minutes contemplating one of the most evocative monuments I know: the granite marker commemorating Pvt. William Scott, the famous “Sleeping Sentry” of the Civil War, who was pardoned by Lincoln for nodding off while on guard duty.

Scott was born on a nearby farm; he died later in the war, as did three of his brothers. What motivated them to leave these hills to fight? What was in their hearts?

Contemporary novelists trying to understand the present should continue over the height-of-land a little farther to the simple, no-frills house that has a Confederate flag flying out in front.

When I was young, a lot of my stories were about older people; now that I’m older, most of my short stories are about the young. This seems a natural way to do it, since, when you’re young, the bulk of the world’s characters are out in front of you; when you’re old, the majority trail behind. But how exhilarating! To inhabit the mind of a 69-year-old when you’re l9; to enter the perspective of a l9-year-old when you’re 69.

Here’s my new theory about the Salem witch trials of l693, when 20 innocent women and men were hanged. What if one wasn’t so innocent? What if by sheer luck the Puritan judges convicted the one genuine witch Satan ever bothered sending to America from hell, knowing one was more than enough?

What if that witch, in the moment before the noose tightened, had time to spit out a last curse? “Racism!” she or he may have shouted, and, while none of the onlookers knew what the word meant, it turned out to be the curse that damned us forever.

One of the delights of being young in the l960s was listening to the readings authors like Frost, Welty and Faulkner did on vinyl Caedmon Records. The most famous of these was Dylan Thomas reading his A Child’s Christmas in Wales.

Was any male voice ever more compelling than Thomas’? A pal of mine listened to the record so many times as a teenager he memorized it in full, and, at the old Thrush Tavern in Montpelier, after a Bloody Mary or two or three, would recite it by heart to whoever was lucky/unlucky enough to be sitting across the table.

My favorite line in Lady Bird, the teenage angst movie that’s getting such raves? When Christine, the I-want-out-of-here high school student from wrong-side-of-the-tracks-Sacramento, screams at her mother in frustration.

“I want to go to the East Coast where culture is! I want to move to New York City or Connecticut or even New Hampshire where writers live in the woods!”

And so, best New Year’s wishes to book lovers everywhere, sent from New Hampshire where writers live in the woods.

W. D. Wetherell is a novelist, essayist and short story writer who lives in Lyme.