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Hunger Mountain – Spring 2004

All-Vermont Issue Number 4

Spring 2004

Sima Rabinowitz

With new editors each time, Hunger Mountain can be vastly different from issue to issue, and that unpredictability can be exciting. Guest editors Syndey Lea’s and Jim Schley’s vision for this all-Vermont special edition to “keep the door open” led them to the discovery of writers they had not known, a celebration of writers who seem “insufficiently applauded” and to what managing editor Caroline Mercurio calls “a few treasured Vermont favorites” (Ruth Stone, Hayden Carruth).

With new editors each time, Hunger Mountain can be vastly different from issue to issue, and that unpredictability can be exciting. Guest editors Syndey Lea’s and Jim Schley’s vision for this all-Vermont special edition to “keep the door open” led them to the discovery of writers they had not known, a celebration of writers who seem “insufficiently applauded” and to what managing editor Caroline Mercurio calls “a few treasured Vermont favorites” (Ruth Stone, Hayden Carruth). There are plenty of reminders that this work is from and of Vermont; Vermont as a physical landscape (Thomas Absher’s “Chesea”), as a metaphorical landscape (Nadell Fishman’s “Coincidence”), and as a metaphysical landscape (Linda Hyatt Young’s “October Morning”), though all of these pieces transcend the merely local, as does Victoria Taylor Smith’s humorous story of the search for love in Montpelier, “This Need.” And there is plenty of work that could not be identified, except in the author’s bio, as coming from Vermont, from edgy (Joan O’Connor’s story “If It’s Bad It Happens to Me”) to lyrical (Alexis Lathem’s poem “Walking”). Photographs of the work of Vermont sculptors Jerry Williams and Giuliano Cecchinelli and “Meander,” the cover painting by Gail Salzman are stunning, enlarging even further this issue’s generous vision. [Hunger Mountain, Vermont College, 36 College St., Monpelier, VT 05602. E-mail: [email protected]. Single issue $10. www.tui.edu/hungermtn/index.asp] – SR

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