Hunger Mountain, the national arts periodical published at Montpelier’s Vermont College of Fine Arts, will now reach a global audience thanks to the launch of its online incarnation, which debuted on July 31, 2009: www.hungermtn.org.
In true Vermont tradition, Hunger Mountain has always been eager to create community, and now that community extends to a global audience. The new online version of Hunger Mountain has received visitors from 45 countries in the week since its launch.
Another distinguishing feature of the new online journal is its wide array of artistic expression. “Hunger Mountain might be the only arts periodical with a rich section devoted to the field of writing for children and young adults, in addition to the more traditional fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, and visual art,” says Hunger Mountain managing editor Miciah Bay Gault. Gault notes that the children’s literature portion of the magazine is meant for writers of children’s literature, not children themselves.
Hunger Mountain online has launched with a sizeable splash, reprinting the first story published by George Saunders, popular fiction writer for The New Yorker and author of CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, Pastoralia and several other books. “A Lack of Order in the Floating Object Room,” first published in 1986 and never collected, has fans of George Saunders buzzing about Hunger Mountain.
“We’re thrilled to reprint a George Saunders story,” says Gault, “but what’s really exciting is the sense of literary lineage in this issue.” The journal published an introduction to the George Saunders story by Tobias Woolf, who was Saunders’s graduate creative writing teacher. Hunger Mountain also published a student of Saunders’s, emerging fiction writer Aimee Pokwatka.
The idea of literary lineage is elsewhere on the website as well. Popular new poet Matthew Dickman’s poems “Fountain” and “Magic Eightball” appear alongside two poems by Dorianne Laux, Dickman’s teacher and mentor. “Showing literary and artistic lineage is a way of celebrating our creative inheritance while encouraging evolving innovation,” says Hunger Mountain fiction editor Anne de Marcken.
“Part of our mission is to foster conversation about the arts,” says Gault. The website is free, and every published piece includes a forum where readers/viewers can comment, share insights, and ask questions. Hunger Mountain has already generated lively conversation in the week since its launch. In response to the George Saunders story, poet David Cooke writes, “I am telling you, he is this century’s Tolstoy.” On an essay by Newbery Award winner Katherine Paterson, a reader comments, “Beautiful and touching. This reaffirms what I hope to achieve in my own writing.”
Vermont College of Fine Arts, which houses the editorial offices for
Hunger Mountain, is the first college devoted entirely to low-residency, graduate fine arts programs, offering MFA’s in Writing, Writing for Children and Young Adults, and Visual Art.
Hunger Mountain was founded in 2002 as a print journal and will now publish three online issues and one print issue yearly. Visit
Hunger Mountain at
www.hungermtn.org and Vermont College of Fine Arts at
www.vermontcollege.edu.
For more information, contact:
Miciah Bay Gault
802.828.8517