THE BEAUTY OF VERMONT

Beyond the apple orchards, big sister Amy ’91 led Hunt on another adventure – UVM – where Amy was a French major.

The two are very close, so it “made good sense to me to go there." 

Their family lived in southern Vermont during some of their childhood years, “and so Vermont has always retained a sense of being a place where I could connect, where I could find calm,” Hunt shares. 

Hunt was always writing – a passion that deepened and expanded through her time at UVM.  

“I think being the youngest of so many kids meant I often was not able to talk in order to sort out my thoughts,” she says, “so I always relied on writing as a way to think. I don’t really remember a time when I didn’t write.”

“We’d take weekend drives all over the state. There were no heater boxes in those old bugs and so we would wrap ourselves in blankets. I remember once on a drive up through the Notch, Linda, who grew up in New York City, rolled down the window and started to scream sing, 'Oh purple mountain majesties!'”

Back at their South Prospect Street apartment on Edenic days like that one, “John would cook up a beautiful soup or pasta dish with buttery onions in the sauce,” she recalls. “It was heaven. The three of us would then get dressed up in wild costumes and dance in our living room till the wee hours. What joy.”

“The beauty of Vermont is something I carry with me always.” 

LOOKING BACK AT UVM

As for classroom memories, Hunt bears a treasure trove: a semester-long seminar on Don Quixote; Creative Writing with Prof. David Huddle; printmaking with the late, great Prof. Bill Davidson; Irish Religion with Prof. Walter Brenneman, where she learned about the intersection of story and nature in regards to holy wells.

Then there was the time Prof. T. Alan Broughton made her and her cohort memorize poetry. “I still remember these poems!” 

she says. “‘Spring and Fall to a Young Child,’ ‘My Papa’s Waltz,’ Sonnet 116. What a gift these poems have been over my lifetime.”

During Prof. Roxanne Lin’s seminar called "Family Values," Hunt and her peers only read Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley, and William Godwin.

“That course still blows my mind.”

Prof. Margaret Edwards is often in Hunt’s thoughts as a tough, sassy, and “amazing literature professor" who would host a handful of students for a weekly roast chicken dinner at her home over a game of Dictionary. 

“I’ll never forget that generosity and true spirit of loving learning and literature.”

After her 1993 graduation came a string of terrible jobs, which Hunt credits for teaching her a lot -- “like, better duck quickly when an angry sous chef throws a plate at your head.”

During that period, she deepened her writing practice and became “committed to writing daily – even if only for a half hour -- as a way to remember freedom and to work towards the idea of being able to tell stories as a profession.”  

At the time, Hunt was also living in a geodesic dome in the woods near Sharon, Vt with her boyfriend’s family, the Stacys. “It was an incredible time in my life. I was making art, reading, writing, working at the Raptor Center at VINS and meeting so many interesting people who lived lives that were very free: scientists, farmers, artists. People who believed in doing things in the new ways and the old.”

Then came The Dark Dark, a collection of stories. “I am always writing a short story collection. It is the background where I funnel ideas, fears and unanswered questions. The Unwritten Book is non-fiction and brings together many of the themes Mr. Splitfoot opened up, primarily, how are humans haunted?”

Alongside teaching and writing prolifically, Hunt has continued to explore form beyond prose, venturing into the world of dramatic writing with the play, The Difference Engine (2003), produced by the Theater of the Two-Headed Calf. 

“The funny thing about that play is," she says, "I wrote it as a play as a joke. I never meant for it to be performed, but I thought making a short story in a play format was an important way to consider the idea of how computers work. They run a program. They stage a play. This also seemed important when I was thinking about Ada Lovelace and her bold life that refused to kowtow to the roles she’d been cast into, i.e., wife, daughter, woman in the 1800s." 

Hunt was delighted when director Brooke O’Harra adapted the play. 

“It set me off on a path of future collaborations that now mostly involve screenplays. I recently had a short film go to the Toronto International Film Fest. Simone Faoro and I adapted my short story 'The Yellow,' then she turned it into a film.” 

In expanding past prose, Hunt has found collaboration -- “it is so different from writing alone. I hope to write another play in the future.” 

These days Hunt is focused on finishing her next novel – a nice change of pace from doing too many things at once – writing, gardening, being a mom to three young women. Instead of three projects at breakneck speed, she is centering her attention on one and at a pace that feels right.

"I am just about to turn in my new novel to my editor. It’s called The Tender. It is set on an island off the coast of New England. The action occurs at many times allowing history to resonate on the present and future, particularly the history of how women’s and girls’ bodies have been leveraged in the fight for reproductive freedom. I am also almost done with a new story collection, and I’ve been working on a number of screenplays, including an adaptation of Mr. Splitfoot.” 

Teaching forms a core part of her writing life, as it forces her to “consider work slowly, to sit with it for a much longer moment in order to teach it later.”

"I have been a professor at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn for — somehow — twenty-three years now. It is a wonderful place. We have a BFA and an MFA for writers and, because Pratt is an art school, we think about writing as craft, as art. We move it out of the liberal arts and into material arts.”

She teaches on occasion in Vermont, “leading workshops with both the MFA at Bennington and the Writer’s Conference at Bread Loaf.”

To her students, and those at UVM aspiring to devote their lives to letters and stories, she says “Read. Read. In books we have a broadening that does not exist elsewhere. In books, we connect with humans across time. Books funnel our impulses toward connection, away from the narrow ideas of capital and capitalism. UVM and Burlington offer so much: a connection to nature and culture. The University setting allows for such a broad path of study. Don’t gear your education toward a job, gear it towards learning as much as you possibly can."