Actually June and July. Just got back yesterday from the 10-day MFA residency at Vermont College of Fine Arts. Exhausting but fun.
Montpelier is tiny. I went running almost every day — partly because I like to run, partly because the dorms are hot and the beds are punishing in the cruel-and-unusual kind of way. I’m pretty sure I covered every street in Montpelier by the second day.
Friendly place, though. Good beer. Good coffee at Capitol Grounds. Not exactly a foodie’s paradise, but the Threepenny has good sandwiches and Puerta Negra has really good ceviche. Which beats the cafeteria food.
The view of the state capitol building as you head down the hill from campus. I became very familiar with this view.Abbe came to stay for the last weekend, and we came across this old railroad trestle bridge a few blocks from downtown Montpelier. Definitely not a bridge to walk across as if you’re re-enacting Stand By Me. Definitely not. More Vermont radicalism: they celebrate Independence Day on July 3rd each year. I’m not sure why, but I have to think it’s about sticking it to the man. Anyway, here’s Bernie.At the top of Hubbard Tower at the edge of Hubbard Park, with the Green Mountains in the background. I think they’re the Green Mountains. I could look it up.Abbe in front of the Tower.Panoramic view from atop the Tower. Again, the Green Mountains. (I think.)
Tom Howard is the author of Fierce Pretty Things (Indiana University Press, 2019).
He received his MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Fierce Pretty Things won the 2018 Blue Light Books Fiction Prize, and his individual stories have won the Ninth Letter Literary Award in Fiction, the Indiana Review Fiction Prize, the Robert and Adele Schiff Award for Fiction, the Carve Magazine Prose & Poetry Contest, the Tobias Wolff Award in Fiction, the Innovative Short Fiction Prize, the Willow Springs Ficiton Prize, the Rash Award in Fiction, and the Robert J. DeMott Award for Short Prose.
