Then what? Carrie Jones essay on Hunger Mountain

Hunger Mountain is the literary journal of Vermont College, and it's a really enjoyable read for the likes of us. Check out Carrie Jones's essay on why she writes fantasy:

It’s all Bigfoot’s fault. I wanted to find him. Every day when I was a kid, I’d rush through my homework, breeze through a call to my mom at work, gobble up my snack, gulp down my apple juice, and head to the woods in my backyard.

Then I’d be incredibly quiet.

I was hunting, you see. Only I didn’t have a gun. (Not that I would have used it, anyway. I was one of those kids who read Charlotte’s Web and became a vegetarian because, well, what if all pigs were like Wilbur, and they could really talk and feel?)

Fortified by meat-free spaghetti leftovers, I’d head to the woods, glassy-eyed, breathing as inaudibly as I could. I tried to walk with quiet, rolling my feet inwards as I stepped in a straight line, moving like a fox. The wind whipped my hair. The maple leaves fell down. The cars on the highway zipped by, but I ignored them all. I was on a quest for Bigfoot.

Yes, Bigfoot, the man-beast of the Washington woods, that smelly recluse, subject of horror movies. I, Carrie Elizabeth, would find him in my backyard in Bedford, N.H. I would find him and … and … and …

Then what? I wondered.

That’s the question that still always gets me: Then what?

Read the rest.