Thanks to Brave Little State and Vermont Public for letting me run this episode on Rumble Strip. You can find Brave Little State wherever you listen to podcasts, and you can read more about them by visiting Vermont Public, at vermontpublic.org. Thanks to Myra Flynn, who worked with me on this show, and the rest of the Brave Little State team: Angela Evancie, Mae Nuguskey and Josh Crane.

 

Credits: Music by Ishmael Ensemble, John Caroll Kirby, Riley Mulherkar and Elori Saxl

Edited by Daniel Guillemette & Daniel Gumbiner

Sound mix / sound design by John Delore

For years I've been wanting to make a show about the terrible cultural divides growing in our country, but I couldn't figure out how to do it without getting into boring conversations about politics. So I backed into an experiment. I asked my editor at Vermont Public if I could drive around and ask people, 'what class are you?', just to see what would happen. And he said, 'uh...sure.' So I did. This is the series that came of that experiment. And even though these conversations took place in rural Vermont, I think they are indicative of what people are thinking and feeling all over the country. And maybe we should all be having these conversations? I don't know. You tell me. And here is the series,  What Class Are You?

 

This series was produced for Vermont Public, and I am grateful to them for allowing me to share it with the Rumble Strip audience.

Mary Lake is a sheep farmer and sheep shearer and itinerant slaughterer. She is a tall, muscular woman in bib overalls and a baseball hat and dangly earrings she carved out of a ram’s horn. She wears a chain around her waist with a scabbard full of knives. And she loves sheep, which is one reason she participates in their slaughter. This is a story about where food comes from.

** The first version of this story aired on Vermont Public. I am grateful to Vermont Public for allowing me to share this story with Rumble Strip Listeners!

Mary Lake's business is Can-Do Shearing in Tunbridge, Vermont

It's town meeting day here in Vermont.

In most of New England, town citizens become legislators for one day a year. They get together in school gyms and town halls and vote in person, and in public. This centuries long practice of towns doing the slow and hard work of disagreeing and arguing and compromising on how to govern themselves—this has a profound impact on a place, and what it means to be from a place.

Sometimes it’s contentious. Sometimes it’s boring. But it’s always the most interesting and authentic and civilized social event of the year. Always.

 

 

Sheila LaPoint wrote a post in Front Porch Forum asking if there was anyone in town who could turn her grandmother's fur coat into a teddy bear. She didn't want to spend a lot of money. She can't wear the coat anymore. But she wants something that will help her remember her German grandmother. My friend Clare Dolan lives down the road from Sheila, and when she read Sheila’s post about the teddy bear, it called to her.  Clare is the maker of the Museum of Everyday Life, which celebrates the many critical and underappreciated objects we use in our daily lives. Clare loves well used and long loved objects, so it seemed like a good idea to help Sheila turn one loved object into a new object to love.  

Tom Mustill is a conservation biologist and he makes beautiful films about where nature and people meet. He’s worked with Greta Thunberg and David Attenborough, he’s been shat on by bats in Mexico, and recently he finished a book called How to Speak Whale.  It describes the very real possibility that someday, maybe even in my lifetime, we’ll begin to understand the complex language of whales--and all this would imply.

I interviewed Tom for hours and I didn't want him to stop until he’d told me every last thing he’s learned about whale behavior and every story he could remember. He was polite about it. I don’t know why I felt this insatiable need to hear every story. Maybe it seems that if we could understand whale culture a little bit, everything would make a little more sense? Anyway I recorded Tom for as long as he'd let me.

This show is about crime. Really crimey crime.

Transom Bio: 

Jay Allison has been an independent public radio producer, journalist, and teacher since the 1970s. He is the founder of Transom. His work has won most of the major broadcasting awards, including six Peabodys. He produces The Moth Radio Hour and was the curator of This I Believe on NPR. He has also worked in print for the New York Times Magazine and as a solo-crew reporter for ABC News Nightline, and is a longtime proponent of building community through story. Through his non-profit organization, Atlantic Public Media, he is a founder of The Public Radio Exchange, PRX.org, and WCAI, the public radio service for Cape Cod, Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket. More about Jay, more than you'd reasonably need to know, is available at www.jayallison.org.b. 

Forrest Foster was loading up the tractor with kindling for deer camp. It was two days before deer season. I was over there visiting and helping him with his night chores. I like Forrest. I like being around him, and I always learn something from him. Like last week he told me that you should always plant your garlic with the long rounded side facing north and the flat side facing south. Anyway, I took my recorder over a couple days before rifle season and a couple hours before milking. This is some sound from that day.

 

Nick Paley is a writer, editor and director for film and TV, and a co-writer on the recent film, Marcel the Shell with Shoes On, which stars an adorable one-inch tall shell who wears shoes and is looking for his long lost shell family. Nick is from Vermont, and he's working on a new TV series set here, so when he was in town I dragged him to a matinee of Marcel the Shell...the same movie theater where he used to clean the bathrooms. And then afterwards he let me ask him ten million questions about what it's like to work in the film industry. This show is a bit of both.

 

Vaughn Hood was a 118-pound barber when he was drafted into the Vietnam War. And in Vaughn’s war, most men didn’t survive their first three-month tour. In honor of Veteran's Day, here is the story of an extraordinary American life.

This story is co-produced by Larry Massett and Erica Heilman. It first ran in...I can't remember what year. About five years ago.

Armand Patoine sat with me in his tea house, deep inside his garden, which leads down to a stream. He has been creating this garden for 49 years. We talked about gardening, and what God has to do with his gardening, which it turns out is everything.

My son is leaving for his freshman year of college in a week and I am feeling maudlin. I listened to this show I made years ago and it made me feel better. So before August is really, really over, here are the kids of Hospital Hill.

Description: The kids of Randolph, Vermont describe their neighborhood as a place with three purple houses. They tell me there’s a shortcut through the woods down to Dunkin’ Donuts, and they say it’s pretty close to three graveyards. The kids run in twos and threes and sometimes in one big pack for a game of hide and seek tag.

I spent an afternoon talking with them and following them around. This show is a little taste of that day. It’s a postcard from childhood, a place we remember but can’t visit anymore.

Leland is my neighbor and for the last seven years, we’ve been getting together in the spring to talk about his year, and things like God and space and pork shortages. This year Leland graduated from high school and I figured it was time to hear pieces from all of the years with Leland, all together, and all at once.

A couple weeks ago on Hardwick's Front Porch Forum, someone called Tiana asked if there was anyone who could help her with her hair and makeup for an important date with her boyfriend. Front Porch Forum is an online, daily community forum, which is like a bulletin board at a local general store. You can find secondhand tires there. Or read complaints about the Selectboard. Every Vermont town’s got a Front Porch Forum and you have to be from that town to be on it.

Since Tiana's new to town, she thought she might have luck finding someone to help her get ready for her date through the Forum. And she did.

 

Here is her original posting:

Makeup for Special Occasion

Tiana• Hardwick

I'm looking for someone who'd be willing to do my makeup (and possibly hair?) on the 23rd of this month.

Just something simple with my eyes and something to hide some red spots. Is there a way to make an illusion of a skinner face? I think thats a thing, right?

I understand it's a long shot and I don't have much money.

I usually don't like anything thats considered "girly". However I want to surprise my boyfriend for our first anniversary.

I have a nice dress picked out with matching press on nails.

The issue is I have no clue how to do makeup. YouTube tutorials have never done me any good considering I don't own any makeup and I have a very round, chubby face.

Thank you for reading!

 

Credits

Music by Brian Clark

Thanks to Tara Reese for finding the posting

Thanks to Tobin and Mike and Rose

Welcome the Civic Standard!

Thanks to Aubrie St. Louis at the Rehair Shop

 

Ira Karp lives on a farm in Vermont's Northeast Kingdom, surrounded by music, puppets, and a family of incredible storytellers. Over his brief lifetime, he has become a ‘story keeper’ himself, collecting epic tales from his everyday life.

This is a story I made for THE BIG PONDER, a podcast series produced by the Goethe-Institut. They work with radio stations and independent producers in the U.S. and Germany, and the programs reflect on abstract ideas and phenomena through hyper-local stories. They also explore dynamics between the the United States and Germany. I loved working with them, and I encourage you to subscribe to the show. You can find THE BIG PONDER wherever you get your podcasts.

For more information about this show, and a transcript, visit THE BIG PONDER.

This show is a kind of coda to Finn and the Bell....

At long last, the bell is in its tower at Hazen Union High School. The final installation happened right before the Hardwick Memorial Day Parade. I stopped by and recorded some of the volunteers as they constructed the tower, hoisted the bell, and rang in its new life up on the hill over Hardwick.

Tara Wray is a photographer. And a dog person. She takes pictures of dogs which are haunting and beautiful, and every bit as distinctive as pictures of individual people. I interviewed her shortly after the death of her beloved dog, Nighthawk. Then my friend Tobin’s dog died, and he told me that he sometimes felt ashamed for feeling so much about the death of a dog--a dog who had been his only companion throughout the pandemic. 

It seems that a lot of people feel like they have to hide the amount of grief they experience when their dogs die. But the death of a dog can be just as painful--sometimes more painful--than the death of a human family member. This is a show about dog love...and grief at their loss. And there is absurd singing.

 

More about These People

Learn more about Tara Wray and her beautiful work.

Learn more about Tobin Anderson

Learn more about musician Brian Clark's band, The Anachronist

I've been thinking of getting a dog for years but even though I have an eighteen-year-old son, I've never felt mature enough to have a dog. So when my friend Chris told me he and his partner Beth were getting a puppy, I asked if he'd chronicle the event, and for the next seven months, he sent me recordings of what it was like to have a puppy. It was hilarious and weird and harrowing. Here are the Puppy Diaries.

Forrest Foster is a farmer in Hardwick, Vermont. It’s an organic dairy farm, seventy cows total and about forty milking at any given time. I spent an afternoon following Forrest around the barn, his sugarshack, we took a long ride in his tractor, out past his deer camp. He took me to the place where he cuts cedar and hemlock boughs for deer in the winter, and dispatches his old animals to feed the bear and the deer and the coyotes and the ravens.

Forrest would rather trade services than exchange money. He’ll give you meat if you can’t afford it, and he’ll expect you’ll do some chores in exchange. What I love about Forrest Foster is that he’s always practical and always generous, and these things are always the same thing.

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Helena de Groot grew up in Belgium and is now a radio producer living in New York City. When I found out she was about to take her citizenship test, I asked if she’d be willing to record herself talking about what it feels like to become an American…and she agreed.

Helena is the host and producer of the Poetry Foundation podcast Poetry Off the Shelf and senior producer of The Paris Review Podcast, and she teaches at Columbia University and the University of Michigan. Once a year she goes home to Belgium, and then comes back home to New York. Ten years after they first met, she still thinks David is the most beautiful man on the entire planet.

I am home alone on New Years, cleaning and listening to music, and suddenly I remembered Grant Owen, a kid I interviewed at the beginning of the pandemic, and I realized he is exactly the company I needed. So as you’re getting ready for your dinner party or dance party or if you are stuck in a cab or a subway on the interminable trip to The New Years Place, I think you will find that Grant Owen is good company.

It’s been another challenging year of the pandemic, and families across the nation are trying to figure out how to be together for the holidays. For some, this is hard. Really hard.

Welcome to Problems, a series about comfortable, upper middle class people who have a lot to complain about. This year, sisters Andrea and Amanda have managed to get to their childhood home in Massachusetts to spend Christmas with their parents, but sister Pam and her daughter River are unable to get there. This is disappointing, and challenging.

On Christmas Eve, the sisters get together for a zoom call, and to share their yearly tradition of New Years Noticings.

Credits

Sarah Miller is a writer in Nevada City, California. Here is her biomass article in the New Yorker and here is her substack.

Amelia Meath is one half of the band Sylvan Esso, which has been nominated for a Grammy for best electronic/dance album. They will win if I have anything to say about it. Which I don’t. But they will.

Sedsel is my son Henry’s sister and she lives on a small farm in a place that is hard to get to. Thanks to her mother Stacey for coaching her on some spectacular whining.

Sedsel and chicken

Will Staats worked for both Vermont and New Hampshire for forty years as a wildlife biologist. He’s also a passionate hunter. He knows the back country of the Kingdom right up through Maine and into Labrador. One day in October he took me bird hunting deep in the unorganized town of Ferdinand. We talked about birds. And we talked about the growing divide between traditional hunting culture and people who don’t like certain kinds of hunting here in Vermont. But it was more interesting than that…it was also about how people harden against each other then alienate each other…something we do a lot of these days.

Here is a recent article from Will that ran in VTDigger.

Finn Rooney killed himself on January 3, 2020 in the afternoon after school. No one predicted it. There were no signs. All that can be said for sure is that there was a flash of high emotion that comes with youth, and there was a gun nearby, and bullets.

This isn’t a story about suicide. It’s a story about a boy called Finn who loved to fish and play baseball and write poetry and embroider…and what happens to a small Vermont community as it staggers forward after an unspeakable tragedy.

Make comment at bottom of this page. Because we really want to hear from you. And we want you to be able to hear from each other.

An interview with Rob Rosenthal for How Sound, on the making of Finn and the Bell

Thanks

My profound thanks to Tara Reese for her insights, her candor and her time.

Thank you to my friends: Amelia Meath, Tobin Anderson, Clare Dolan and Mark Davis.

I also want to thank every single person who talked with me for this show. You didn’t really want to but you did anyway. Thank you to Arron and Alleigh and Butch and David and Illia and Mike and Kim and Mirko and Alex and Mac and Allison and Dave and Jack and Dante and Bob and Ben and the Bread and Puppet Band.

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I heard recently that Peter Dunning died.  I want to play this again, in tribute. He was an amazing man.

Peter Dunning’s farm was a Vermont hill farm. A hundred and thirty-six acres of forest and orchards and wet spots and steep, rocky pasture, picked over by farmers for hundreds of years.

Peter farmed here, mostly alone, for nearly forty years. When he was getting done, we spoke at his kitchen table,  as the farm was growing up around him.

Credits

I learned of Peter Dunning from a documentary, Peter and the Farm. It’s stunning. Watch it if you can….

Music for this show by David Schulman and Quiet Life Motel

Thank you Geof Hewitt for your help with the poetry!

This show also features the last verse of a remarkable poem called Marshall Washer, by Vermont poet Hayden Carruth. Here’s the full text.

In cases where a defendant seems unjustly accused, the defense attorney is our hero. But if they seem guilty…or if it’s an especially violent crime, we look at these lawyers and wonder…how can they do that?

This is a show about the people who stand with the accused.

You’ll hear five perspectives on the art of criminal defense, and you’ll hear some great stories. Which makes sense because telling great stories is part of the job description.

Hear the Full Interviews

Here are the (relatively) unedited interviews with the attorneys. I’ve removed redundancies, overly personal material, and questions of my own that were too wandering and obtuse. Sadly, the interview with Scott Williams was too damaged to include. I salvaged small sections for the show, but most of the interview suffered from ‘faulty microphone.’

Dan Sedon:

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Kelly Green:

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Kerry DeWolfe Part 1:

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Richard Rubin Part 1:

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The Lawyers

Richard Rubin Esq., Rubin, Kidney, Meyer & Vincent

Kerry B. DeWolfe, Esq., Appellate Division, Office of the Defender General

Dan Sedon, Esq., Sedon and Ericson, P.C., Chelsea, Vermont

Kelly Green, Esq., Staff Attorney, Prisoner’s Rights Office, Office of the Defender General

Scott R. Williams, Esq., Williams Law Group, LLC

Special Thanks

This show was mixed by the wonderful Colin McCaffrey. The featured photo is another great contribution by Josh Larkin. Thanks too to David Schulman for his music!

And thanks to Colin Dickerman, G, RSH, Larry Massett and especially Tamar Cole for all the help and feedback.

In cases where a defendant seems unjustly accused, the defense attorney is our hero. But if they seem guilty…or if it’s an especially violent crime, we look at these lawyers and wonder…how can they do that?

This is a show about the people who stand with the accused.

You’ll hear five perspectives on the art of criminal defense, and you’ll hear some great stories. Which makes sense because telling great stories is part of the job description.

Hear the Full Interviews

Here are the (relatively) unedited interviews with the attorneys. I’ve removed redundancies, overly personal material, and questions of my own that were too wandering and obtuse. Sadly, the interview with Scott Williams was too damaged to include. I salvaged small sections for the show, but most of the interview suffered from ‘faulty microphone.’

Dan Sedon:

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Kelly Green:

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Kerry DeWolfe Part 1:

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Richard Rubin Part 1:

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The Lawyers

Richard Rubin Esq., Rubin, Kidney, Meyer & Vincent

Kerry B. DeWolfe, Esq., Appellate Division, Office of the Defender General

Dan Sedon, Esq., Sedon and Ericson, P.C., Chelsea, Vermont

Kelly Green, Esq., Staff Attorney, Prisoner’s Rights Office, Office of the Defender General

Scott R. Williams, Esq., Williams Law Group, LLC

Special Thanks

This show was mixed by the wonderful Colin McCaffrey. The featured photo is another great contribution by Josh Larkin. Thanks too to David Schulman for his music!

And thanks to Colin Dickerman, G, RSH, Larry Massett and especially Tamar Cole for all the help and feedback.

Susan is a private investigator and I interview her a lot for my show. Last week she hit an owl with her car and it died. She didn’t want to leave it on the side of the road so she took it home and put it in the freezer and started calling around the state to see who could use a dead owl and it turned out the Fairbanks Museum in St. Johnsbury could. So she drove up. The owl joined its raptor brethren in the museum cooler and then Susan came over to my house to eat sandwiches and talk…mostly about Covid, and about how it has changed us utterly.

Music for this show is by Brian Clark and Mike Donofrio

Susan’s private investigation business is called VTPrivateye

At the onset of Covid in March, 2020, the Vermont Supreme Court declared a judicial emergency, suspending all non-essential court hearings. Hearings have resumed, but many are still being held remotely, including arraignments, which are ground zero for all criminal cases.  An arraignment is the first time that defendants appear in front of a judge. They’re informed of their charges and they enter a plea. And for defendants working with a public defender, it’s often the first time they meet their attorney, or even see their attorney. But since Covid, nobody’s seeing much of anyone in person. The judge might be at home, the defense attorney’s in his office, the state’s attorney’s in another office, and the defendant on the phone, or lodged in jail, as the case may be. Instead of appearing in court, they meet on a scratchy channel called WebEx. So what does justice lose when human contact is lost?

Credits

Attorneys Dan Sedon and Mike Shane, Sedon and Ericson

George Contois, court officer at Orange County Courthouse

Music by Brian Clark

Thanks

Thanks to Kelly Green and Tobin Anderson

Zeno Mountain Farm is a camp for people with and without disabilities, which is a super reductive way to describe it. Most other camps are places where people with disabilities are not. They’re missing. Zeno is a camp where everyone…is.  And a camp that includes everybody is way more fun. Exponentially more fun. At Zeno, everyone is a camper and everyone is a counselor and nobody pays to be there and nobody gets paid. It’s just friends who come back year after year to this mountain in Lincoln, Vermont, which looks out over the Champlain Valley. I spent a day talking with people there and capturing the sound of a day at Camp Zeno.

Credits and Links

Thank you Laurel Sager for introducing me to Zeno!!!

Link to Zeno Mountain Farm

Zeno’s latest film, Best Summer Ever

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Chris and Beth sing a lot. You’ve heard them before, if you listened to the show Sing your Job. They were the ones singing Game of Thrones, which I could not stop listening to. When I wrote to Chris to say that I couldn’t stop listening to them sing Game of Thrones, he told me that he and Beth sing a lot. They make up songs about whatever they’re doing at the moment, and lucky for us, they record themselves periodically.

Nobody really knows a marriage except for the two people in it. It’s a very private institution. I’ve never been married but I’d like to think that this is what marriage sounds like. Some of the time…

Credits:

Chris Attaway and Beth Lewis are moving to Birmingham in August and they want to get a dog. Beth is a writer and performer and Chris makes a podcast called Left of the Dial

The music video for Squash in My Shop – https://www.instagram.com/p/CMAipXznoCg/

Beth Tapes:  https://anchor.fm/bethlewis

Beth’s Tiny Letter – https://tinyletter.com/BethLewis/archive

Alexis Harte is out biking on a chilly afternoon last November when a new song pops into his head and mesmerizes him. It doesn’t seem strange at first — he’s a musician, after all. But when he discovers what was happening to a cherished relative at the moment the song sprang into his brain, he begins to wonder if he’s the target of a practical joke from the hereafter.  Herschel’s Song is one part tribute to a dear friend, and to a life well-lived, and one part meditation on the songwriting/creative process.

Producer Bio:

Producer Alexis Harte is a singer-songwriter and composer and is the co-founder and creative director of Pollen Music Group. His latest musical short film, Thirsty, premiered at the 2021 Tribeca Film Festival. This is his first audio story.

Credits:

Story, narration, song, and sound design: Alexis Harte

The Bonobo Band:

Alexis Harte: Guitars/Vox/Harmonica

Jon Evans: Upright Bass

Matthias Bossi: Drums

Additional music:

“Wedding Waltz” | “Bandon” by Gunnar Madsen (respectively, from the albums “Spinning World: 13 Ways of Looking at a Waltz” and “Two Hands”

“This Old House” by Jayme Pohl

“Sunrise” | “Different Farm” | “The Story”  by  Pollen Music Group

“Nocturne” Opus 27 no. 2 in Db Major (Lento sostenuto) by Frédéric Chopin. Performed by Frank Levy

(…with my humble thanks to Sir Paul McCartney, who can always be counted on for a good “perfect example”)

Irfan Sehic grew up in Bosnia and spent most of his childhood living in a civil war. One day the kids across the street were his best friends, the next day they were enemies. His father would fight in the war a few days a week and then be back for dinner. It was complicated. He told me I couldn’t understand war because I had not experienced it, which is true.  But I kept asking him to explain it to me anyway.

Here’s a link to the Robby and Irfan show, wherein I admit that I do not know who Joe Rogan is.

Credits
Irfan owns an insurance agency and you’d be super lucky to have him as your insurance agent because he is radically honest and loves to save you money but he doesn’t need more clients. But you can read about his agency here.

Episode Sponsor!

This episode is sponsored by Dobbs Maple, making small batches of locally sourced granulated maple sugar, which happens to be the best maple sugar in the world. I know this because I eat a lot of maple products even in the middle of the night.

My friend Bryan Pfeiffer is a writer, educator and field naturalist. He used to be a professional birding guide. He knows all about birds and dragonflies and moths. He knows where they live and what they eat and what it smells like where they live and eat. And even though we’ve been friends for a long time, Bryan has never taken me birding because I’ve never been interested in birds. Then I turned fifty and became interested in birds and I think that my sudden interest has more to do with my growing desire to know these places where birds live–and be absorbed in them.

So Bryan took me birding.

Some writing by Bryan:

The Extinction of Meaning

On Bogs
Butterflies and Joy

Bryan’s website: where there is much good writing and many amazing pictures of flying things

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Jane Lindholm recently left her position as host of Vermont Edition, VPR’s midday public affairs show. In her fourteen years on the show, Jane interviewed governors, senators, authors, wildlife biologists…she interviewed me once, which was awful because I couldn’t think fast enough. I have no idea how she does it, which is why I wanted to talk with her. What is it like to be live every day with a different person? And what is it like to be a regular fixture in the lives of Vermonters every day? And then…not?

Mostly this is a show for those of you who’ve been listening to Jane for fourteen years. To hear about what’s actually going on in that studio, and in her mind during Vermont Edition. We sat in her garage, in foldout chairs, between her husband’s bee keeping equipment and her kids old bikes.

Where is Jane now?? 

She’s focusing on her podcast, But Why: A Podcast for Curious Kids, which she produces with Melody Bodette, and plans to produce special projects with VPR. And that will be awesome.

Music for this show is by my excellent friends Brian Clark and Mike Donofio.

Thanks to Tobin Anderson for his help, as always.

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It’s been too long since I’ve reported on police activity here in Vermont and it’s been a challenging time for law enforcement. Calls to police are countless, and complex. I asked Scott Carrier to read from recent police logs, as reported in the Barre Montpelier Times Argus, and the Lamoille County News and Citizen.

Scott Carrier is the producer of my favorite podcast, Home of the Brave.

Vaughn Hood was a 118-pound barber when he was drafted into the Vietnam War. And in Vaughn’s war, most men didn’t survive their first three-month tour.

Now Vaughn Hood runs a hair salon in St. Johnsbury with his wife, Bev. For a couple days, I sat and talked with him in the back of his salon. We talked about war, about hard work, about survival, and hairdressing.

Here is the story of an extraordinary American life.

This story we featured here was co-produced by Erica Heilman and Larry Massett.

Some Kudos:

Click here for an interview with Erica about the show, by the excellent people at The Third Coast

50 Best Podcasts of 2015, The Atlantic Monthly…#16

I met Leland when he was in school with my son Henry at Calais Elementary. I interviewed him when he was over playing at our house when he was in fourth grade, and I’ve been interviewing him every spring ever since. We’ve talked about deep space, death, girls…sometimes we don’t talk much at all. Leland’s a junior in high school now. He spends most of his time at a technical school working on carpentry. He has his license and his own truck, which doesn’t have much of a muffler.

We sat and talked out by his barn, which overlooks a field and a vernal pool full of spring peepers which is there because of a stuck culvert.

Here is a little musical about the beautiful minutia of your lives. And I just keep adding to it because our lives just keep going on and on and on. So just keep sending songs and now and then I’ll add them to the Longest Song.

The first time I meet Han MeiMei, we were standing on my deck in Vermont. She looked at the fields around my house and she said, ‘That’s a lot of fields. Have you ever thought of writing messages to airplanes?’ I had not thought of this.

Han is a brain scientist. She studies the nature of memory, and she’s one of the smartest people I’ve ever met. She grew up in a state-run factory compound in Guilin, in southeast China’s Guangxi province. Everyone who worked there lived there, and shopped there, and the children were educated in schools there. Han was born in 1984, soon after China had decided to open itself to more economic engagement with the international economy. But she was also a second child when second children were not allowed in China.

We talked about growing up in China, and what she learned about China after she left. And why she’s chosen to spend her life asking questions that may never be answered in her lifetime.

Notes

Thank you as always to Tobin Anderson.

Music credits I cannot pronounce:

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An excellent Little Tiger Team video that you must watch:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7hbYLaD-FY

Han is not her real name. A lot of what she says in this conversation would be considered censorable in China, and she wanted to protect her privacy.

Playlist from show:

1. “Fly, butterfly!” by The Little Tigers Team
2. “Our life is full of sunshine” by Yu Shuzhen
3. “Songs and smiles” by The Milkyway Youth Art Troupe
4. “Flowing water ” by Guan Pinghu
5. “The waters and clouds of Xiaoxiang” by Wu Jinglue
6. “For ten years, the river runs east; for ten years, the river runs west” by Wutiaoren

Rose Friedman and some friends decided to start making free meals on Wednesday nights for anyone who wants them. They set up outside the East Hardwick Grange Hall. A lot of people around here are making food for neighbors during Covid. But Rose isn’t making food because of Covid. Or not exactly. She wants to see what will happen. Who will come and get the food and what will it be like when they come to get the food and if a lot of really different kinds of people come to get the food, what will they all talk about in front of the grange hall? It’s like a combination of science project and putting on a show, which is one reason why I like Rose, and why I wanted to watch her make soup.

VPR show about Rose and Justin and Modern Times Theater

Modern Times Theater

Music for this show by Brian Clark

Thanks to Tobin Anderson and Amelia Meath

We’re a year into Covid and in Vermont we’re almost into the last stretch of winter and I’ve been thinking a lot about married people, or people partnered with other people living in houses and apartments day after night for days and months and now a year. I wonder what goes on in those houses and what they talk about and how they get on day after day, night after night. I found a young couple willing to talk with me about how they’re doing. They live in an old farmhouse in central Vermont that they’re renovating…

(((Note: This is not ‘real’. Some people get really mad if they don’t know in advance. So here I am to say it’s not real. Not ENTIRELY real. I mean there’s a lot here that is real. But not all of it.)))

Credits

• Thank you Jesse and Serena for excellent cocktails and your insights about condiments
• Thank you Brian Clark for your music. And your beautiful woodwork.
• Thank you Tobin Anderson for your constant help
• A link to Jesse’s work.

Here are some pictures of Jesse and Serena and their awesome house in Plainfield:

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In most of New England, town citizens become legislators for one day a year. They get together in school gyms and town halls and vote in person, and in public. This centuries long practice of towns doing the slow and hard work of disagreeing and arguing and compromising on how to govern themselves—this has a profound impact on a place, and what it means to be from a place.

Sometimes it’s contentious. Sometimes it’s boring. But it’s always the most interesting and authentic and civilized social event of the year. Always.

This is a show about where I live, which is maybe not where you live, but we’re all living through a time of awful division. There aren’t a lot of opportunities anymore to disagree civilly, in public, or to make decisions with people who are hugely different from ourselves. And maybe there should be. So I made this show to inspire us all. And you’ll hear a lot about trash removal.

Credits

Music by Brian Clark. In addition to being a fine musician, he is also a fine woodworker.

Featured photos by Terry J. Allen

Endless thanks to Tobin Anderson, Kelly Green and Amelia Meath for their help on this show.

Susan Clark is the co-author of Slow Democracy, a wonderful book on self governance and rediscovering community.

Thanks to Brattleboro Community TV and Mount Mansfield Community TV for their recordings of town meeting and all the brave people who get up and talk in those meetings

Moderators in this show are: Stephen Magill, Moretown. Paul Doton, Barnard. Gus Seelig, Calais. John McLaughry, Kirby. Bobby Starr, Troy. Susan Clark, Middlesex. Kelly Green, Randolph

Click on images below for better view. Most of the good pictures here are by Terry J. Allen of East Montpelier.

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This is a FUN show to celebrate FRICKIN’ INAUGURATION DAY which we’ve been waiting for for 1000 years!!!!!!  It’s from the Shaking Out the Numb, a series I made with Amelia Meath and Nick Sanborn of Sylvan Esso. The show is called Party Is Everything. It’s about being young and getting ready to go to parties and then going to parties. And all of the things you think about when you’re getting ready to go to a party and then when you’re at a party.

The song you hear is Ferris Wheel, from Sylvan Esso’s new album, Free Love.

In this show you’ll hear Alexandra Sauser-Monnig, Amelia Meath and Molly Erin Searle, who together have a band called Mountain Man, which is an amazing band.

There’s some swearing. A lot of young people swear. They’re good at Instagram and they swear a lot.

It’s been a challenging year. Families are trying to figure out how to be together for the holidays when they can’t be together physically. Welcome to Problems, a Christmas special. Problems is a series about comfortable, upper middle class people who have a lot to complain about. This year, Pam and her two sisters, Andrea and Amanda, are planning a Christmas caroling zoom call to their parents. In a series of zoom calls they plan and practice.

But it’s just really hard.

Credits

Amanda is played by writer Sarah Miller, of Nevada City, California and a reasonably regular contributor to this show. You can find a link to her essay, Why Cooking Sucks…below.

Andrea is played by Amelia Meath of Durham, NC, singer/songwriter in Sylvan Esso and Mountain Man. I’ve done a bunch of shows for and with Sylvan Esso, some of which are below.

Pam is me.

Daniel Kirk is a children’s book author and illustrator and he lives with his wife in New Jersey, about twelve miles outside of Manhattan. They were both infected with COVID last March, before it had spread in the United States. They still don’t know where they got it. By now we know a lot more about COVID. We know the symptoms. We can recite the symptoms. But what does it actually feel like to struggle to breathe? And for those who become deathly ill–who slip into some state between waking and dreaming–where do they go?

As Daniel’s wife recovered, Daniel’s temperature climbed to 104, and eventually he ended up in the hospital. Here is his story.

Credits

Information about Daniel Kirk

Music for this show is by Mike Donofrio and Brian Clark, two excellent people.

As always, my thanks to Tobin Anderson who helps me with all things.

Bill Schubart is a writer and a cultural and political commentator. He’s chaired a lot of important boards here in Vermont. He’s really smart and he talks a lot and a lot of people listen to him. What he talks less about is that he’s struggled with being fat his entire life. He’s not averse to talking about it. In fact he wrote a brilliant collection of stories called Fat People in 2010. But it’s not the sort of thing that comes up in conversation.

In this show, we talk about it.

For more about Bill Schubart

A link to Bill’s book, Fat People

Credits:

Music for this show by Brian Clark, who is awesome.

Thank you Tobin Anderson, as always

Headshot by Bill’s brother, Michael Couture

Biker photo by Erik Borg

I first interviewed them when they played in Vermont in 2017 and we became friends. In fact Amelia is the only person with whom I have two-hour phone conversations that start like this:

‘Hey. What are you doing?’
‘Nothing. What are you doing?’
‘Nothing.’

This podcast was an experiment. The interviews were all recorded over the phone during Covid….on back porches at night, by rivers, in fields, and sometimes in closets. Nick and Amelia weren’t interested in a standard set of questions about how they make their songs or what their songs are about. Instead…they told stories that cause songs.

The series is called Shaking Out the Numb.

I love them. I hope you will too.

Photo Credits: Above picture by Nick and Amelia. Banner picture by Shervin Lainez.

More Information about Sylvan Esso

Sylvan Esso has unveiled a new podcast today called Shaking Out The Numb. The experimental six-episode series is a revealing exploration of the creative heartbeat of this duo, and the impulses and experiences that led them to make their new album Free Love.  Sylvan Esso has partnered with NPR Music to share the episode entitled “Make It Easy,” and all six episodes of Shaking Out The Numb are available now via all major podcast distributors and YouTube.

The podcast was created from hours of unadorned conversations that Amelia Meath and Nick Sanborn of Sylvan Esso had with their friend, Rumble Strip producer Erica Heilman, shortly after completing Free Love.  Both focused and freewheeling, each episode has a different scope, mixing together found sounds, reflections and discussions that celebrate the sheer thrill of the very essence of creativity.  From a visit to a decommissioned particle collider to the electric feeling of getting ready for a party, Shaking Out The Numb opens a window into the soul of Sylvan Esso.  The podcast was produced by Erica Heilman and Sylvan Esso.

This past weekend, Sylvan Esso performed three songs from Free Love on CBS Saturday, from a roof in their home city of Durham, NC.  Watch them perform “Ring,” “Ferris Wheel,” and “Rooftop Dancing.”  Since May they’ve also performed for The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and on Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, where Amelia sang “Ferris Wheel” from the bed of a moving flatbed truck.

Last week, Sylvan Esso also shared a remix of their summer bop “Ferris Wheel,” transformed into a “woozy headtrip” (Stereogum) by celebrated producer/multi-instrumentalist Terrace Martin (Kendrick Lamar, Snoop Dogg, Travis Scott) and featuring Robert Glasper (Kanye West, Erykah Badu, JAY-Z).

The duo has also been hosting a virtual concert series throughout the fall called FROM THE SATELLITE – which will conclude December 1 at 9PM ET with a performance titled WITH LOVE.

François Clemmons was born in Birmingham, Alabama in 1945 on the plantation where his great great grandmother Laura May’s family had been slaves, then he moved with his mother and siblings and aunts and cousins to Youngstown, Ohio during the Great Migration. Youngstown is where he started singing, and he never stopped singing. He sings in the middle of sentences, he sings on the way to the bathroom, he sings like the world depends on it, which maybe it does.

But you know him already. Or those of you who are of a certain age. For twenty-five years François played Officer Clemmons on Mr. Rogers Neighborhood. And recently he wrote a book about it, called Officer Clemmons.

Now he lives in Middlebury, Vermont. I drove over there to talk with him about his life in the South and about Mr. Rogers, one of the great loves of his life.

Credits and More

François Clemmons’ Website

Clemmons’ memoir, Officer Clemmons

Additional music by Brian Clark

Article in Seven Days about François Clemmons by Dan Bolles. Thank you Dan for writing it.

[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/230694656″ params=”color=ff5500&inverse=false&auto_play=false&show_user=true” width=”100%” height=”20″ iframe=”true” /] Mark Utter was born with a form of autism that makes it impossible for him to say what he’s thinking. For the first thirty years of his life, Mark did not have access to the world of words, except as a listener. An observer. When he was thirty, he was introduced to supported typing, and for the first time in his life, with the help of a facilitator and a typing pad, Mark started his life as a writer of words. This is an interview about what it’s like inside the life and mind of Mark Utter.

Kudos and Credits

50 Best Podcasts of 2015, The Atlantic Monthly…#38

Mark Utter lives in Colchester, Vermont. He receives services that assist his day to day ventures with negotiating a world that functions differently than he does. The more you read about him the more you will realize that we are more alike than different.

Emily Anderson is trained to support people who type to communicate. She was the producer of “I am in here.” She has a background in social/political theater and uses it to assist creative projects that bring odd people more positively into the limelight.

Mark’s Web site: www.utterenergy.org

To view the “I am in here” trailer or purchase the DVD: http://www.utterenergy.org/iaminhere/

Mark’s Blog: http://www.utterenergy.org/blog/

For more information on the form of communication Mark uses: http://www.utterenergy.org/supported-typing/

Music for this show by Podington Bear, and the Free Music Archive

Kudos

Best in Show from The Timbre!

I’ve been doing a couple freelance jobs for extra money. One requires a great deal of video conferencing. I have learned that I do not excel at video conferencing and at the moment I knew this with certainty, my recorder was close by, so I recorded some thoughts on the subject. Then an audio producer in London heard it and did a remix version of it. So here is a short dip into my state of mind during this election season, this world burning, this age of video conferencing. There is some justifiably strong language.

Credits

Arlie Adlington, Audio producer for podcasts and radio

Maya Goldberg-Safir, an excellent person who also happens to be the artistic director of The Third Coast Festival

Karl Hammer is the founder and president of the Vermont Compost Company in East Montpelier, right up the hill from Montpelier, the state capital. I first heard about Karl from my friend Rosana, who used to be married to him. She told me about how they had puppies one winter, and Karl decided to compost their poop on the floor in the house, which he sweetened with donkey manure and hardwood bark and hay.

Karl started as a vegetable and dairy farmer on a hill farm in Vershire Vermont. He had a business card that said, ‘Have fun. Make money. Save the world.’ How do you make more land better land to make more food for more people? I think it was that question that finally made him leave farming and get into compost production, long before composting was a virtue.

Recently, Karl’s been running a donkey cart into town to pick up food scraps at restaurants and the local coop. Karl has always had donkeys. He loves donkeys, especially the American Mammoth jackstock, which is endangered. And Karl figures the only way to protect them is to give them a useful job to do…to make them indispensable.

I tried to interview Karl a few years ago and failed. He has a mind that connects politics and history and feces and he talks about them all at once and he’s impossible to corral into any one subject at a time. I figured this time I could keep him on the subject of donkeys. But I couldn’t. But it didn’t matter. Karl knows a lot of things I wish I knew.

Pictures and video by Sid Hammer, except the less good pictures, which are mine.

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A GUEST SHOW from one of my favorite radio producers….Bianca Giaever.

During a period of personal loneliness, radio-maker Bianca Giaever set out into New York City, hoping to connect with another lonely stranger. She began visiting Catholic churches, and eventually, she met Sophia — a school crossing guard. In this piece, Bianca documents Sophia’s life for many months… weaving between the ordinary life of a school crossing guard, and larger themes of loneliness, God, and the quest to live a meaningful life.

This piece is the first episode in a new podcast by Bianca and The Believer Magazine called Constellation Prize, which you can find in the iTunes store or wherever you get your podcasts. In this series, Bianca talks to subjects about their daily existential problems, both big and small.

If you like Rumble Strip, you will like Bianca’s show. It never fails to surprise me.

Music in this episode is by Zubin Hensler and Stellwagon Symphonette. It was written and produced by Bianca Giaever, and edited by Hayden Bennett. Special thanks to Andrew Leland and Laura Irving.

Artwork by Sludge Thunder

Winnie Wilkinson is originally from Jamaica but she spent half her life in New York City before moving up to St. Albans, Vermont, where black people make up 2.52 percent of the population. Winnie has family all over the country, and she has a lot of family members who’ve been harassed by the police, which is what I went to talk with her about. But it’s not what we talked about. Instead, we talked about God and about slavery–two things that have a profound impact on how Winnie thinks about everything else, including police brutality.

Thank you David Glidden for introducing me to Winnie. And thank you Winnie for going to look for my glasses. And thank you Tobin for bearing with me.

To learn more about Winnie’s seasonings, spices, hot pepper sauce and African products, visit her here.

Clare is the curator of the Museum Of Everyday Life, which lives in a barn on Route 16, about eight miles from Glover, Vermont, population 2000. Over the years, the Museum of Everyday Life has given us the toothbrush, the mirror, bells and whistles–celebrations of objects we use everyday in our unglamorous everyday lives. This year’s exhibit features the knot. It’s not quite finished, because as Clare was preparing the exhibit, she was also working her other job as a nurse at a small rural hospital, in the middle of a pandemic.

She showed me the exhibit, which is not quite done but which is already strange and brilliant, and we talked about knots, and  about her work as a nurse, in a pandemic and beyond…

THANK YOU to Bianca Giaever for her insights on this show. She just launched a podcast and it’s really frickin good…

More

Visit the Museum of Every Life

Images from the new exhibit:

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I met my friend Leland when he was in first grade and he came over to play with my son Henry. For six years now, we’ve been having a yearly conversation about how he’s doing and what he’s thinking about. He just finished his sophomore year at the Central Vermont Career Center in Barre, which is a technical education school. He was never big on regular school, even though he knows more about geography than I’ll ever know. Leland lives in an old farmhouse on a dirt road looking down over Pekin Brook in Calais. I drove over and I sat in my car and he sat in his truck and neither of us had a lot to say, in that way that a lot of us don’t have a lot to say right now, with so much that’s so uncertain…

Last month a friend of mine sent me a picture of miles and miles of cars lined up waiting for food that was being distributed by the National Guard here in Vermont. Nineteen hundred cars. I’d never seen anything like it, and it took me a minute to even believe it. And when I told a friend about it…a perfectly smart and thoughtful friend…he said,  “Well, they probably don’t really need it. I mean, those are pretty nice cars…”

It turns out there are lot of ways to be food insecure, and they’re all invisible, and they’re growing all the time. I went and talked with some people working on the front lines of hunger about this big federal food distribution program that’s all over the news, and we talked about the chronic problem of stigmatizing people who don’t have to enough to eat.

((Check out a gallery of pictures from this event below…))

In this show

Robert Ostermeyer, Director of Franklin/Grand Isle Community Action at the Champlain Valley Office of Economic Opportunity

Nicole Whalen, Vermont Foodbank

Faye Longo, Vermont Foodbank

Music

Brian Clark, Calais, Vermont

Links to Information about Food

How to find your local Foodbank

Vermont Foodbank

How to find your local food pantry

The following pictures were taken by Terry J. Allen of East Montpelier, Vermont, at the Newport food distribution event in June, 2020. She’s great, and you can see more of her work here.

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Here’s our last show, which also happens to be show number seven.

• In this show you heard
• Cheering healthcare workers in Barcelona and Toronto
• Greg’s son practicing trumpet on a rainy night in Plainfield, VT
• Brooke in Denver Colorado
• Rob on the accordian in Adamant, VT
• Bianca in Brooklyn, NY
• Gideon and his mother Kathryn in High Falls, NY
• Liv singing in Los Angeles, CA
• Toria in Boulder, CO
• Edward and his daughter in Forth Worth, TX
• Shane singing about dinosaurs in Minnesota
• The 5pm one song concert in Ditmas Park, Brooklyn
• Ali cheering the healthcare workers on her porch in Putney, VT
• And this is Mary and her dad Ted in Lincoln, VT

The incomparable associate producer for this series is Samantha Broun. Thank you to Larry Massett and Scott Carrier and Tobin Anderson. Our Show is made in collaboration with Transom, the birthplace of excellent radio.

I think this is our last show everybody. I’m not getting the same volume of recordings as I was a month ago. I think maybe we’re into a new stage of this pandemic experience, and maybe it’s more internal, where people don’t want to talk as much. If that changes again, and people suddenly have lots they want to say, and the recordings start building up again, then I can always make more. But for now I think we should congratulate ourselves for making an amazing thing together.

Thank you ALL for the remarkable privilege of listening to your recordings from all over the world. It has carried me through this time and I am so grateful.

This is Our Show, number six. Your recordings about the pandemic.

In this show you heard from:

• Alicia and Liv in Los Angeles, CA
• Ada in Marfa, Texas
• Anna in Bennington, Vermont
• The sound of rain in a woodstove from Bruce in Montreal
• Bill in New York City
• Morten in Southampton, United Kingdom
• Eli in Philadelphia, PA
• Katz in Amsterdam, The Netherlands
• Shana in Auchterarder, Scotland
• Samantha, somewhere in South Africa
• Jen in East London
• Bev and her mother Marj and her father Bill, in Toronto.

Samantha Broun is the associate producer for this series, and she’s producing an amazing series right now about an ER nurse in Queens. You can find the latest episode here.

The picture above is Morten’s beautiful daughter in their garden in Southampton, UK.

Transom is my partner in this series, for which I feel extremely lucky.

Keep sending your stories, from wherever you are. Sing a song. Record a phone call, or an argument, or your thoughts in the middle of the night. Say the location and the date at the beginning. And tell your friends to send their tape too. I’m hoping we make something that sounds like what’s happening. Send me your recordings at rumblestripourshow@gmail.com, and if you cant figure out how to do it, just email and we’ll figure it out together.

Katz in Amsterdam

Jen and kids in East London

Anne Frank’s church bells in the distance, in Amsterdam

Here’s Our Show, number five…your recordings about the pandemic.

In this show you hear from:

• Niels in Copenhagen, Denmark
• Thomas singing in El Cerrito, CA
• Rachel in Olympia, Washington
• Rob and his kids from Olympia, Washington
• Louisa in Brittany, France
• Another meditation from Cali in Florida
• Tomas in Berlin, Germany
• Molly’s bells in Las Cruces, NM
• Esther in Amsterdam, The Netherlands
• Ada and Mathew in Marfa, TX
• Carlos, in Bethesda, MD

The Associate Producer for this series is the excellent, gifted Samantha Broun. The partner for this series is Transom.

Above is a picture of Tomas’ plant.

Keep sending your stories, from wherever you are. I listen to every one of them. And I love them. Sing a song. Record a phone call, or an argument, or your thoughts in the middle of the night. Say the location and the date at the beginning. And tell your friends to send their tape too. I’m hoping we make something that sounds like what’s happening. Send me your recordings at rumblestripourshow@gmail.com, and if you cant figure out how to do it, just email me and we’ll figure it out together.

This pandemic is changing. In a lot of places, it’s becoming more dire. There are more people who are sick. More people have loved ones who are sick. Healthcare workers are overworked and scared and tired. And a lot of us are really worried about paying our bills.  And in order to do as much justice to as many people as possible, we need to hear from these people on the front lines. If you know someone who is struggling, and may find it USEFUL to talk about it in a recording, tell them about the project. We want to hear from them.

We’re making this show together, and it’s for all of us. Thank you for doing this with me.

Here is Our Show 4, your recordings during the pandemic. Thank you for sending me remarkable recordings from all over the world, and the intense privilege of making shows with them.

In this show you hear from:

• Bill in New York City
• Clive in Toronto
• Tim in Durango, Colorado
• Bianca in New York City
• Andrew’s son reading Pi in Northhampton, Mass.
• Kelly in New Braunfels, Texas
• Ralph in North Wolcott, Vermont
• Amelia in Durham North Carolina

Music by hand habits and Amelia Meath.

Your Recordings!

Keep sending your stories, from wherever you are. I listen to every one of them. And I’m pulling from ALL of them to make these new shows. Sing a song. Record a phone call, or an argument, or your thoughts in the middle o fthe night. Say the location and the date at the beginning. And tell your friends to send their tape too. I’m hoping we make something that sounds like what’s happening. Send me your recordings at rumblestripourshow@gmail.com, and if you cant figure out how to do it….

I’m happy to say that Transom is now a collaborator on Our Show. Transom is sort of where new radio gets born, and I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have become a radio producer if they didn’t exist back when I started. Thank you so much to Jay Allison and to Scott Carrier for support, and to Samantha Broun for support and editing.

This is Our Show number three…made from your recordings during the pandemic.

Keep that tape coming. Let’s keep making damn shows.

• In this show you hear from:
• Elliott in Brooklyn and his mother Roberta who’s outside of Chicago
• Carlos in Bethesda
• Ryan in West Virginia
• Katy in New York City
• Darren in the middle of the south coast of England
• Silvia in Barcelona
• Jessica in Minneapolis
• Alicia and Liv in Los Angeles
• Scott in Streatham, London
• Greta in Los Angeles
• Karen on an island near Stockholm
• Sarah and Hannah in Essex, Vermont

THANK YOU to Samantha Broun at Transom for all her help on this project.

Picture above from Silvia in Barcelona.

Recordings

Send me your stories, from wherever you are. Sing a song. It doesn’t have to sound good. Record a phone call, or an argument, or whatever you like. Say the location and the date at the beginning. And tell your friends to send their tape too. Send it to me at rumblestripourshow@gmail.com, and if you cant figure out how to do it, email me at that address and we’ll figure it out.

Jay Allison at Transom has posted ideas about how to record, and why. They are great, and more articulate than what I’ve written. Have a look and send to friends if they’re interested in recording.  And better at communication than me.

Darren, England

Simone, San Francisco

Sarah and Hannah, Vermont

This is the second installment of Our Show, which is about all of us during this pandemic, and is made from all the recordings you’re sending to me from wherever you are in the world, in whatever isolated circumstance. I’m in St. Johnsbury, Vermont, in a third floor walk-up, with my son Henry. I have plenty of time to edit. So keep sending your stories.

Here’s Show Two.

• In this story you hear from:
• Bianca and Matt in New York City
• My sister Missy in Damariscotta, Maine
• Craig and his wife and son in Madison, Wisconsin
• Desiree in Los Angeles
• Gary in Singapore
• Malcolm and Shana in Auchterarder, Scotland
• John in Seattle, Washington, who is not a teacher but is teaching the meaning of circumference
• Nick in Los Angeles, singing  an Arthur Russell song

Auchterarder, Scotland

It’s amazing. An entire planet of people living mostly in isolation…or those of us lucky enough to be well. It’s the darkest thing to happen in my lifetime, but also strangely the most unifying. We’re all experiencing the very same thing at the same time, but not together. Which is why I wanted to make this show.

I asked you to send me recordings from where you are so we could make a show about all of us.  And you did. And they are remarkable, and there are too many to make just one show. So I’m going to just keep making this show, called Our Show, for as long as you want to to send me your recordings from wherever you are in isolation. And we can keep each other company. So here goes.

More!

Keep sending recordings! Your handwashing, your arguments, your thoughts in the middle of the night…your songs and  hummings….whatever. And tell your friends to send their recordings too. Just email me at rumblestripvermont@gmail.com, or send files via wetransfer.com.

Credits:

In this show you hear from Tristan from Tasmania, Helena DeGroot in New York City, Cali from Florida and her friend Keri from Durham North Carolina, Clark from Atlanta, Georgia, Tom and Liam from Columbus, Ohio, and Deb and Gary in Montpelier, Vermont. Also birds and Aoife the cat from Woodbury, Vermont.
Picture by Helena DeGroot

Liam, Columbus, OH

Sponsor (TAKEOUT FROM HONEY ROAD!!!)

This show is sponsored by the excellent people at Honey Road, making the best food in Burlington on the corner of Church and Main. They are now serving takeout. Please order up from them, ok? Click on the picture and check out the menu…

Hi all,

My father died a couple weeks ago. He died peacefully at the UVM Medical Center in Burlington. My mother and sister and I spent six days and nights with him, the last 4.5 in comfort care. It was quiet. We had a room we could all camp out in together. The death was a surprise but not a shock.

I’m putting out this announcement because work on the show is going slowly at the moment. Also because the show is very personal and it would seem odd not to tell you all.

My father was a brilliant, curious, funny man of enormous integrity. He taught me that everyone is an expert in their own life, and knows something you’d be better for if you knew it too. He was my first teacher in interviewing. He was also a terrible eavesdropper in restaurants.

Here’s his obituary if you want to read it.

Thanks for your patience everyone,
Erica

Susan Randall is a private investigator here in Vermont and she’s been my friend for twenty five years. If you listen to the show, you already know that I interview her periodically for Rumble Strip. We talk in her car, in her backyard…mostly we talk about her work as a private investigator, but lately we’ve been talking about all the complicated things that seem to start happening when you turn fifty. In our last conversation, she was just finishing treatments for breast cancer. And on New Year’s Day this year, she had a terrible medical incident that was a reaction to her cancer medication. So I went over to her house and we lay on the brown couch in her living room. We talked about her work, and some of the benefits of getting older.

Credits

For more information about Susan and her work, visit her site here.

Music for this show is by the excellent Brian Clark

Sponsor!

This show is sponsored by the excellent people at Honey Road, making the best food in Burlington on the corner of Church and Main. Click on the picture and check out the menu…

People often assume the Joslyn House is a nursing home, probably because a lot of old people live there. But it’s not a nursing home. It’s not assisted living. There’s no anonymous art on the wall. It’s not licensed by the state. It’s a house. It’s a a place where up to twenty older people live independently together…in a huge, elegant house furnished with their own things. There’s socializing when you want it, silence when you don’t, there’s sociable silence… there are three beautiful meals served a day. Residents are given a room, and rent is 1500 dollars a month.

I can’t believe every town doesn’t have a Joslyn House…a place in your own town where you can help each other as you get older. Where you don’t have to worry about cooking, where if you’re lonely at night there‘s someone to talk to, or sit with. In other words, a civilized place. A place where love is evident…

Credits

Thanks to all the residents who talked with me, and the beautiful Arlene and Becky Wright, managers of the house.

My friend Kelly Green produced this show with me. She’s great at this PLUS she’s a great defense attorney! If you’re in trouble, call Kelly!

Click here for more information on the Joslyn House

The song for this show is A Wave in the Air by The Imperfectionists, from their latest album, Universal Consent.

More of their music

And my frickin ALL TIME FAVORITE IMPERFECTIONIST SONG: Astroplane.

Sponsor!

This show is sponsored by the excellent people at Honey Road, making the best food in Burlington on the corner of Church and Main. Click on the picture and check out the menu…

An outtake with bear biologist Ben Kilham, about living with dyslexia, and how it informs the way he thinks about bears.

Ben Kilham and his sister Phoebe are the only licensed bear rehabilitators in the state of New Hampshire. For over twenty-five years, the Kilham Bear Center has taken in orphaned or injured black bear cubs and successfully released them back into the wild. And Ben has conducted arguably the longest scientific study of black bear behavior in history.

Until Ben Kilham, black bears were studied mostly using tracking collars. But Ben has spent decades following bears in the woods, sometimes for nine hours at a time. As his orphan cubs acclimate to their natural environment, he watches them. He naps when they nap, he moves when they move, and he studies their complex social behaviors. One of his very first cubs, Squirty, is twenty-four years old this year. She lives in woods near his home, and he’s watched her become a mother, and now a grandmother. Bear biologists have generally assumed that black bears were solitary animals. Ben Kilham has proven them very wrong.

Links

Kilham Bear Center: the place for all information on the rehabilitation program, Ben’s research, videos and books for sale….

Cubs Video: I could not figure out how to attach more video. For more, go to Ben’s website above…

The photos below are lent to Rumble Strip by Ben. Please don’t copy. Thank you!….:

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For many years I have privately loved the song Total Eclipse of the Heart, by Bonnie Tyler. I started to love it when it came out in 1983, when I was fourteen.

This month I’m turning fifty. And for some reason, every time I think about turning fifty, I think about singing this song that I’ve loved for over over thirty years, and making other people listen to me sing it. I guess in a way it’s a kind of phoenix moment I’m hoping for. That I’ll burn up in some exquisite shame and then I’ll be born again into the second chapter of a century.

So I asked my friends Mike and Brian and Tobin to record the song with me in the  East Calais community center at the back of the post office.

I knew they didn’t like the song and they didn’t really want to do it, so I felt really bad asking them to do it, which in a way seemed like part o the phoenix moment I was looking for.

I feel ambivalent about turning fifty. I don’t know what’s supposed to happen next. So I recorded conversations with some friends about getting older. I talked with my son Henry, who’s 16. Bianca Giaever is 29. Scott Carrier is 60-something. And Clare Dolan is around my age.

Here’s a show about turning fifty and recording Total Eclipse of the Heart.

Credits

Thank you to Scott Bassage for helping me secure the best recording studio in central Vermont at the back of the East Calais post office

Thank you to the band: Brian Clark, Mike Donofrio and Tobin Anderson (pictures below)

Thank you to my friends who talked with me for this show: Scott Carrier, Clare Dolan, Bianca Giaever and Henry Heilman

Sponsor!

This show is sponsored by the excellent people at Honey Road, making the best food in Burlington on the corner of Church and Main. Click on the picture and check out the menu…

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Patrick Soniera has been hunting and tracking bobcats in Vermont for fifty years, and he has a diary entry about every single hunt–the weather, the birds or the bears, the behavior of the cat tracks he followed–his diaries fill one whole wall of his office. And for the majority of those days out in the woods, Patrick never even saw a bobcat. You almost never see them, which is why Patrick is so fascinated by these cats.

Last year Patrick went out tracking cats with his hounds a hundred and fifty times and he shot one bobcat. He says it isn’t about the killing. And that’s what all good hunters say. And when you ask, ‘Well then why not just take a camera?’, the answer is always the same.

‘Because I’m a hunter.’

After years of interviewing good hunters, I’m beginning to understand the tautological logic of this. Part of Patrick’s love for bobcats is the fact of the hunt. And part of why he’s able to share years’ worth of knowledge with Vermont Fish and Wildlife is because now and then he kills one.

Thank you to Louis Porter of Vermont Fish and Wildlife for recommending Patrick to me. I love the state where I live…

This show is sponsored by Honey Road, my all time favorite restaurant in Vermont. Make a reservation. Go. Eat. Report back. And click on the image below for more information.

This is the fifth episode of Problems, a radio drama about Pam and Joel, two old friends who support each other through their problems. In this episode, Joel’s just come back from a long vacation in British Colombia, where he had a lovely time mountain biking with friends. But…there were some problems.

This show is sponsored by Honey Road, my all time favorite restaurant in Vermont. Make a reservation. Go. Eat. Report back. And click on the image below for more information.

Garret Keizer and I stood together in a field, in the late summer, in the Northeast Kingdom, and he read poems from his new book, The World Pushes Back.

I first heard of Garret a few years ago when I read his book, Getting Schooled, about his years as a high school teacher up here in the Kingdom. He described this place more honestly and more humanely…than anything I’d ever read about the place before. And his stories about his own experience teaching are almost brutally honest. I’ve never read an account of teaching quite like it.

Garret’s one of the only writers where I find myself copying whole passages down from his work, as if I’ll need them later. They’re not always easy or nice things I copy down. Garret Keizer is one of the most critical and also most contemplative people I’ve ever met. I write these passages down because they remind me of something fundamental about being human that I don’t want to forget.

He’s just come out with his first book of poetry, so we drove around and talked in his car until we found the perfect field to read poetry in. It was some of the best, and most surprising conversation I’ve had in a long time.

Links and Credits

For more of Garret’s work, visit his site here.

One of my favorite articles he’s written for Harper’s is called Requiem for the Private Word….

Garret will be the headlining reader at the opening ceremony of the Burlington Book Festival on September 27th at 7:00. For more information, go here.

Music for this show is by Vermont musician Brian Clark

And thanks also to my wonderful sponsor, Honey Road. The best restaurant in Burlington. Click below to read about the menu…

It’s the summer musical in Randolph, Vermont…one day before showtime. It’s been an annual event at Chandler Music Hall for over twenty years, and this year they’re putting on Footloose. And honestly? It feels like the whole town is involved. Like it takes every last person in Randolph to pull this thing off…again. To put on a full musical with up to 120 kids, in three weeks? It’s a miracle.

I spent an afternoon talking with some of the kids backstage, about their lives in musical theater. And even though we were sitting on the floor in a Xerox room, they were willing to sing songs from the show…from their hearts. This is theater magic. Welcome.

Thank you SO MUCH to Kelly Green, associate producer on this show. Also Ramsey Papp for her help and guidance. And thanks also to my wonderful sponsor, Honey Road. The best restaurant in Burlington. Click below to read about the menu…

Toj Marceau as Cranston

Reagan Papp as Willard

Leland lives over the hill from me in East Calais. We’ve been friends since he was in first grade, and every year around this time we get together and he tells me what he’s thinking about, worried about, what his plans are. He got his driver’s permit two weeks ago so he drove me over to Number 10 Pond and we sat and talked about the ups and downs of his first year of high school, about girls, about avocado toast…

Credits

Music for this show is by Vermont musician Brian Clark, who is the lead singer and songwriter for the band Anachronist. Which is awesome.

Rumble Strip is sponsored by the best restaurant in Burlington, Vermont. It’s called Honey Road. Click on the image below to read about their menu of Eastern Mediterranean small plates…

If you drive around rural Vermont, you see logging skidders parked in people’s dooryards. You see them working in smaller woodlots and residential woodlots, felling trees with a chainsaw at twenty below zero, dragging cables through waist deep snow. It’s dangerous work, and they’re a resilient lot. And they prefer logging by hand.

This story is about them.

Credits

This show is part of The Resilient Forest series produced by Northern Woodlands and first aired on NEXT, a weekly radio show and podcast about New England. The Resilient Forest Series is supported by the Davis Conservation Foundation and the Larson Fund. Most of the loggers you heard are part of the landscape of the vast working forest of Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom, the subject of a special report in the Summer 2019 issue of Northern Woodlands magazine. You can find that reporting HERE.

Rumble Strip is sponsored by the best restaurant in Burlington, Vermont. It’s called Honey Road, and I ate there a couple weeks ago and honestly it was the best meal I’ve had in years. Plus the place is wicked fun. Ask for the drink that comes in two glasses….you won’t regret it.

Original music for this series is produced by Vermont musician and Rumble Strip collaborator and friend Brian Clark. In fact, here is a picture of his band, Anachronist, looking very serious:

Gamelan Sulukala is a group of fifteen people in central Vermont who come together at the dead end of a dirt road in the basement of the Goddard College library, to play Indonesian music on an ornate, court gamelan made on the island of Java.  There is no harmony. Instead, each sound is part of an intricate layering of patterns. No one instrument, or musician stands alone.

Except the people in gamelan are people who very much stand alone. Writers and strawberry farmers and scientists and Renaissance music lovers…I guess what I’d say they have in common is they all seem to need to be alone a lot…which describes most central Vermonters I know. Also…they come here with a common purpose….to get lost in something that’s more than the sum of their parts…

Thanks so much to Steven Light and Kathy Light, who lead and inspire this group. Thank you Tobin for all your help on this show. And thanks also to all the gamelan players who talked with me.

Here’s a great article in Seven Days about Gamelan Sulukala.

This show is sponsored by the best restaurant in Burlington, Honey Road, at the corner of Church Street and Main Street. It is amazing. Go eat there and tell them I sent you! And click below to learn more….

When I was in high school I remember being amazed by how much grownups seemed to forget about being young. But as it turns out….you do forget. A lot of it. And a lot of it’s important, and funny, and sometimes scary.

I do remember that I hated high school graduation. Not because I didn’t want to graduate, but because I knew I was supposed to be excited but I didn’t know how to be excited about a future that didn’t exist yet and that I couldn’t imagine.

So a couple weeks before graduation, I went to St. Johnsbury Academy and I talked with nine high school seniors…about what they’re afraid of, what they’re excited about….and also, prom. We talked about prom.

Credits

Thank you to the students: Jack Luna, Fiona Sweeney, Hope Reeve, Riley Taylor, Grace Nadeau, Ce Ce Jones, Shawn Guckin, Lucas Masure and David George.

Music is by Vermont musician Brian Clark.

Thanks to Phoebe Cobb and Melissa Burroughs for their help and patience setting all these interviews up!

Sponsor!

This show is sponsored by the excellent people at Honey Road, making the best food in Burlington on the corner of Church and Main. Click on the picture and check out the menu…

The criminal justice system is not designed to answer to the needs of crime victims. It’s designed to figure out if there’s enough evidence to bring a case. If there is, a defense attorney builds a case for the defendant and a prosecutor builds a case for the state of Vermont. The alleged victim in the case becomes a witness in their own story. They may have felt the impact of a crime, but they play no direct role in how the crime is adjudicated. For most people brand new to the system, this comes as a shock.

In every Vermont prosecutor’s office, in the Vermont State Police, in the Department of Corrections, there are people who see to the needs of these victims, from the time a crime is reported until long after the attorneys have gone home. It’s not their job to build cases or determine guilt or innocence. Their job is to support the victims in their cases. And that can mean a million different things. But always it’s complex and deeply personal.

This is a story about the victim advocates.

This show features:

Kate Brayton, victim advocate for Vermont’s Major Crime Unit

Amy Farr, victim advocate for Vermont’s Attorney General’s Office

Val Gauthier, victim specialist at the FBI covering Vermont and the Plattsburgh area

Aimee Stearns, victim witness coordinator at Vermont’s U.S. Attorney’s office

Danielle Levesque, victim service specialist at Vermont’s Department of Corrections

Kelly Woodward, victim advocate at the Franklin County State’s Attorney’s Office and victim advocate at the Northwest Unit for Special Investigations

Big Thanks to Toni Monsey for introducing me to these women, and to Jessica Dorr, Corrections Services Director.

Music for this show by Vermont musician Brian Clark and Kai Engel

This show is sponsored by Honey Road, the best restaurant in Burlington, Vermont. Click below for menu and accolades….

Welcome to the fourth episode of Problems, a radio drama about Pam and Joel, two old friends who support each other through their problems…because no problem is too small to complain about.

In this episode, Joel pays a visit to Pam at her house and brings her a small gift. Joel’s daughter, Whitney, has started at public school. Pam’s daughter River had a harder time at public school, and now she’s back at the local private school.

Welcome.

Captain JP Sinclair has been at the center of over five-hundred death investigations and a hundred-and-one homicides in the state of Vermont. He served as the state’s chief criminal investigator and he led the Vermont State Police’s Bureau of Criminal Investigations. He was also instrumental in forming a major crime unit in the state of Vermont to handle the state’s most egregious cases.

And we used to play little league together.

JP and I went to Charlotte Central School together from Kindergarten through eighth grade. And when you go to a school as small as ours, you remember each other. And what I remember about JP is just that he was just a decent kid. He helped Mrs. Atkins clean up the cafeteria after lunch.

JP retired from the Vermont State Police in September, 2018.

We talked about his life in the VSP. We don’t get into the explicit details of homicides, but I do want to warn people that we talk about the Melissa Jenkins case. Jenkins was a mother and teacher here in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont, and she was raped and murdered by a married couple in 2012. So if you don’t want to be reminded of this story, you might want to skip that section.

JP Sinclair now runs a mill and works as a logger in the Northeast Kingdom. You can find him at Sinclair Millworks and Timber Harvesting

Credits and Sponsors

Thank you to writer and editor Mark Davis for his excellent feedback on this show.

Thanks also to Brian Clark who wrote the music for this show.

This show is sponsored by Honey Road, the best restaurant in Burlington, Vermont. Click below for menu and accolades….

I interviewed T.O. back in the summer of 2017. He’d just gotten out of prison, where he’s spent the majority of his adult life, and he was trying to figure out what to do next. After we met, he found employment and he enrolled at the Community College of Vermont. Things were going well. But what does it feel like to start a brand new life? It’s hard. And it’s complicated.

Credits

Music by Brian Clark

T.O.’s Poetry

Patience

Peep dis…
What’s patience??
What’s life w embracing trials and TRIBULATIONS without…
Patience???
Like…ppls ignorance… judgements…n gossiping…
Without patience.. there is no
Betterment!!!
I can’t reach my goals(10 folds)..
Until I reflect or resurrect..”my new from my old!!”
Looking back only seems
To subtract..&..
I find myself on da WRONG tracks..
Blinded by what..
I COULDN’T KEEP INTACT!!!
I initiate All I make…
Bcause it’s a fact…
“ONLY WEAKLINGS BREAK!!!”
God disciplines…
So with each reprimand…
Im grow into thicker skin..
Which brings into existence…
A GREATER MAN!!!
My physical is living proof…
How PATIENCE..is da key
which could ONLY..
Strengthen me..
2 b a wiser me!!!
So PATIENCE…
How I love thee…
I’m not single..
But damn bitch..
“Would u marry me??”

Peace…
Triple OMEGA

What’s Love?

What’s love?
Y is it so much pain??
Y does it shone lite on my soul..
Regardless 2 my darkest rains???
Y can’t I c past it??
Y won’t it allow me 2 4 get?
Y do I admire it as if..it’s my twin bastard??
How can it tug on my mind??
Y do it give me visions..when I think I’m blind?(what am I??)
Y do I continue to bust thru shittyations?
Y does it give me strength..n all I’m facing?
Beauty b the name!!!
Victorious n all life’s Lane’s..
But 1 thing…will always remain..
Dis motherfucka… won’t Eva get tired of GAIN..
It will make a sane person turn..INsane.
It’ll also mend a ..dats been crushed & broken..ova n OVA again…
It’s ONLY 1 rule 2 dis game..
Which is Neva/EVA rush…
Or u will find yaself in da repetitive position…!!!!!!!

P.e.a.c.e.!!!
I’m TripleOmega

It’s EZ

It’s EZ..2 have friends..
When ur tricking..or spending dividends!!
It’s EZ…2 smile@ life..
When it’s breezy, smooth or nyce!!
It’s EZ…2 have sights..
When Ur tunneled visioned..
Thru what U swore defined..
Da right life!!!
It’s jus EZ…to say..I Love U!!!..
When U don’t reflect on da issues..
Or da shit dat made u!!
So…if U ask me..
PERSONALLY… I don’t agree…w Any1
Or Anything dat respects…EZ!!!
TRIALS N TRIBULATIONS…
bring mental n spirit-u-all..
PERSEVERANCE..
Bcause da True key to being PROSPEROUS..is when Ur @
Peace…w PATIENCE!!!
What dey eat… WON’T…
make u SHIT!!!
SO…what dey drink..
CAN’T make u piss!!(get it?)
It’s a lesson…(less w/n)
Jus ask yaself a question…
WHO DROPPING U JEWELZ
4 DA PROPER DIRECTION?
All hugs n smiles.. don’t come w blessings…
So..b on point w who u have in close sections!!!
Ya enemies..are truly ya friend…
Bcause they teach u 2 manifest…morals..like..HOW?? WHERE?? WHEN??
So..I ask u my FRIENDS…(lol)..
Is having it EASY…
Defining a win????
If so..u Betta think 3x again..

Peace n blessings…T.O.

I spent the night before deer season at Jim Welch’s deer camp in Chelsea, Vermont. His camp is an old school bus, outfitted with a woodstove and a couple pallets in the back for sleeping. To get to it you have to drive through Mr. Bradshaw’s barnyard and then about a half mile across a field. The bus has been there for as long as Jim can remember and Mr. Bradshaw lets him use it.

So a bunch of Jim’s friends were coming out to the bus to do what they always do the night before deer season, which is mostly drink beer, tell deer stories, eat burned hamburgers, bitch about hunting permissions and land use and give each other a hard time. And no surprise, there was plenty of profanity. And since there’s no movie theater, no bowling alley or much cell service in this valley, fun is something you have to make up together as you go along….

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A lot of you who listen to the show regularly already know Susan Randall. She’s a private investigator and an old friend and I interview her now and then for the show. A couple months ago Susan was diagnosed with breast cancer. It’s important to say right off that I think Susan’s going to be fine. The cancer hasn’t spread. She doesn’t need chemotherapy, and she’s almost done with her radiation therapy. But the diagnosis has made her think differently about her life. We got together at the hospital and talked about parenting, about aging, and mortality.

Credits:

Thank you to the great people at Radiation Oncology at The University of Vermont–Kate and Lena, Heather and Dr. Nelson. Also thanks to the University of Vermont Breast Care Center and to Michael Carrese and Annie Mackin. To read more about Susan’s private investigation business, go to vtprivateye.com. And for more shows with Susan on Rumble Strip, just go to the episodes listed below.

Susan’s private investigation business is called VTPrivateye

Music: Ticket to Ride, by the Carpenters.

I spent a day riding around with game warden, Jeff Whipple, on the second weekend of deer season…just when some hunters are getting frustrated they haven’t got their deer yet.

Exciting things happened.

Game wardens are like nature’s cops. They’re trained in law enforcement, but they’re also conservationists. Their job is to look after the wilderness areas and forests that make up 75 percent of Vermont. They’re spread thin across the state, so in order to respond quickly to calls, they have to work in the districts where they live. That means that their neighbors are also their constituents.

What’s most interesting to ME about game wardens is they come into contact with just about every kind of Vermonter, and they have to be able to talk with anyone. I love people like that.

Jeff lives in Chelsea, Vermont. His district includes areas of Orange and Windsor counties. His district is crazy beautiful.

What most people outside Vermont know about Christine Hallquist is that she was the country’s first transgender gubernatorial candidate. But it’s not what she ran on–and it’s not even what was most interesting about her campaign.

The day before election day, Christine and her team had just finished a fourteen-county Road to Victory Tour,  which involved going to places like Lunenburg, Vermont, population 1302. And this wasn’t her first visit to Lunenburg. Christine’s campaign focused on rural Vermont, on people in small towns in far flung places, and many of the towns she visited over the course of the campaign had never even seen a gubernatorial candidate before.

In my book, that’s what made her candidacy special. Not to mention the fact that the odds were against her–no ones beaten a gubernatorial incumbent in VT in 56 years.

I asked her if I could follow her around in the days leading up to the election. She said yes. And I did. I watched her planting Christine signs along Route 2. While she was at it, she righted a few sandwich board signs for Sunday night bingo that had blown over. She made countless calls and took credit card numbers from donors on the phone.

I guess it’s possible that other gubernatorial candidates do all this. But I doubt it.

Here’s Christine Hallquist in her final push for governor. Welcome.

Thank Yous

Thank you Teddy Waszazak, David Glidden, and Cameron Russell.

Thank you Mark Davis for producing this show with me.

Thank you John Van Hoesen for giving me the idea for this story.

Phone by Cameron Russell.

Welcome to another episode of Problems–a series about Pam and Joel, two old friends who support each other through their problems. Because no problem is too small to complain about.

This is a special episode, featuring special celebrity guest, Steve McFadden. McFadden is an acclaimed performance artist from Chicago, and old friend of Pam’s. His work is extreme, and always dangerous. Pam was conducting the interview on behalf of her daughter River, who was uncomfortable conducting the interview herself, which was a problem.

Sarah Holland had no history of mental illness. She was a full-time R.N., she had three kids and a small farm. She was busy. Then suddenly she started to experience symptoms of depression. She didn’t have a name for it. No one in her world had ever talked about mental health. But pretty soon Sarah was having a hard time working, and parenting.

This is a story of one woman’s struggle with major depression, and her recovery.

This show is the first in a seven-part series I produced for Vermont Public Radio called They Are Us, which features personal stories from inside the state’s mental healthcare system.

Comments: Please make a comment or share a story if you’ve got one. Comments and conversation are part of the point!

Credits:

Series Advisor: Dillon Burns, mental health services director at Vermont Care Partners

Series Associate Producers: Clare Dolan, Mark Davis

Series Executive Director: Sarah Ashworth

VPR Advisors: Franny Bastian and John Dillon

Mixing: Chris Albertine

Digital Producer: Meg Malone

Series Logo: Aaron Shrewsbury

Music for this series is by two excellent Montreal-based bands:

Godspeed You! Black Emporer and Esmerine. Special thanks to the awesome Bruce Cawdron

Sarah Holland’s awesome landscape company: River’s Bend Design

For more information about the series, visit VPR. You’ll find the series schedule and resources.

Very big thanks to the following people for their knowledge, time and advice: M.T. Anderson, Melissa Bailey, Gretchen Brown, Seleem Choudhury, Anne Clement, Jimmy Dennison, Isabelle Desjardins, Laurie Emerson, Deb Fleischman, Laura Flint, Al Gobeille, Alix Goldschmidt, Gary Gordon, Keith Grier, Heather Houle, Jenniflower, Karen Kurrle, Lt. Maurice Lamothe, Sabrina Leal, Fran Levine, Martie Majoros, Jack McCullough, Mark McGee, Megan McKeever, Betsy Morse, Bess O’Brien, Roxanne Pearson, Julie Potter and her beautiful daughter, Malaika Puffer, Michael Rousse, Marla Simpson, Montpelier Senior Activity Center, Sandy Steingard, Tony Stevens, Cindy Tabor, Gloria Vandenberg, Konstantin von Krusenstiern.

How should people live long-term in our state if they have a serious mental illness? The hope is that they’ll find ways to integrate into their communities with support, but that’s proven tough to accomplish. In this show we look at the challenges in our community mental health care system.

Featuring:

• Ken Libertoff, former director of the Vermont Association for Mental Health
• Anne Donahue, state representative from Northfield and Berlin, editor of Counterpoint
• Greg Mairs, operational director of adult services at Counseling Service of Addison County
• Mary Moulton, executive director of Washington County Mental Health Services
• Michael Hartman, adult mental health director at Lamoille County Mental Health
• Connie Stabler, mother and Howard Center board member
• Louis Josephson, president and CEO of Brattleboro Retreat

This show is part of a seven-part series I produced for Vermont Public Radio called They Are Us, which features personal stories from inside the state’s mental healthcare system.

Comments: Please make a comment or share a story if you’ve got one. Comments and conversation are part of the point!

Credits:

Series Advisor: Dillon Burns, mental health services director at Vermont Care Partners

Series Associate Producers: Clare Dolan, Mark Davis

Series Executive Director: Sarah Ashworth

VPR Advisors: Franny Bastian and John Dillon

Mixing: Chris Albertine

Digital Producer: Meg Malone

Series Logo: Aaron Shrewsbury

Picture: Anne Donahue knockin it out of the park

Music for this series is by two excellent Montreal-based bands:

Godspeed You! Black Emporer and Esmerine. Special thanks to the awesome Bruce Cawdron

For more information about the series, visit VPR. You’ll find the series schedule and resources.

Very big thanks to the following people for their knowledge, time and advice: M.T. Anderson, Melissa Bailey, Gretchen Brown, Seleem Choudhury, Anne Clement, Jimmy Dennison, Isabelle Desjardins, Laurie Emerson, Deb Fleischman, Laura Flint, Al Gobeille, Alix Goldschmidt, Gary Gordon, Keith Grier, Heather Houle, Jenniflower, Karen Kurrle, Lt. Maurice Lamothe, Sabrina Leal, Fran Levine, Martie Majoros, Jack McCullough, Mark McGee, Megan McKeever, Betsy Morse, Bess O’Brien, Roxanne Pearson, Julie Potter and her beautiful daughter, Malaika Puffer, Michael Rousse, Marla Simpson, Montpelier Senior Activity Center, Sandy Steingard, Tony Stevens, Cindy Tabor, Gloria Vandenberg, Konstantin von Krusenstiern.

Both Alexis and Steve were diagnosed with schizophrenia. This is the story about how meaningful, paid work plays a role in their recovery.

Featuring:

• Paul Miller, co-coordinator of the Green Mountain Workforce, Washington County Mental Health
• Louis Josephson, president and CEO of Brattleboro Retreat
• Alexis Kyriak, artist
• Steve, culinary worker

This show is part of a seven-part series I produced for Vermont Public Radio called They Are Us, which features personal stories from inside the state’s mental healthcare system.

Comments: Please make a comment or share a story if you’ve got one. Comments and conversation are part of the point!

Credits:

Series Advisor: Dillon Burns, mental health services director at Vermont Care Partners

Series Associate Producers: Clare Dolan, Mark Davis

Series Executive Director: Sarah Ashworth

VPR Advisors: Franny Bastian and John Dillon

Mixing: Chris Albertine

Digital Producer: Meg Malone

Series Logo: Aaron Shrewsbury

Music for this series is by two excellent Montreal-based bands:

Godspeed You! Black Emporer and Esmerine. Special thanks to the awesome Bruce Cawdron

Photo of Alexis by Diana Gonsalves

For more information about the series, visit VPR. You’ll find the series schedule and resources.

Very big thanks to the following people for their knowledge, time and advice: M.T. Anderson, Melissa Bailey, Gretchen Brown, Seleem Choudhury, Anne Clement, Jimmy Dennison, Isabelle Desjardins, Laurie Emerson, Deb Fleischman, Laura Flint, Al Gobeille, Alix Goldschmidt, Gary Gordon, Keith Grier, Heather Houle, Jenniflower, Karen Kurrle, Lt. Maurice Lamothe, Sabrina Leal, Fran Levine, Martie Majoros, Jack McCullough, Mark McGee, Megan McKeever, Betsy Morse, Bess O’Brien, Roxanne Pearson, Julie Potter and her beautiful daughter, Malaika Puffer, Michael Rousse, Marla Simpson, Montpelier Senior Activity Center, Sandy Steingard, Tony Stevens, Cindy Tabor, Gloria Vandenberg, Konstantin von Krusenstiern.

Leslie Nelson has heard voices for as long as she can remember. She sees things other people don’t see. This is a conversation about what it’s like to be normal, from Leslie’s point of view, and the incredible power of finding people like herself to talk with about their normal lives with mental illness.

Featuring:

• Leslie Nelson, START Team Leader, Howard Center

This show is part of a seven-part series I produced for Vermont Public Radio called They Are Us, which features personal stories from inside the state’s mental healthcare system.

Comments: Please make a comment or share a story if you’ve got one. Comments and conversation are part of the point!

Credits:

Series Advisor: Dillon Burns, mental health services director at Vermont Care Partners

Series Associate Producers: Clare Dolan, Mark Davis

Series Executive Director: Sarah Ashworth

VPR Advisors: Franny Bastian and John Dillon

Mixing: Chris Albertine

Digital Producer: Meg Malone

Series Logo: Aaron Shrewsbury

Music for this series is by two excellent Montreal-based bands:

Godspeed You! Black Emporer and Esmerine. Special thanks to the awesome Bruce Cawdron

For more information about the series, visit VPR. You’ll find the series schedule and resources.

Very big thanks to the following people for their knowledge, time and advice: M.T. Anderson, Melissa Bailey, Gretchen Brown, Seleem Choudhury, Anne Clement, Jimmy Dennison, Isabelle Desjardins, Laurie Emerson, Deb Fleischman, Laura Flint, Al Gobeille, Alix Goldschmidt, Gary Gordon, Keith Grier, Heather Houle, Jenniflower, Karen Kurrle, Lt. Maurice Lamothe, Sabrina Leal, Fran Levine, Martie Majoros, Jack McCullough, Mark McGee, Megan McKeever, Betsy Morse, Bess O’Brien, Roxanne Pearson, Julie Potter and her beautiful daughter, Malaika Puffer, Michael Rousse, Marla Simpson, Montpelier Senior Activity Center, Sandy Steingard, Tony Stevens, Cindy Tabor, Gloria Vandenberg, Konstantin von Krusenstiern.

Connie’s son was diagnosed with schizophrenia when he was nineteen, just as he was becoming independent. He didn’t believe there was anything wrong with him. He did not want to seek treatment. And since he was legally an adult, his parents stood by and watched his life fall apart.

Ron’s story was much the same.

One in 100 adults is diagnosed with schizophrenia, and for most, the onset is around this time, in late adolescence, and parents often play a critical role in their care. As caregivers, crisis responders, money lenders…and often they end up having to figure out for themselves which services are available to them, in the complex network of programs that make up the community mental health system.

This is a story about what it’s like, day to day, year to year, to be the parent of an adult child with schizophrenia.

I’d love to hear your comments. Just go to the show page and scroll to the bottom and you’ll find a comment box there.

Featuring:

• Connie Stabler, a mother and Howard Center board member
• Ron, a father (note: we are only using Ron’s first name)

This show is part of a seven-part series I produced for Vermont Public Radio called They Are Us, which features personal stories from inside the state’s mental healthcare system.

Comments: Please make a comment or share a story if you’ve got one. Comments and conversation are part of the point!

Credits:

Series Advisor: Dillon Burns, mental health services director at Vermont Care Partners

Series Associate Producers: Clare Dolan, Mark Davis

Series Executive Director: Sarah Ashworth

VPR Advisors: Franny Bastian and John Dillon

Mixing: Chris Albertine

Digital Producer: Meg Malone

Series Logo: Aaron Shrewsbury

Music for this series is by two excellent Montreal-based bands:

Godspeed You! Black Emporer and Esmerine. Special thanks to the awesome Bruce Cawdron

For more information about the series, visit VPR. You’ll find the series schedule and resources.

Very big thanks to the following people for their knowledge, time and advice: M.T. Anderson, Melissa Bailey, Gretchen Brown, Seleem Choudhury, Anne Clement, Jimmy Dennison, Isabelle Desjardins, Laurie Emerson, Deb Fleischman, Laura Flint, Al Gobeille, Alix Goldschmidt, Gary Gordon, Keith Grier, Heather Houle, Jenniflower, Karen Kurrle, Lt. Maurice Lamothe, Sabrina Leal, Fran Levine, Martie Majoros, Jack McCullough, Mark McGee, Megan McKeever, Betsy Morse, Bess O’Brien, Roxanne Pearson, Julie Potter and her beautiful daughter, Malaika Puffer, Michael Rousse, Marla Simpson, Montpelier Senior Activity Center, Sandy Steingard, Tony Stevens, Cindy Tabor, Gloria Vandenberg, Konstantin von Krusenstiern.

There are Vermonters who experience psychiatric crises for years — and repeated visits to emergency rooms and psychiatric hospitals. Where do they go when they leave the hospital? And why do they keep coming back? This is a story about the role housing plays in mental health.

Featuring:

• Ken Libertoff, former director of the Vermont Association for Mental Health
• Louis Josephson, president and CEO of Brattleboro Retreat
• Brian Lincourt, night charge nurse at Brattleboro Retreat
• Connie Stabler, mother and Howard Center board member
• Karl Jeffries, unit chief for adult inpatient unit at Brattleboro Retreat

This show is part of a seven-part series I produced for Vermont Public Radio called They Are Us, which features personal stories from inside the state’s mental healthcare system.

Comments: Please make a comment or share a story if you’ve got one. Comments and conversation are part of the point!

Credits:

Series Advisor: Dillon Burns, mental health services director at Vermont Care Partners

Series Associate Producers: Clare Dolan, Mark Davis

Series Executive Director: Sarah Ashworth

VPR Advisors: Franny Bastian and John Dillon

Mixing: Chris Albertine

Digital Producer: Meg Malone

Series Logo: Aaron Shrewsbury

Music for this series is by two excellent Montreal-based bands:

Godspeed You! Black Emporer and Esmerine. Special thanks to the awesome Bruce Cawdron

For more information about the series, visit VPR. You’ll find the series schedule and resources.

Very big thanks to the following people for their knowledge, time and advice: M.T. Anderson, Melissa Bailey, Gretchen Brown, Seleem Choudhury, Anne Clement, Jimmy Dennison, Isabelle Desjardins, Laurie Emerson, Deb Fleischman, Laura Flint, Al Gobeille, Alix Goldschmidt, Gary Gordon, Keith Grier, Heather Houle, Jenniflower, Karen Kurrle, Lt. Maurice Lamothe, Sabrina Leal, Fran Levine, Martie Majoros, Jack McCullough, Mark McGee, Megan McKeever, Betsy Morse, Bess O’Brien, Roxanne Pearson, Julie Potter and her beautiful daughter, Malaika Puffer, Michael Rousse, Marla Simpson, Montpelier Senior Activity Center, Sandy Steingard, Tony Stevens, Cindy Tabor, Gloria Vandenberg, Konstantin von Krusenstiern.

A story about Vermont’s only permanent, supervised housing for people with serious mental illness.

Featuring:

• Anne Donohue, state representative from Northfield and Berlin, editor of Counterpoint
• Graham Parker, MyPad director
• Connie Stabler, mother and Howard Center board member

This show is part of a seven-part series I produced for Vermont Public Radio called They Are Us, which features personal stories from inside the state’s mental healthcare system.

Comments: Please make a comment or share a story if you’ve got one. Comments and conversation are part of the point!

Credits:

Series Advisor: Dillon Burns, mental health services director at Vermont Care Partners

Series Associate Producers: Clare Dolan, Mark Davis

Series Executive Director: Sarah Ashworth

VPR Advisors: Franny Bastian and John Dillon

Mixing: Chris Albertine

Digital Producer: Meg Malone

Series Logo: Aaron Shrewsbury

Music for this series is by two excellent Montreal-based bands:

Godspeed You! Black Emporer and Esmerine. Special thanks to the awesome Bruce Cawdron

For more information about the series, visit VPR. You’ll find the series schedule and resources.

Very big thanks to the following people for their knowledge, time and advice: M.T. Anderson, Melissa Bailey, Gretchen Brown, Seleem Choudhury, Anne Clement, Jimmy Dennison, Isabelle Desjardins, Laurie Emerson, Deb Fleischman, Laura Flint, Al Gobeille, Alix Goldschmidt, Gary Gordon, Keith Grier, Heather Houle, Jenniflower, Karen Kurrle, Lt. Maurice Lamothe, Sabrina Leal, Fran Levine, Martie Majoros, Jack McCullough, Mark McGee, Megan McKeever, Betsy Morse, Bess O’Brien, Roxanne Pearson, Julie Potter and her beautiful daughter, Malaika Puffer, Michael Rousse, Marla Simpson, Montpelier Senior Activity Center, Sandy Steingard, Tony Stevens, Cindy Tabor, Gloria Vandenberg, Konstantin von Krusenstiern.

We didn’t have cheerleading at my school. Or pep rallies. I think we would’ve made fun of cheering and cheerleaders at my school. Because we were scared and cruel and had no idea what we were missing.

My son just started high school and I snuck into the gym for his first pep rally. I almost wept. Seeing all those kids—the freshmen and the seniors and the football players and the shy kids—kids at a stage in life that can be so self conscious and horrible—seeing them all clapping and cheering together and ‘moving to the left and shaking to the right’….it was ridiculous and beautiful and unlike anything I’ve ever seen.

And right at the middle of all of it were the cheerleaders. So I went and talked with them. They talked about why they love cheerleading and what they’re afraid of and what they’re proud of and what they want to be with they grow up. And school spirit…

Thanks to all the girls on the St. Johnsbury Academy Cheerleading team for talking with me, and coaches Deb Priest and Chrissy Carr. For more pictures and info on the team, click here.

Thanks also to Mark Davis for his great advice. As always.

Our Generous Sponsor:

This show is sponsored by Honey Road, one of Burlington’s most popular restaurants down on Church and Main. It serves Eastern Mediterranean small plates. And it’s the kind of restaurant where you want everything on the menu. You share, you eat, they take away the finished plates and bring new ones. In other words, it’s episodic and fun. It’s also woman owned, woman run, and Allison and Cara have made a sane and happy work environment. You can even buy the kitchen staff a bucket of beer…

Steve Grody has dedicated his life to his passions. He’s an accomplished swing dance teacher. He’s a self defense instructor. And in the last twenty-eight years, he’s taken tens of thousands of photographs of graffiti in his hometown of Los Angeles. This is a conversation about the decades he’s spent wandering alleyways, climbing under bridges and through tunnels,  documenting this ephemeral art.

This program is produced by Bianca Giaever. She’s a writer, filmmaker, artist and radio producer, and recently I heard a story she made with Jay Allison that was sublime. It’s called Two Years with Franz, about the Pulitzer-winning poet Franz Wright. It’s beautiful and I highly recommend it. Her college film, the Scared is scared was named Web Video of the Year by USA Today but more importantly, it’s awesome.

More about Steve

You can see Steve Grody’s photos in his book,  Graffiti L.A., Street Styles and Art, and he has curated and contributed to graffiti art shows at MOCA LA and the Pasadena Museum of California Art.

Steve Grody’s blog

Ted Talk with Steve

Music

A Day At The Racetrack, by the musician Julian Lynch

Additional music by Zubin Hensler and Jacob Blumberg

This is a show about women running for office. It’s not about issues or policies. You won’t learn where these women stand on public education or healthcare. It’s just about being a woman…running for office.

The truth is I’m tired of hearing about women running for office. I think there’s a liberal assumption that I already understand why that’s a good thing. But we’re not really supposed to talk explicitly about how being a woman, and not being a man, can be a value in and of itself.

So I figured it would be interesting to talk explicitly about it with some women running for office in Vermont. And it turns out they had plenty to say. It also turns out they’re all people I’d want to have a beer with…that gold standard of good male political candidates.

In this program you’ll hear from:

Kathleen James, running for the Vermont House in the Bennnington-4 District.

Becca White, running for the Vermont House in Hartford.

Christine Hallquist, the Democratic nominee for governor in Vermont.

Ruth Hardy, running for State Senate in Addison County. She is also the executive director of Emerge Vermont, which recruits and trains women to run for office in Vermont.

This show is sponsored by Honey Road, one of Burlington’s most popular restaurants down on Church and Main. It serves Eastern Mediterranean small plates. And it’s the kind of restaurant where you want everything on the menu. You share, you eat, they take away the finished plates and bring new ones. In other words, it’s episodic and fun. It’s also woman owned, woman run, and Allison and Cara have made a sane and happy work environment. You can even buy the kitchen staff a bucket of beer…

Thank you to my excellent and smart journalist friend Mark Davis.

I want to thank The Athanaeum in St. Johnsbury for allowing me to conduct an interview in their beautiful building.

Music for this show by Blue Dot Sessions from the Free Music Archive

Becca and Christine

Kathleen James

Becca White

Daphne Kalmar was a school teacher for over twenty years. She taught in California, Massachusetts and then in a small school in Vermont. She was one of those teachers. One of the exciting and inspiring ones you never forget…one of the teachers who sees every kid.

Daphne is now a children’s book author and she’s just published her first book, A Stitch in Time. We sat in her kitchen by an open window. It had that late summer sound to it, the sound I associate with the beginning of school in Vermont. We talked about her new book, but mostly we talked about what it’s like to fall in love with a new batch of kids every September, and then let them go.

Credits

Daphne Kalmar’s Website

Music by Esmerine

More Esmerine

Esmerine Facebook

Additional music by Brian Clark and Mike Donofrio

I picked Amelia up at The Shelburne Museum the other day. It was a few hours before her soundcheck so she had some time to kill and we took a slow drive down by the lake. She drove. She’s a good driver.

Amelia is one half of the band Sylvan Esso. Nick Sanborn is the other half. I’m not great at music genres but I’ve heard their music described as ‘electro-pop’, as ‘glitchy metropolitan folk’ (what??). Anyway, their music is incredibly fun, bent, smart, and they can turn the end of the world into a dance party. Their show moves like a train. Non-stop dancing and a stunning light show.

Last time I talked with Amelia was about a year and a half ago. Since then, Sylvan Esso has entered the drinking water. It’s everywhere. They’ve gotten famous, which I figure must be a really strange thing to be. Amelia and I drove around and I asked her what it’s like to be famous, which is one of those things that you’re not really supposed to talk about, but I wanted to know what it feels like, and how fame affects her life. And also we talked about other things…and she sang a little.

Here’s a show. It’s driving around with Amelia. And lots of great music.

And there’s some swearing.

Sylvan Esso’s latest music video: Parade.

Sylvan Esso official website

Thomas Caswell has autism. Which doesn’t tell you very much about him.

Autism doesn’t describe a person. If you’ve met one person with autism, then you’ve met one person…with autism. But over the last couple years Thomas has been coming out of the closet, in stages. And along with the common difficulties of coming out, there are some special difficulties if you’re a person with a disability. In this show, Thomas talks about growing up with autism, and growing into his life as a gay man.

Credits and Links

Thank you to the amazing Emily Anderson, the advocacy facilitator and Bridging coordinator, at Champlain Community Services, which focuses on career development for people with intellectual disabilities and autism. The Bridging Program helps students negotiate the transition from high school to adulthood. Thomas is working on a Sartac fellowship through Green Mountain Self Advocates. Champlain Voices encourages people to express themselves through self-advocacy.

Music for this show is by Brian Clark and Mike Donofrio.
Also, Blues Arrangement for Toy Piano and Piano Margaret Leng Tan

Reviews
Here’s a lovely review of the show by my favorite podcast reviewer, Ben Cannon.

It’s time again for another conversation with my neighbor Leland. He’s fourteen now. He just finished eighth grade. He’s got big plans for the summer.

This is the fourth year I’ve interviewed Leland about what he’s doing and what’s on his mind, and what’s on his mind is always pretty interesting.

This year he took me out to his fort, in a pine forest about a half mile from his house. It’s a tarp held up by two beams, and covered with brush piles. There’s a firepit. We sat in a couple lawn chairs and talked about his year, about cow skulls and bear turds and North Korea…

Credits

This show is sponsored by Honey Road, one of Burlington’s most popular restaurants down on Church and Main. It serves Eastern Mediterranean small plates. And it’s the kind of restaurant where you want everything on the menu. You share, you eat, they take away the finished plates and bring new ones. In other words, it’s episodic and fun. It’s also woman owned, woman run, and Allison and Cara have made a sane and happy work environment. You can even buy the kitchen staff a bucket of beer…

Music for this show is by Brian Clark, Mike Donofrio and Peter Cressy, my talented friends here in central Vermont.

Welcome to the second episode of Problems, an occasional mini-series of  Rumble Strip. Problems. Because no problem is too small to complain about.

Problems stars Pam and Joel, old friends who support each other through their problems. We left off with Joel, who was in the midst of a pretty inconvenient bathroom renovation in his house, and Pam, who’s been dealing with some issues with her daughter River. River’s been biting other kids at school.

Here is a very special addition to the song from listener James Roggenbeck. So many of you don’t understand River and what she goes through as a sensitive child. But James? He does. Here is his tribute.

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It’s almost summer here in central Vermont, and as it gets hotter, it seems to get more dangerous. Law enforcement is working hard behind the scenes to keep people safe. Also to keep cows safe. Here’s the police log, read by Scott Carrier.

Depending on who you talk to, The Shaggs were either one of the best bands from the ’60s, or one of the worst bands of all time.

Helen, Betty and Dot Wiggin grew up in Fremont, New Hampshire. They had no interest in music, no natural talent for music, and in the late ’60s, their father forced them to drop out of school and start a rock band. In their living room. And then he forced them to record an album.

Decades later, The Shaggs became a cult classic….beloved by the likes of Frank Zappa, Sonic Youth and Kurt Cobain. And the sisters were suddenly in a spotlight they never expected, or desired.

In this show, The New Yorker’s Susan Orlean talks about her reporting on the origins of The Shaggs.

This show was produced for a FANTASTIC series out of KCRW, called Lost Notes. I highly recommend checking it out.

I produced this show with:

Susan Orlean of The New Yorker

Nick White of KCRW

Myke Dodge Weiskopf of KCRW

The present day interview with The Shaggs was by Avishay Artsy

Directions to Carl Blaisdell’s house: Go about seven miles down this road. Then there’s a road that kind of goes up to a Jersey farm on the left and then there’s a pond. But there’s no sign to the pond. So after the pond, drive past the pull-off and Carl’s trailer sits way up in a field at the top of that hill. There’s a lot of pipes. And a lot of cars and trucks. And lots and lots of hounds.

But Carl wasn’t home. And so I went back the next day and we sat in his truck and talked. Carl’s trailer looks out over the farm he ran for most of his life, then sold. After farming, Carl seemed to make a smooth transition to being a mountain man, which is how he described himself, and the name pretty much fits. He’s private. He only goes to town to get something he needs. His life is close to the ground, to his dogs, and to the outside.

Larry Massett was inspired by the hounds and made this short piece. It’s called Where’s Carl.

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Credits

This interview was conducted while I was reporting for an episode about the Northeast Kingdom, by Brave Little State, which you can find HERE.

Music for this episode is by Emily Kueppers

And here’s a link to Caplan’s Army Store, where I have bought a LOT of socks.

This is a show I made back in 2008. I’m running it as a tribute to my friend Greg Sharrow. Greg was one of the first people I met when I came back to Vermont in 2003. I didn’t have many friends, I didn’t have a job or really any plans, and it was the middle of winter. And then I met Greg at his office in the old Vermont Folklife Center building in Middelbury. It was crammed with books, and we sat down and talked for two hours, and it was that kind of talk where you’re almost gulping each other down. And he became one of the funnest, and maybe one of the most important friends of my life.

Greg Sharrow died two days ago at his home in North Carolina, with Bob and their dear friend Brian at his bedside.

This is a story about Greg, and his husband Bob, and Greg’s mother, Marjory. Marjory had dementia in the years before her death. This is a show about what remained for them, after the forgetting. Welcome.

For a longer version of this show, and an additional interview with Greg, click here

Photos by Evie Lovett

Music by Karinne Keithley Syers and Doris Day

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing
and rightdoing there is a field.
I’ll meet you there.

–Rumi

This winter Susan Randall worked with the defense on a sentencing case for a high profile multiple-murder here in Vermont. A sentencing is the time for considering the pain caused by a crime. It’s also a time to ask, How did we get here? What happened in the life of this person that led her to do what she did?

For months, Susan worked closely with the woman who committed these murders, creating a profile of her life, her history, and her family. It’s a story of almost unimaginable, multi-generational abuse…abuse which started two generations before her birth. In the end, the perpetrator received a sentence of life without parole. I’m not going to name her here because it’s a very sensitive case in Vermont, and this story is not about her. It’s about what it’s like to work closely on cases like these as a private investigator, and what happens after the cases are closed.

Susan’s private investigation business is here.

The music for this show was made by Emily Kueppers. Thank you Emily!

[Uhm…..satire. In case that wasn’t evident….]

Some of life’s inevitable problems are big and some are quite small. But no problems are too small to complain about.

Welcome to the first installment of Problems…a periodic radio drama about…problems. Joel and Pam’s problems.Pam and Joel, who you’ll hear from in this show, are old friends and they support each other through their problems, and even if you don’t think their problems are very problematic, for Pam and Joel…they are.

In this first episode, we hear about Pam’s daughter, River, who’s having a hard time getting her needs met at school. Also, this Friday is the contra dance school benefit at the grange hall, and Joel’s facing some challenges with his bathroom renovation.

Welcome.

Thanks to Sarah Miller.

Music: The Aurora Principle, by Chris Wortmann, Enough Records

Son Lux is a band that doesn’t live comfortably in any genre. Their sound is massive, anthemic, but it’s also strangely intimate. The rhythms are incredibly complex, and it’s shot through with these bright details of sound. The project started in Ryan Lott’s brain in Cleveland, and then it grew by two–guitarist Rafiq Bhatia and drummer Ian Chang. They’re all composers and producers and improvisers. I think it’s fair to say they’re all wicked smart.

I interviewed Ryan Lott just two days before he went out on tour for their new album, Brighter Wounds. We had a really interesting conversation about where music comes from, and how he makes it. Or where he finds it…

LINKS

Image of Ryan by Zenith Richards

Band image by Lisa Wassmann

Website for Brighter Wounds

A lot of Son Lux Music

NPR review of Brighter Wounds

The Northeast Kingdom is mostly small towns separated by miles and miles. Sometimes it’s featured in trout fishing magazines. It also has some of the highest unemployment and lowest wages in the state. Its beautiful place. And it’s a hard place to live.

I was up at the St. Johnsbury Academy a couple weeks ago, which is one of the gateways to the Kingdom. My sister and brother in law both work there. And I’ve always been curious about the career and technical classes at the school. They have  the most incredible CTE facilities I’ve ever seen (pictures below), and what makes them really special is they’re all on campus. In a lot of places, ‘tech kids’ are bused off to other campuses…which, when you’re in high school, can’t help but send the message that kids in English class don’t need to know what those tech kids are doing, and the tech kids don’t need to bother much with English classes. But at the Academy, it’s all in one place, and 80% of the general school population takes CTE classes at least once in their high school careers.

After spending some time with students and teachers, I had that rare experience when you know you’re seeing something important…something that’s so obvious and right, that it’s almost hiding in plain sight.

If you listen to Rumble Strip, you know that I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about problems. Big, complicated problems. So when I  watched 19 kids in hard hats rewiring a building on their own school campus, I didn’t think, ‘well isn’t that nice?’ Instead, I felt like I was looking way upstream of all the problems, and seeing a solution. Not the only solution. Just…a solution. One solution.

This show is a kind of valentine to all the people learning to work in the world and learning to make things. And the people who are helping them to get there….

Credits

Music by Vermont musicians Brian Clark and Mike Donofrio

Thank you Emily Kueppers for your beautiful logging!

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People having mental health crises are visiting emergency rooms in record numbers. But emergency room nurses are not trained to treat mental illnesses. This problem isn’t unique to Vermont. In fact it’s an acute problem all over the country.

For this show I interviewed nine nurses and one sheriff, in three settings around the state. This isn’t a show that explores where the problem came from, or where the solution lies. This show is about what it looks like right now in emergency rooms across the state.

Thanks to Clare Dolan, Seleem Choudury and Mark Davis for their help with this show

This is another guest show from radio producer Scott Carrier, which he produced when he was twenty-six. He hitchhiked across the United States, interviewed people along the way, and ended up at the door of NPR in Washington, DC with an armful of tape. This is Scott’s first story.

Scott produces my favorite podcast. It’s called Home of the Brave.

Here is our annual season’s greetings card, this year from Liz and Jerry Danforth. Fair warning…they had a pretty rough year.

Credits

Script by writer Tal McThenia

The show is a co-production of Rumble Strip and Pod Planet.

Music

Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy • United States Navy Band

Clouds Pass Softly Deux • Podington Bear • Free Music Archive

I Am A Man Who Will Fight For Your Honor • Chris Zabriskie • Free Music Archive

Little Drummer Boy • Field recording of Christmas carolers.

My friend Tim Kasten died two weeks ago.

Ever since I met Tim, he’s been preparing for his own death. Partly because he had significant medical issues. But I think mostly he was preparing for his death because he wanted to. Thinking about the impermanence of life gave his life meaning. He was one of the most spiritually curious people I’ve ever met.

In this show, we hear from Tim, on death and dying. And we also chronicle the building of his casket…or his simple pine box…built by family and friends. Vermont style.

This show is sponsored by The Alchemist Brewery in Stowe and Waterbury, Vermont. Some of the world’s best beer. You can click on the logo to check out this stellar brewery, and please crack one for me. You won’t be sorry.

More Tim Music:

I couldn’t figure out how to embed a soundcloud link here, but here’s a link to Tim singing

We Shall Overcome

Lord Lord Lord

Tim doing the crossword.

I’ve been reading the news too much. I read every version of the same story in every news outlet, and sometimes I forget I’ve read them and I read them again. I think a lot of people are feeling concerned and even scared. But I thought it would be good to remember some of the important things that are not the news.

I asked Scott Carrier to tell me about a place in the wilderness, in a high meadow, far, far away from the news.

It’s a musical.

Credits

Willie Tobin provided the nature sound for this show. It was recorded on a September day in a clearing on the southwest side of Gillespie Mountain in Hancock, Vermont. I am so grateful to have these recordings. Thank you Willie!

Thank you Larry Massett and Tobin Anderson.

This fall my friend and I were going for a walk and as we walked past a small barn set down off the Upper Road in Calais, we heard someone from the barn call up to us and say, ‘You wanna come see some pigs?’

Of course we wanted to see some pigs.

John Rowell showed us his new piglets and I went back a few weeks later to hang out with John and his brother Eddie and record a conversation. Here’s a few minutes from that night.

The mission of The Museum of Everyday Life is “a heroic, slow-motion cataloguing of the quotidian–a detailed, theatrical expression of gratitude and love for the miniscule and unglamorous experience of daily life in all its forms.”

The museum’s home is in a barn on Route 16 in the Northeast Kingdom. It is my favorite museum. This is a show featuring the museum’s creator, Clare Dolan.

Credits

This show is co-produced by Erica Heilman and Mark Davis. Mark is my friend and a very good journalist at Seven Days. Here are some of my favorite articles from Mark:

Feuding in Victory

Death by opiates in 2016

Final conversations with overdose victims

A fond rembrance of Howard Frank Mosher

Game warden

Pictures from the Museum of Everyday Life, in summer and winter

   

One of my favorite things in the toothbrush exhibit.

 

Rob Mermin had a career as a mime clown for forty years, then in 1987 he started a circus company here in Vermont called Circus Smirkus. Three years ago he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease.

This is a story about movement, the loss of control of movement…catastrophe and grace.

About Rob

Rob Mermin trained in classical mime with Etienne Decroux and Marcel Marceau and has performed in European circus, theater, TV and film for forty years.  He is an author, director, university lecturer, former Dean of Ringling Bros. Clown College, and founder of the award-winning international company Circus Smirkus (www.smirkus.org).

Rob’s awards include Copenhagen’s Gold Clown; the Bessie Award; Best Director Prize at the former Soviet Union’s International Festival on the Black Sea; the Lund Family Center’s “It Takes A Village Award”;  the Vermont Arts Council Award of Merit, and the 2008 Governor’s Award for Excellence, Vermont’s highest honor in the arts.  Rob lives in central Vermont.

To learn more about Rob Mermin, click here.

Thank you Tobin Anderson for your help.

And here’s a link to a book about Marceau written by an awesome central Vermont author, Leda Schubert!

Peter Dunning’s farm is a Vermont hill farm. It’s a hundred and thirty-six acres of forest and orchards and wet spots and steep, rocky pasture, picked over by farmers for hundreds of years. It’s the kind of place that does not lend itself to the industrial production of anything. Instead it lends itself to the production of…everything.

Peter has farmed here, mostly alone, for nearly forty years. Now he’s getting done. The animals are gone. The farm is growing up around him.

Here’s his story.

Credits

I learned of Peter Dunning from a documentary, Peter and the Farm. It’s stunning. Watch it if you can….

Music for this show by David Schulman and Quiet Life Motel

Thank you Geof Hewitt for your help with the poetry!

This show also features the last verse of a remarkable poem called Marshall Washer, by Vermont poet Hayden Carruth. Here’s the full text.

My mother used to say that everyone should waitress at least once.

So I did. And I failed.

In this program, I talk with some of the finest waitstaff in central Vermont about life in the business of serving your food.

Appreciation:

Thanks to Jay at Sarducci’s and Brian at the Wayside Diner for lining up interviews in these two fine establishments. Additional interviews with Josh Larkin and Jodi DeGuzman.

Mind Windows is a public radio program that gives your mind a chance to open its windows. Open them and then…see what happens!

Our guest today is Morgantha Prentiss, a director with New York’s off Broadway Lynx Throttle Theatre. Last year, she co-created and directed the musical, Lambs and Order, in which actors re-create the classic police procedural but as a musical, and with a cast wearing paper-mache lamb masks. The musical was a hit. It was extended several times, and transferred to New York’s Public Theater where it got was nominated for an OBIE for Best New Musical.

Credits

Mind Windows is written by Sarah Miller. It might become its own podcast but for now it will make periodic appearances on Rumble Strip, and I have no doubt it will open your mind. The part of Morgantha was read by my friend Kate Gleason, an actor and director who lives in Denver Colorado with her dog Emerson. Sarah Miller is a writer who lives in Nevada City California. She has a dog called Merle. Recording studio and technical support by Ms. Tara Falk with the help of her dogs, Trout and Kate.

The music for this show was purchased from a stock music house. It’s called Starlit Landscape.

A few weeks ago I got a call from my friend Susan Randall, the private investigator you might remember from previous shows. She said that ‘T.O.’–a former client in a federal public defender case–had just been released from prison seven days before, after serving a six year bid. He was trying to figure out what to do next and also clearly trying to figure out how to manage the world outside prison. Where people are just walking around.  Susan said she and T.O. were having lunch and she asked me to join them. After lunch, T.O. and I drove down to the waterfront in Burlington to talk in my car.

I wanted to try to understand what it’s like to be seven days out of jail, with no housing, no money, and no family. I wanted to know what it’s like to adjust to freedom after years of confinement.

Here’s what he said.

The first time I learned of Amelia Meath was in an email exchange. She’d written me a nice note about Rumble Strip and at the end she wrote–in rather an understated way–‘P.S. I’m in a band. It’s called Sylvan Esso.’ And because I’m old, I’d never heard of Sylvan Esso.

So I looked her up online and I spent the rest of that night listening to every version of every Sylvan Esso song I could find, really loud and over and over. If there had been an album cover, I would have been clutching it to my breast.

Ever since their first single in 2013, Sylvan Esso has gotten famous pretty fast, and they tour all over he world. Last month they played in Burlington, and I spent a rainy day talking with Amelia and Nick in their tour bus before the show. We talked about their music, touring, and the complexities of success. And there’s a lot of music in the show.

It’s like a musical.

Links

For links to their albums, tour schedule, and all various and sundry, visit sylvanesso.com

It’s been some time since we’ve heard reports from the police about criminal activity here in Vermont. And I’m sorry to say that so far this summer, it’s been…busy. There’s pretzel-related violence and lawnmower theft. And more trouble at Dunkin’ Donuts.

Here’s your summer report from Vermont police, reported by Scott Carrier, producer of Home of the Brave.

Last month, Attorney General Jeff Sessions sent a memo to all federal prosecutors, with new directives for charging and sentencing in criminal cases. He’s directed federal prosecutors to charge defendants with the most severe penalties possible and pursue mandatory minimum sentences where they’re available. We’re headed back into the war on drugs from the 80s and 90s…a war that did not end drug use or make anyone safer. Instead it ripped apart families, packed American prisons and resulted in long sentences for a lot of non violent drug offenders. Everyone seemed to agree that it was a disaster. Hell, even the Koch brothers agreed.  During the Obama administration, there was bipartisan support for sentencing reform. And for the first time in decades, federal inmate numbers were down, and the Justice Dept made plans to stop sending inmates to private prisons.

But last month, Sessions decided to relaunch the war on drugs.

This is a show about a new dawn, a new day…crime and punishment in the Trump era.

Credits

This show is produced in collaboration with Seven Days. Click here for Mark Davis’ article on Jeff Sessions’ new charging directives.

Dan Sedon, Mark Kaplan, and Lisa Shelkrot are some of the smartest, most accomplished attorneys in Vermont. If ever you’re in trouble, I highly recommend calling one of them. You will be in excellent hands. For more information on each of them, click on their names below.

Dan Sedon, Esq., Sedon and Ericson, P.C., Chelsea, Vermont

Lisa Shelkrot, Esq., Langrock Sperry & Wool, Burlington, Vermont

Mark Kaplan, Esq., Kaplan and Kaplan, Burlington, Vermont

Music for this show is from Vermont musicians Peter Cressy, Brian Clark, and Mike Donofrio

Many thanks to Susan Randall, Mark Davis and former U.S. Attorney Charles Tetzlaff for their help on this show.

It’s spring in Vermont, and it’s been a full year since we heard from my friend Leland. When we left him last year, he was just about to graduate from Calais elementary school and move up to the big union middle school.

Leland is my neighbor. And this will be my third year talking with him on tape…about what he’s doing, and what he’s thinking about. He talks about revolutionary war reenactments and friend groups and grief… he takes me around and shows me all the places I forgot about in the thirty years since I was thirteen.

This year we decided to meet down in the valley between our two houses. We crouched in a stand of dead reeds by Pekin Brook, which runs through our town…and Leland gave me some highlights from his year.

The music for this show is by Vermont musicians Brian Clark, Mike Donofrio and Peter Cressy, and was recorded in my living room. I feel so lucky to have such talented and awesome friends.

To hear the other Leland shows, look below for links…!

The Eventide Singers are a volunteer hospice choir based in Greenfield, Massachusetts. They aim to comfort people who are ill, homebound, or actively dying. There are a number of these groups of bedside singers in Vermont and all over the world. They sing to be of service to people who are straddling the edges of life and death, or who are lonely and need a little light. They sing to comfort the caregivers and give them a little break from all they must attend to. They are intimate strangers providing a unique service–temporarily healing the weary through song.

We Are Sending You Light is produced by  Sara Brooke Curtis.

Thanks and Links

For more of Sara’s work, click HERE.

Sarah wishes to thank Barbara Buschner, Alexa Berton, Judith Williams, Joe Toritto, Loren Kramer, Walt Cudnohufsky, Sandra Platt, and Kelsey O’Brien. Thanks also to the Farren Care Center and Poet Seat Nursing Home.

Sara is a fellow member of The Heard, a collective of awesome independent podcast producers around the country.

Robert Ford served as the last U.S. Ambassador to Syria. He arrived in the country right before the protests began there in 2011 and he was witness to the beginnings of the civil war. In 2012 he was pulled out over security concerns, but he continued to work on the crisis in Syria back in DC until 2014, when he left the Foreign Service. Robert Ford now lives with his wife Alison in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont, which is about as far from the Middle East as you can get. We met in his living room on a rainy day last week, right after the chemical attack in Syria and right before Trump’s military response. We talked about his personal experience in Syria and the role of diplomacy in the Middle East.

Kudos

Delicious Ingredients: The Best Podcasts for April 15-21, 2017

This is a show about how the charitable food system works and how it’s not working.

The topic of hunger is not very exciting. Stories about problems that have always been problems are generally not very exciting. And since there’s enough food to feed everyone in this country ten times over, hunger is obviously a systems problem. So I think I’ve figured it would get solved any day now. By systems people.

But it’s not getting solved. In fact the lines at food shelves are getting longer while the volunteers running the food pantries are getting older. All over the country, food shelves and food banks are struggling to keep up with growing numbers of people who need them. In 2014, according to the USDA, 14% of all US households were food insecure. And if the federal government makes more cuts to food programs, that number will certainly grow.

So I made a show about it. And and as it turned out, the people I talked with for this story were not boring. They’re tired, but they’re not boring. You’ll hear from Ernie LaRock and Marj Taylor of the Swanton Food Shelf. You’ll hear from Lisa Pitcher, who manages Our Place, the community meal site down in Bellows Falls. And you’ll hear from Judy Stermer, formerly of the Vermont Foodbank, the largest supplier to food shelves and meal sites around the state.

Credits

The music for this show is by Vermont musicians Brian Clark and Mike Donofrio

The picture for this show is from the Heavenly Food Pantry in Essex Junction, Vermont

In the concrete jungle, it all starts out innocently enough: especially if you live in a high-rise.

It was a blustery Tuesday morning, when two pigeons, named Cody and Megan, were house hunting on the balcony of my apartment.

As you’d expect, they put in an offer.

Beyond the holiday turkey or roast chicken here and there, I wasn’t fond of birds.  When Cody and Megan appeared, I shooed them away, closed the balcony door and left for work.

When I came home, I was in for a surprise. Cody was dancing on the railing and Megan was huddled in a shabby nest.

Megan had laid some eggs.  I wanted the birds to leave. I had no idea how difficult this would be.  It was war.

So off to war I went.

Credits

The Wildlife was written and produced by Peter McHugh and Clive Desmond for Pod Planet, a podcast that is so damn good. Here is a logo, which is also a fancy link:

Additional Credits: Lisa Dalbello as City Animal Control Lady, Carter Hayden as Carlo the Civil Servant and Ali Rojas.

Producer Biographies

Pod Planet is written and produced by chronic multi-media experimenters, Peter McHugh and Clive Desmond. It’s the first podcast created by the international team, both of whom have worked across a wide variety of media formats.

Clive Desmond, who has lived in Toronto and New York, also serves as the narrator for Pod Planet. He has produced audio books for Harper Collins Digital, including Bruce McCall’s “Thin Ice”, and the best-selling “Pinkerton Files” by author Bruce Luchuk.

He’s also written and produced numerous syndicated radio documentaries on popular music and is a presently an on-air contributor to Canada’s top-rated talk/news radio show on CFRB in Toronto.

 Peter McHugh, having lived and worked in Chicago, Toronto, Amsterdam, Los Angeles and, now, Minneapolis, has been acclaimed in a wide variety of media formats, as well. Along the way, he’s produced an RIAA-certified, multi-platinum boxed set for Eric Clapton, that also yielded a Grammy-finalist song. Sadly, the song did not win.

Other projects he’s worked on are display in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and Le Musée de la Publicité at the Louvre in Paris (France, not Texas.)

He also created the social media-driven, public activism effort, “Book Burning Party”. As a result, the closing of an award-winning library was saved from the clutches of anti-tax activists. The work drew international media acclaim, and was nationally recognized by the American Library Association.

Ed Cashman spent twenty-five years on the bench, presiding over drunk driving cases and murders and everything in between. After a while, he started to question whether the American criminal justice system was actually achieving justice. The kinds of sentences that the public demanded and that lawyers accepted often felt more like vengeance than fairness. Judge Cashman tried to give defendants—even those charged with heinous of crimes—a chance to redeem themselves. It was a philosophy that some people didn’t understand. And Cashman eventually paid a terrible price for it.

Life Sentence: Eleven Years After Being Tried in the Court of Public Opinion, Former Judge Ed Cashman Defends Himself

By Mark Davis

The beautiful photo of Judge Cashman is by Matthew Thorsen of Seven Days.

The music for this show was made by Vermont musicians Brian Clark and Mike Donofrio and Peter Cressy.

For the last four and a half years, Victor’s been working on dairy farms in the Northeast. Like 11 million other people in this country, he’s undocumented. I’m embarrassed to say that I’ve always assumed I knew this story already…like it was some kind of composite story of the ‘Mexican migrant farm worker experience’. The worst part is, I didn’t even know I was assuming this. I guess I didn’t really have to think about it. The story didn’t have a lot to do with me.

But last week President Trump started making good on his promises to ramp up deportations of undocumented people in this country–people who pay 12 billion dollars in US taxes every year–but don’t have US documents.

Victor’s a friend of a friend of mine, and I won’t say where he works but these friends of friends are my neighbors, and yours. My friend, we’ll call her ‘T’, agreed to do some translating, along with her brand new baby. We visited Victor at his apartment on the dairy farm where he works. This is his story.

Credits

The music for this show was made by the amazing Amelia Meath, and her band Sylvan Esso. Thank you so much Amelia for humming in your bathroom, your car and on the street. Her other group is a trio of women called Mountain Man. Music that will make your hair stand up.

I want to thank all the excellent farm workers I met in making this show. And thanks so much to A and A, and T for her wonderful presence and a memorable drive.

When Marlo Mack’s son was three and just learning to talk, he informed his mother that he was not a boy. He said that something had gone wrong in her tummy that made him come out as a boy instead of a girl.

Today, a guest show from two of my favorite podcasts…

Marlo Mack’s podcast, How to Be a Girl, is a riveting, funny, sometimes heartbreaking account of her life raising a transgender daughter. It has some of the best interviewing with a child I’ve ever heard. It’s also one of the most interesting chronicles of parenting I’ve heard. And the show offers listeners an intimate introduction to what it means to be transgender.

Marlo Mack is not her real name. She has decided to keep their identities secret until her daughter is old enough to decide if she wants to use their real names.

This episode was re-edited and re-mixed by Jeff Emtman, for another podcast called Here Be Monsters, from KCRW. He had help from Bethany Denton and Nick White. Here Be Monsters is a show that explores our fears and all that’s unknown. It’s always surprising and always beautifully made and what I love most is that they’re not afraid to take risks–with their subjects, their format and their exquisite editing.

This show is just two great things that go great together.

The music for the show is by The Black Spot.

It’s really dark here in Vermont this time of year. And every year, by the third week in January, I feel like I’m seeing everything through the wrong end of a telescope. A dirty telescope. I stop wanting to answer the phone. I have a hard time picking out a cereal at the store. Most mornings it just seems easier to wear what I wore to bed.

After Trump’s first week in office, I feel worse than most years. And actually the whole world seems on edge. It seems like no one can decide how to help or what to do. Or how much to look or look away.

Dunkin’ Donuts and the library are the last two public places in most towns around here where everyone’s welcome and no one wonders how long you’ll be there. For about a dollar you can stay at Dunkin’ Donuts as long as you want. I went there to talk with people. Not about Trump necessarily. But about how their lives are going, and whether they fit into the famous middle class we keep hearing so much about. Also I went there because in January in Vermont, it’s good to sit in a bright place with a cup of coffee and talk with strangers.

Credits and Thanks
My thanks to John Dillon and Scott Carrier. The music in the end of this show is by Vermont musician Peter Cressy.

Steve Sheinkin is an award-winning writer of  stories for kids about American history. When he started out, he was a writer of boring textbooks for kids about American history. When he started, he was young and ambitious and he wanted to bring new energy to textbook writing, to mine American history for fresh new details and anecdotes that could capture the interest of fifth graders…!

This is an interview about how he failed.

And he shares stories about the awful push and pull of priorities for teaching our origin stories to American children.

It’s also a story about Benedict Arnold’s leg.

Credits

Steve thinking about history.

Steve Sheinkin is an award-winning author of history books for young adults. You can visit him at http://stevesheinkin.com

Thanks to MT Anderson for introducing me to Steve, and helping me with this show.

Music and sounds for this show were found on freesound.org

Articles

How Texas Inflicts Bad Textbooks on Us, New York Review of Books, 2012

Texas Textbook Massacre, Huffington Post, 2010

Texans on Review Panel Push for Creationism in Science Textbooks, Huffington Post, 2013

Ho ho ho! It’s time again for the annual seasonal update from the Keen family!

In certain American subcultures, there’s a long holiday tradition of sending out end-of-year family update letters to far-flung relatives, friends and acquaintances. They can be wonderful. They can also be spectacularly bizarre. Could it be that this year the tradition comes to an end? Here is the Keen family report….

The Season Update is written by Tal McThenia. Tal is a writer of books and articles and screenplays. To learn more about Tal, you can visit his website:  talmcthenia.com.

As some of you may remember, last year I did a pledge drive. It was called the Shwag Pledge Drive. I gave away a number of prizes to extremely lucky pledgers. There was a pair of boiled wool mittens that my sister made, a box of kindling that my boyfriend cut up, a VPR pledge drive mug, and one of the prizes was going to be an interview with me in my car in the Dunkin’ Donuts parking lot in Montpelier, Vermont. Nicholas won the interview, but he lives in London. So we did the interview by Skype. Nicholas and his wife, Sarah, were just about to have a baby when we spoke, they were looking for the baby trend expedition jogger stroller online for their baby. So today’s show is a CHRISTMAS MIRACLE.

Here is a few minutes from our conversation…the speculations and special anxieties that come with the long wait for a brand new person to arrive.

Thanks to producer Mary Wesley for her remarkable production work on this show!

“That’s the thing about lentils, if they were going to soften, they would have already fucking softened. Honestly, you’d be better off waiting for someone who didn’t find you remotely attractive to fall in love with you.”

This show is from an article by writer Sarah Miller, and it appeared in FoodandWine.com. The title is self explanatory. Welcome.

Sarah Miller lives in Nevada City, California. She’s the author of Inside the mind of Gideon Rayburn and The Other Girl. She also has a series called the Nevada City Wine Diaries, in which she does not use the word ‘buttery’ and sometimes only tangentially writes about wine. Here is a link to the full lentils essay in foodandwine.com.

The music for this show is made by David Schulman of Quiet Life Motel, and is from his new album, Anhinga.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone. Here is hunter Barry Forbes talking about turkey hunting again. I could listen to Barry Forbes talk about turkey hunting all day, but in this case he only talks about it for about three and a half minutes. Welcome.

Credits

I made that show with tape from the Vermont Folklife Center.

 

Charlie Hunter is a plein air painter, which is a fancy way of saying he paints outside. His paintings of Vermont are stark and evocative and mostly the color of mud (Charlie calls it murk, which I think is a fancy way of saying mud). But his paintings capture the light and the feeling of this place in a way that’s totally uncanny and unique. He has a special love for painting trains and garages and industrial places in decline, and his hometown of Bellows Falls is his favorite subject. It’s an old mill town where the industry pretty much atomized years ago. And like a lot of poor towns that are out of the sight line of tourists, it specializes in Section 8 housing and low income assisted living. Bellows Falls is not a tourist destination. And because it’s not right off the interstate, it sort of feels like an outpost. But outposts are fun. People’s plot lines mix up in interesting ways, and at outposts, people know and consort with other people who are not exactly like them. It really feels like are are somewhere when you’re in Bellows Falls. I checked out a kiosk in the middle of town and there was an event called Swill, Swine and Swing. Which sounds pretty awesome.

I talked with Charlie about how he makes paintings, or actually more about what he thinks about making paintings. We also drove around town and visited places he likes to paint, in a town that he loves.

Credits and Links

Charlie’s website

Information about Charlie’s Roots on the Rails, where awesome musicians and audiences ride around on trains and enjoy great music.

Music by Brian Clark

Thank you Mark Bushnell and Erica Housekeeper for introducing me to Charlie.

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A couple weeks ago my son and I volunteered at the soccer Special Olympics in Northfield, VT. The athletes came from all over the state and the teams were all ages, and both sexes. So there were fifty-five year old women teaming up with thirteen year old boys and seventeen year old girls and you’ve never seen so much team spirit or felt such intense excitement. About all of it. Everything. The games, the cheering, the lunch…it was like the feeling of Christmas and birthdays and Chariots of Fire at all once. All day long.

This show is a sample of that day.

Welcome!

Credits and Stuff

Thanks to Liza Reed at Special Olympics Vermont for her help, and photographer Heather Glenn for letting me use her images on my website.

If you’ve never participated in the Special Olympics or volunteered at an event, I encourage you to check it out. It’s serious fun. Go here to search for events in your area.

Today, an interview with songwriter and Grammy winning record producer Jim Rooney. He and his wife Carol live in an old farmhouse in Sharon, Vermont, but Jim is still back and forth to Nashville, where he spent thirty years playing music, writing songs, and producing some of my all time favorite records with artists like John Prine, Nanci Griffith, Iris Dement, and Townes Van Zandt. Record producers are the people responsible for getting great performances from singers and session musicians in the weird, blank atmosphere of a recording studio. I’ve always wondered how they do that. I also wonder how they know when a record is ‘cooked’…and when to let it go.

I sat with Jim at his kitchen table and we talked about all these things. And more. Welcome.

Credits and Links

Link to Jim’s blog, his books and his music is here.

Additional music for this show by Vermont musician, Brian Clark

 

 

More and more Vermonters can’t afford groceries by the end of the month. The paycheck isn’t enough. The food stamps won’t stretch. And they’re looking to community meals and food shelves for regular help. The trouble is, food shelves weren’t designed to provide sustainable food. They were set up for emergencies. For fires, for floods. But every day, an army of volunteers–mostly women between the ages of 55 and 70–hustle food from area stores and local farmers and the Vermont Foodbank….to feed people.

This is a show about what it feels like when you don’t have enough to eat.

“The fields were fruitful, and starving men moved on the roads.”
― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

Interview with Food Shelf Director Lisa Pitcher

Here is an unedited interview with Lisa Pitcher, the awesome Executive Director of Our Place, a community drop-in center in Bellows Falls, Vermont. She talks about the charitable food system in Vermont…how it works, and how it’s not working.

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Credits

Music for this show was made by the excellent Mike Donofrio

Thanks to Lisa Pitcher, Mark Davis, Judy Stermer, Tobin and Peter, Pam Smart, Sharon Fannon, Robin Bradley, Evie Lovett, and the great people who put on Monday lunches at the Unitarian Church in Montpelier, VT.

Too Much Month at the End of the Money is a country western song by Marty Stuart.

I met Jubal Durivage through my boyfriend, Gordon. Gordon and his two partners, Robby and Hilton, own a small hydroelectric plant way up near the Canadian border. It was pretty rundown when they bought it, and over the years they’ve hired a lot of people to work on it, mostly from the Northeast Kingdom. Crane operators, engineers, and Jubal Durivage, one of the few certified bridge welders in Vermont. I heard a lot about Jubal before I met him from Gordon and Robby. They respect his work and the care he takes in his work. So with a little bit of arm twisting, Jubal agreed to talk with me at his house in Eden, Vermont.

In this show, Jubal talks about an important teacher in his life as a welder, and mostly he talks about hunting–one of the great passions of his life. But in my mind this show isn’t about hunting or welding, and I can’t name what it is exactly. Maybe you can tell me.

Welcome.

Last summer I interviewed my friend Susan Randall, a private investigator. Susan trained me as an investigator, and we’ve spent whole days driving around the state of Vermont, working on cases and talking. We never run out of things to talk about. So I figured it was time to do another show with her. In this conversation, we talked about the criminal justice system more generally than before, and we ended up talking a lot about parenting…single parenting in particular. Come drive around with us.

If you haven’t heard the other interview with Susan, you might want start there. It’s called VT Private Eye.

Here is a picture of Susan and my boy Henry and her girl Lena, a zillion years ago.

It’s hot here in central Vermont, and there’s a whole lot of crime going down. Here’s a sampling of calls to the police, as reported in the Times Argus, the Stowe Reporter, and the Caledonian.

Read by Scott Carrier, producer of my favorite podcast, Home of the Brave.

Music from Joey Truman, a Brooklyn-based writer and musician. His two recent books, Killing the Math and Postal Child, are available from Whiskey Tit Press. His band is called Um, and they rock.

This is a conversation with Bread and Puppet founder and director, Peter Schumann…a conversation in which I ask him over and over again to answer questions that don’t really have answers, about what makes a great performance. And about what is a great performance…

Peter Schumann is a driven, prolific artist who makes huge outdoor theater performances with giant paintings and puppets and sculptures. There is music. There are people making animal sounds. Everything seems to be made of paper mache, twigs, twine and cardboard. The theater company lives in an old farmhouse in Glover, Vermont, when it’s not performing around the country and the world. And what Peter Schumann makes isn’t always good, but it’s always great.  There’s a wild current that runs through all that he does, and it all seems to be alive long after he’s done with it. ((If you haven’t been to the museum, housed in a huge barn behind the house in Glover….I would highly recommend it…))

Bread and Puppet is one of the oldest, nonprofit, self-supporting theatrical companies in the country. To learn more about the company and its strange and illustrious history, I recommend going HERE to read more.

Please leave a comment or a story at the bottom of this page! It’s always good to hear from you….!

Thanks and Other Things and Pictures

The music for this show is Peter on the fiddle, and his grandson, Ira Karp, on the drums. Pictures from their epic session below. Also, the show features Sinfonia number 15 in B Minor,  from the 1955 Goldberg Variations, performed by Glenn Gould.

Thanks to Clare Dolan, Jennifer Miller, Larry Massett, Scott Carrier and Marc Estrin for their help on this show. And to Elka Schumann for her patience.

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The kids of Randolph, Vermont describe their neighborhood as a place with three purple houses. They tell me there’s a shortcut through the woods down to Dunkin’ Donuts, and they say it’s pretty close to three graveyards. The kids run in twos and threes and sometimes in one big pack for a game of hide and seek tag.

I spent an afternoon talking with them and following them around. This show is a little taste of that day. It’s a postcard from childhood, a place we remember but can’t visit anymore.

Thanks
Thanks so much to Kelly Green for introducing me to the kids and letting us camp out upstairs for an entire afternoon. Thanks also to Tally Abecassis, Mike Donofrio, John Schak and Larry Massett.

Rob Mermin and Bill Morancy lived in neighboring apartments in Montpelier, Vermont. They were best friends.  And when Bill was diagnosed with terminal cancer, he asked his best friend to help him die.

In 2013, Vermont passed the The Patient Choice and Control at End of Life Act, or Act 39…our version of Death with Dignity. The legislation allows eligible Vermonters with terminal diseases the option to be prescribed medication that will hasten the end of their life. In 2015, Bill elected to use Act 39 to end his life, and he asked Rob to help him. This is a story primarily about their friendship–and the months, days and moments leading up to Bill’s death.

To learn more about Rob Mermin and his illustrious career as a mime and the founder of Circus Smirkus, visit here.

The music for this show was made by Vermont musicians Brian Clark and Mike Donofrio. And you heard from the original film soundtracks of South Pacific and Carousel, both by Rodgers and Hammerstein. The piano licks in this show were made by Vermont pianist Marie Helene Belanger

Kudos for Show

The 2019 movie, Paddleton,  from the Duplass Brothers, was based on this episode and story.

Notable podcast, AV Club, June 13, 2016, for Last Chapter

Audible Feast, June 11-17, 2016

Rob Mermin

Last winter I made a show about working for the Department of Children and Families and I’d promised to make a show about what it’s like to be a parent whose had to work with this state agency, which is responsible for the safety of Vermont children. It’s no secret that DCF is currently understaffed and overworked. The opiate epidemic is one major factor in the growing number of kids taken into temporary custody by the state, and the growing number of TPR’S, or terminations of parental rights.

This show offers a close look at what it’s like to be a parent inside the DCF system. To have your choices, your lifestyle, your living circumstances under the microscope of a state agency that’s capable of taking away your children.

DCF is an intensely private agency, and there’s no way to corroborate the details of these cases. The truth about these cases is always elusive and complicated. And I’m not looking for good guys or bad guys here.

This is a show about six parents with six very different stories from all over the state of Vermont.

There is a transcript below, thanks to Jennifer Jorgenson at UVM!!

Credit and Gratitude

Music by Marie Helene Belanger and Isha Love.

My thanks to all the parents who shared their stories with me by phone, email, and in person. Thanks to all the DCF caseworkers who have spoken with me over these months. Thanks to Mark Johnson, Bess O’Brien, Elsa Ingpen, Michael Chorney, Diane Zeigler, Mark Davis, Dillon Burns, the Aldrich Public Library and the Milton Public Library.

Show Reviews:

Kudos from 7 on 7 for 5/28/2016

SHOW TRANSCRIPT

Speaker 1: Having to prove to DCF that you are good enough to be a parent is definitely a very challenging thing.

Erica Heilman: I’m Erica Heilman. This is Rumble Strip, Vermont. Last winter, I made a show about people who work for the Department of Children and Families and I promised to make a show about what it’s like to be a parent [00:00:30] who’s had to work with this state agency, which is responsible for the safety of Vermont children. It’s no secret that DCF is currently understaffed and overworked. The opioid epidemic is one major factor in the growing number of kids taken into temporary custody by the state and the growing number of TPRs or terminations of parental rights. Addiction, multi-generational abuse, lack of education problems with housing, and transportation, and maybe the mother of all problems, [00:01:00] poverty. If you ask any DCF case worker, they’ll tell you the source of the problems is way upstream from where they work and this isn’t a show that’s going to solve any of those problems.

What this show does do, is give you a very close look at what it’s like to be on the wrong side of DCF as a parent, to have your choices, your life of style, your living circumstances under the microscope of a state agency, that’s capable of taking away your children. [00:01:30] DCF is an intensely private agency and there’s no way to corroborate the details of these cases. The truth about these cases is always elusive and always complicated and I’m not looking for good guys or bad guys here. This is a show about six parents with six very different stories from all over the State of Vermont. Fair warning, there’s graphic language and descriptions of violence in this show. Welcome.

Speaker 3: My memories of parenting [00:02:00] Brianna was that, “I’m going to be there for you. I’m going to talk to you. I have an education, so I will be able to teach you things.” Whereas compared to my mother, who was always working and then having a father who liked girls, I’m just going to say. They were both alcoholics, came from a family of alcoholics. Very uneducated, did not graduate high school either one of them. So [00:02:30] my thought was I was not going to put her in that situation, it was going to be, I was going to be the mom that I didn’t have or we’ll have the family that I was supposed to have.

Erica Heilman:What did your home look like? Where? What [crosstalk 00:02:45]-

Speaker 3:It was look like where, what I lived in a trailer park across from what used to be Jennifer’s restaurant. There was a little tiny trailer park there, trailer was very nice, very well maintained and I had one of the very last trailers in the park. So behind [00:03:00] the trailer was a really cute clothes line for clothes to hang out clothes, because it did come with a washer and the previous tenants had left a swing set there and there was a big, large field behind it.

I think she was probably a or old when she knew all of her ABCs, probably at a year and a half was when she was starting to learn Spanish, because we would watch Nickelodeon Dora The Explorer. So she [00:03:30] could say five or six colors in Spanish and count to 10 in Spanish. And I knew it was because of me being there with her and being present with her, not putting her off a playpen, like I used to with my other kids and go outside and smoke pot with my friends. But I started using again. I thought I am a much better parent than what I was the first time around. And I’m like, “So now I know what I can’t do,” and basically it came into me just using when she was sleeping is what [00:04:00] I thought and how I tried to justify it, “I’m only doing it when she’s sleeping.” And then of course addiction, it progresses.

It was her birthday. I wanted to go. I was planning on having a part of the next day for her. So I had brought her to the neighbor’s house where I got my drugs and left her with them. I borrowed their car and I went to the store to buy her birthday stuff. And when I’d come back, she was in this [inaudible 00:04:28] of the trailer and [00:04:30] Brianna had a little baggy in her hand, which I knew was the corner from a cocaine bag, what they sold. So I took her home. It wasn’t into till the next day when they all came over for the party and we had the kids playing in the other room, windows were open and we were smoking drugs and we thought that that was okay. That later on that afternoon, evening she began to get sick, could barely stay awake.

So I brought her to the emergency room and [00:05:00] she tested positive for her cocaine. I knew, I said, “Yeah. It’s bad. I said, “I’m not going to get her back.” I was in a room talking with them, I want to say it was a state trooper. So Brianna was in her room and they said, “Yeah. We’re going to have a foster family come.” So we have that conversation and I go into the room and Brianna was already gone, so I did not get to see her. [00:05:30] Yeah. That was awful to me. So it’s hard.

Speaker 1: Well, when I got pregnant, I found out the night before my high school graduation, it was totally not planned at all. It was a difficult pregnancy. I gained a lot of weight and had a lot of health problems. Everything was good for a little while and then the domestic [00:06:00] happened. It started, I think the week before I had my first child. I was 39 weeks pregnant and my boyfriend at the time called me a fat whore, pushed me down on the bed. That was when it started. And then, we ended up having a child together years later down the road and that is what [00:06:30] now resulted in my DCF case.

Definitely one of the hardest parts of a domestic is the actual act of leaving the domestic. There’s control over what you’re doing, who you’re with, who you’re talking to, where you’ve been, how long you’ve been gone, there can be control issues over money and finances. When a child is involved, it’s not your safety, it’s [00:07:00] your children’s safety. When you leave, a lot of times you leave with none of your belongings, you pretty much escape whenever you feel you have a safe time to get out and then having to deal with DCF after getting up the courage to leave the abusive situation. In a lot of cases, DCF doesn’t understand what it does to [00:07:30] a mother or a parent if they leave a domestic that takes a lot out of them and then to take their child, the whole reason of why they left was to protect the child that they no longer can protect.

Speaker 4: They end up showing up at my door. My living situation wasn’t appropriate, which I knew ahead of time anyways. [00:08:00] But we were living in the camper because the housing that we had ended up being condemned, so we had to move and we had really nowhere to go and it was towards the winter time and whatnot, so we technically shouldn’t have been in the camper with two children. So then they showed up, they said that there was allegations of abuse towards my children. And when they looked into it, it came to be the children’s father. They found out that their father was unsafe [00:08:30] to be around them because he was an alcoholic and abusive towards me verbally and physically, so then they helped me. Basically, they gave me an ultimatum to either lose my children or move with my children.

And I ended up finding housing in Wilder and for me and my children and then I found out in 2009, that I was pregnant again. So then, I ended up with three children and I had their father [00:09:00] move back in with me through the housing unit that I was in and DCF was still involved.

Erica Heilman: Same father for all three?

Speaker 4:Yes. Same father for all four, actually. But we were good for a little while, even though DCF was involved, my daughter then was born in 2011 and I actually filed for a divorce in 2012 and kicked him out. So it took a while, but I ended up divorcing him and whatnot because I mean, beforehand [00:09:30] DCF was telling me, “Oh, you can’t get married. You shouldn’t marry him. You should separate from him. He shouldn’t be around the kids. He’s not safe, he’s not fit.” And it felt like I was being told how to live my life and they weren’t living my life, so that’s why I pretty much was going against them because it just didn’t feel right.

But I understand now because I’ve gone through some counseling with my children and I’ve also had testing done on one of my children [00:10:00] and it opened my eyes the most, because it was based on children with abusive homes and whatnot to see where their brain actually lies and growth. And a lot of stuff that I was doing wrong really affected one of my children and his brain growth, so he’s having a lot of difficulties and behavior issues due to that. He is showing through a violent behaviors, he’s showing through lack [00:10:30] of sleeping, so there’s a lot of different areas that are not where he should be as far as his age.

Erica Heilman: Is that something you feel responsible for?

Speaker 4:Some of it, yes, it does follow me because I didn’t see the wrongs that were occurring in that time.

Speaker 5: I got pregnant very young. I had my kids at 18, so I was young to have children of my own at that age. And [00:11:00] then when my son was 3-months-old, I started hanging out with friends and that’s where my addiction started. I think I was just trying to escape what had gone on between the father of my children and I, and he had ended up going to jail for a domestic on me when I was pregnant with my son. And when the dad got out of jail, I ended up going back. We got back together. No one knew outside of my mom that I had a problem, [00:11:30] but it got to a point that when their father came back from jail, she came over to the house and he had hit me before she had come in, my nose wasn’t broken, but he had hit me in the nose, so I had had my son in my arms and I was hurt, I was injured and she could tell and she had had enough.

And so she took him home and called DCF at that point. [00:12:00] I was very angry. I was so pissed. I drove over to her house and tried to get in. I knew what was coming, but you try to not have that happen and the cops met me when I got there and said, “You need to go to rehab, you need to do something because he’s not coming back.” And [00:12:30] my addiction went from bad to 10 times worse at that point. I had nothing. I felt like I had lost the purpose for getting up. So you go and there’s three judges. You’ve got the state’s attorney, you’ve got DCF, you’ve got a guardian ad litem and my mom and they talk about what brought you in. You’re listening to this woman who [00:13:00] you’ve never met, explain how you’re a drug addict and you can’t care for your child and that there needs to be custody taken. And it’s out of your control, you have no control at this point.

You met your attorney for the first time five minutes ago. He has no idea what’s going on and all you can do is sit and listen, I knew I had a drug problem and it wasn’t affecting my son, that’s how I looked at it because I was still doing what I needed to do to take care of my son. [00:13:30] Not understanding at the time that being abused in front of my child was neglectful, that’s something that you see later on. So the court hearing happened, my mom got temporary guardianship of him at that point and I then met the case worker.

Speaker 6:  DCF has been involved in our life two times and while in both cases, the claims were found not to be [00:14:00] true. That process of having the claims found to be untrue is something that I get the impression and so [inaudible 00:14:07], but I get the impression happens much quicker for certain kinds of families. And in our case, these things were very drawn out and very horrible. I don’t know if there’s a better word, but in public when you’re talking about it with friends or family, it’s your very indignant about it and you know, “Oh my gosh, how could they treat us this way? Or, or think this about us as parents,” but in the moment [00:14:30] when you’re in it, it’s really fucking scary.

This is an agency that can physically take my children away from on me. And that is you’re acting like you’re indignant, but really you’re facing losing the most important thing in your entire universe. And between us as a couple, it was really stressful, but I don’t think either of us really wanted to reveal our fear to the other one because we’re trying to be strong for each other, so that’s just an emotion that I think we each [00:15:00] carried separately knowing the other one had it through the whole thing, just being scared and really sad, really sad that this is happening, that there is this threat, this possibility looming out there.

The moment that I’m most ashamed of as a mother is I remember being on the phone with the case worker when she was needing to get me to agree to the safety plan. [00:15:30] For them, while an investigation is open, they have to have a safety plan in place and I just remember trying to say to her, “Well, I don’t agree with this plan. I don’t think this plan is necessary. This is not a safety plan for my family. This isn’t what’s [inaudible 00:15:45],” because they were asking that that my husband not be alone with the children at all while the investigation was pending, which of course is not logistically feasible for any family, either, for me to have done all the daycare pickups [00:16:00] and drop offs, it just, it wouldn’t have worked for our family, but more importantly, it just, it wasn’t necessary.

And I just remember trying to be assertive and to say, “This isn’t okay. I don’t agree with this,” and saying, “Well, what are my rights? Do I have to agree to this?” And she said, “Well, if you don’t, then we have the right to remove the children from the home.” And that’s when I crumbled and let them put my name on the line and I wish I hadn’t done that. I really wish I had just said, ” [00:16:30] No.”

Speaker 7:I got the impression that they already had me pegged as the abusive stepfather. Mom doesn’t know how to choose a mate that is safe for her family, so she chose me and I’m coming in here and all I do is abuse her, beat the kids and everything else. That’s exactly lead impression I got from the intake supervisor. I felt that once again, because of my size and being in this neighborhood, [00:17:00] in this part of the country and not being of the general makeup of the population up here, that I’m just getting judged unfairly once again. I mean, I’ve been here before and it’s not a good feeling.

Erica Heilman:  Since it’s audio and not video. What is your size? Where are you from?

Speaker 7:I’m a native New Yorker. I lived and grew up in Upper West Side of Manhattan up until I was 41- [00:17:30] years-old. I’m currently 295 pounds, six foot two. Yeah. And I’m brown skinned. My mother is of German descent. My father is from Barbados, so I’m a mixed person. Yeah. I’m not the brownish skinned person on the face of earth, but I’m not the palest skinned person either, some like to call it beige.

Erica Heilman:  I call it caramel.

Speaker 7:Yeah. Caramel. Yeah. And [00:18:00] I learned during this experience, not being the biological father of these children, it’s automatically, “It’s stepdad and yeah, he could only care, but so much for these kids.” Yeah. Which is so far from the truth. But yeah, that’s the impression I got. And I do understand that they have a difficult job and they see a lot of ugly things, but it’s a tough line to walk, to not [00:18:30] come into a household expecting to see certain things that aren’t there and then writing them down on a legal document as such as if they were there. Every family’s different but to look at it as, “Okay. We know this happened now we just have to look for the evidence to point to it,” this is why a lot of people get swept up in the system that really shouldn’t be there.

Then sometimes you have some families that DCF needs to be in their life and then they miss the whole thing entirely. If I ever saw some [00:19:00] of the ugly things they may have seen, I don’t know if I would lose the ability to do that, either. I don’t know. But I think that’s being on the other side of what happened, I can tell you that’s exactly what they came into here. For instance, they tried to say the kids didn’t have access to nutritious food. That was one of the things that were written down. There’s always fruit sitting there, always, the kids are welcome to it at any time. But the case worker wrote down, “They don’t have access to nutritious food.”

Why? Because when they went through the pantries, we don’t have fruit roll ups, [00:19:30] we don’t pizza, bagel bites in the freezer and all that other stuff, we don’t have that. So it’s, you come in here looking for a certain thing and you’ll find it. You’ll find something wrong if you’re going to look hard enough.

Speaker 5: She was young. Yeah. She’s younger than me walking to my house, going to tell me what I’m going to do. Has no kids of her own because I asked and when she said, “No,” I was all over, “You’re going to come into my house and try to tell me about a situation you know nothing about and you’re younger than me. You have no [00:20:00] idea what this is like, you have no idea what I’ve been through.” She didn’t say a whole lot that first visit. I’m sure to this day, I’m sure she probably thinks about that first visit because I was awful. But if you’re going to send somebody out to somebody’s house, that’s going through abuse and addiction, the worst thing you could do is send someone that has no life experience.

I was awful to her for the year and a half that she [00:20:30] was supervising my case. I had given up. I had actually come to the conclusion that my son was going to be adopted by my mom. And as painful as that was, I knew he was going to be okay and you have to change the relationship with a child. I was able to spend time with him, with my mom, but the relationship had changed for me. It’s almost like you have to grieve a loss of [00:21:00] child to break the bond so that you can survive because you know you’re not going to be a parent anymore.

So when (beep) was going to be born, well, when I got pregnant with her, I knew there had to be a change because they were going to take her right from the hospital from me. So I on April 23rd of ’06, packed up my [00:21:30] car and left their dad, not knowing what I was doing or how I was going to do it. But I called the case worker at the time and said, “I’m done. I’m done. I need to figure this out because I don’t want to lose my daughter.”

Speaker 4:I know that every parenting style is going to be different anyways. My parenting styles [00:22:00] are from when I was growing up because that’s what I was shown, that’s what I went through. My pants were pulled down, my underwear down, I had bare hand, bare ass slaps depending on the behaviors. And then I also remember one occurrence where I said that my sister was a bitch, my mouth got slapped. That’s the way I was growing up. My parenting now, I’ve slapped them on the asses and so [00:22:30] what I was shown. And I was also told in one case, “If you kept having a nasty mouth, it was going to get washed out with soap.” So a dab was soap in your mouth, on your tongue. And then of course my second son, he was very vocal once he got his words and would speak and whatnot.

Well, they were inappropriate words, a lot of swear words, a lot of cuss words and so hot sauced, [00:23:00] just not even a raindrop full on his tongue, he would scream at you and then he would stop. And I got yelled at for doing that, the dab of hot sauce on his tongue by DCF saying it was inappropriate. It’s a food item. Yeah. It’s a little hot on the tongue. Yeah. It made him ugly at me, but it got my point across to him, but I can’t do that. [00:23:30] It’s hard for me not to do what was done to me as a kid because now it’s wrong. Nothing happened to my mother when she was doing that to me or my siblings when they got the hand on their asses and whatnot. When I was growing up, if we bit somebody we would get bitten back, so I mean, that’s how I was showed to deal with biting.

And my oldest son did bite me, so I did bite him back, [00:24:00] but not to the point where I left any kind of a mark. So I mean, that’s what I was taught when I was growing up. So therefore that’s the only discipline I knew of as far as with biting, then you have DCF step in the picture, all of a sudden and, “Oh, you’re doing this all wrong.” Here he is kicking me, slapping me, I’ve actually got him to stop swearing at me. I’m telling him to get in the chair, he’s refusing to get in the chair, how am I supposed to get him to do the time out if I can’t get him in the chair?

Erica Heilman:Well, what’s your [00:24:30] instinct?

Speaker 4: I mean, there’s times when he’s gotten me to the point where I would just want to bend him over my knee, slap his ass. But if I do that, it’s going to get reported and then I’m going to get in trouble again. What am I supposed to do? I don’t know what to do.

Speaker 1: So once DCF has been involved with you once, whether it is an assessment, or [00:25:00] an accusation, or an investigation, it’s you’re guilty until proven and innocent, you have to go and jump through hoops. Shortly after my daughter was born, we were still in the hospital and I actually had a visit from DCF, an emergency visit. So I had a 3-day-old daughter. I had DCF in my hospital room and two [00:25:30] cops stationed outside of my door at the hospital. Having to prove to people that you can handle your child is one of the hardest things ever.

One of the nurses called DCF because they said I had gotten upset with her over breastfeeding and [00:26:00] that her father had gotten upset because some poop got on his shoe, which never even happened, she was always changed in her little bassinet thing that the hospital provides you with. Because of my previous involvement with DCF, the anxiety building up to when they actually come and see you is the hardest part, having to impress so to speak someone who doesn’t know you [00:26:30] or your situation. The DCF worker who came out cleared me after my meeting saying that it wasn’t a emergency and that they didn’t need to take my daughter, but I had to follow up with DCF because it was still an assessment. So shortly after we got to leave with my daughter, I had to have a home visit with another DCF worker and then he [00:27:00] was supposed to close the case in 45 to 60 days.

My daughter is almost 3-months-old, so she’s almost 90-days-old. I have been playing phone tag with this person, they are either on vacation, they don’t return your phone calls. You have to sit and wait and wait. They say, they’re going to send you something in the mail, telling you if your case is closed or what you need to do. You sit and you wait [00:27:30] for the mail, you wait for the phone call. And I don’t think that DCF really understands how much control that puts on someone having to find out if other people think that you can handle your child.

Speaker 4:The case worker I have in regards to my second child right now, because I mean, that’s pretty much the only one she’s dealing with. [00:28:00] I can call her three different times in a day, I can’t reach her. I can call her three different times in a day for a week straight and I don’t get no calls back. Contact as far as when you want to get a hold of them is ridiculous. But if they want to get a hold of you, you better return their call within that day, otherwise, they’re going to hunt you down.

Speaker 6:When we first dealt with them, we [00:28:30] thought about getting a lawyer, but knew that realistically, that was not financially possible and went in there on our own. We felt judged, we felt vulnerable, we felt very vulnerable, we felt scared, we felt angry, we felt sad. And going into it the second time with a lawyer, which was not something, I mean, bills didn’t get paid because we hired the lawyer. I mean, it’s not like it was an easy decision, but we just felt we could not risk, we couldn’t put our family at more risk and we did. We were in the position [00:29:00] where we had the money. And when you go in with a lawyer, you feel safer.

There were three people in the room for our interviews because there was the case worker assigned to our case, but then her supervisor was also present for all of it, which I’m sure is because we had a lawyer and she was a younger, newer caseworker, so her supervisor was also there. And the supervisor and the lawyer were shooting the shit beforehand. And he’s like showing her pictures of kids and talking about where they went on vacation [00:29:30] and I’m thinking, “Well, we’re fine because look at this, they’re telling us that we may be harming our children, but obviously they’re not really telling us this, or they wouldn’t be talking about their vacations together.” And you can be well sure that, that would not have had when we went in on our own, they wouldn’t have said, “Oh, how’s the beach this summer.” No way.

Erica Heilman:When you’re in that room and you’re witness to kind of the chit chat between the DCF supervisor and your lawyer who you’ve hired and they’re talking about their kids and their vacation, was that [00:30:00] objectionable to you?

Speaker 6: No.

Erica Heilman:Or was it was comforting to you?

Speaker 6: Yes.

Erica Heilman: Interesting.

Speaker 6:Yeah. Because I’m thinking, if they have this relationship with each other, because they’re obviously, we’re trying to play like we’re middle class and here’s people who are much further beyond than that, and they see each other as peers I felt like, “Okay. That I’m sure this is going to be okay. And I think that it’s not necessarily the lawyer itself [00:30:30] as being seen in a certain light and the stories we were talking about where people have very minor and quick involvements with DCF, because something reported by a jealous neighbor or whoever, and they have to look into it, but then it’s wrapped up very quickly. I think that that maybe because people are seen in a certain way. And because of our past involvement with DCF and our history in general, we had to take [00:31:00] a big step to say, “Hey, we’re not those people, we’re these people.”

Speaker 7: The outcome with DCF is that the kids were removed from the house for approximately nine months and then it was three months until the case was finally closed, so it was almost to a year to the day. What has changed since then, I guess the couple of the kids have access to some of the mental health facilities they may need, but [00:31:30] in getting there, there was a whole lot of trauma, a whole lot of damage was done to this family that we’re still repairing with the children. And within my wife and my relationship behind this, you can’t be angry, you can’t show that you’re angry because then they will say, “Hey, you have an anger issue.” You just have to grin, bare it, and jump through everything they ask you to do and hope that at the end of the day, the kids wind up back home.

Speaker 3: [00:32:00] It was just my lawyer. She was like, “Cindy, so they’re going to push for TPR and they’re probably going to get it. I don’t think you should fight because you can’t beat DCF. And they do have all this information about you, your past, your charges and, the slips that I’d had.” But so, yeah, they’re like, “I mean, I will go to the hearing,” I said, “but I do think I would like to fight.” She’s like, “You’re not going to have a chance. You’re not, you can’t win against DCF. [00:32:30] And then you hear that and you believe it. And maybe I also believe that I wasn’t deserving to be her parent because of what had happened. And even if you would’ve got Brianna back and not come to jail, I can definitely say now that I probably would’ve gone back to using drugs.

And then, I also thought she’s probably to myself, she’s better off there. She’s got a mother and a father. [00:33:00] They’re a very good family and that’s kind of what drove my decision was what was in the best interest of her. I think it was the most unselfish thing I’d ever done in my life.

Speaker 5:So at the point that I gave birth to my daughter, we were at the point where, when I knew that they were going to be trying to take my rights away from my son. At this time, the case worker had become [00:33:30] a support system as well. She saw me doing what I needed to do and the guardian ad litem that I had had for my son, I was in contact with faithfully. And they all collectively the case worker, the Easter Seals worker and the guardian ad litem petitioned the court and said, “No. This needs to stop. She’s doing it.” So they got rid of the TPR. And I just remember looking at my attorney and he was like, “Thank God you figure [00:34:00] it out because you were so close.”

\And I just remember feeling at that point that the case worker had my back, she fought for me, they understood I was ready to do it, to be a mom on my own and I was okay. And I remember the day that we went into the courtroom to have them transfer custody to [inaudible 00:34:24] and the state’s attorney was like, “You [00:34:30] are one of the only ones I have actually seen do this, that I have actually seen get that close to losing your children and you pulled it together. And I’m really happy that I could be the one to get them back to you.” She only had me as a successful case at that point. I was the only one,

Speaker 4:The discussion was brought up saying, “Well, you’re not having contact with him. You’re not staying in contact face-to-face. You’re not doing this, you’re not doing that, [00:35:00] so we’re going to be requesting to go through and terminate parental rights.” And in one of the counseling sessions, before we had talked about where he wanted to live, as far as if he wanted to live with me live where he was, which is the foster placement or live with his father. And by talking to him about that helped me sign away because I was doing what he [00:35:30] wanted.

Erica Heilman: He wanted to stay with the foster family?

Speaker 4:Yes. He wanted to stay there. And I think because of all the fighting back and forth, he didn’t want to choose between his parents. So when we ended up actually going to the court, I signed away my rights, but [00:36:00] he also knows that I am here, he knows that he can write to me and talk to me. We get pictures and letters.

Erica Heilman: Where are things now? What do you see now, when you look forward?

Speaker 1: I had another [00:36:30] child two months ago, a little girl and I’m living with my husband. I see my oldest child every day. At this point, I have decided that in the situation with my middle son that, I really don’t have any control of the situation right now, I have come to the conclusion [00:37:00] that, I just have to wait it out till he’s old enough to come find me.

Erica Heilman:You’ve been listening to Six parents. Six DCF Stories. I want to thank all of the parents who’ve shared their stories with me in writing, on the phone and in person. [00:37:30] These are hard stories to tell and I’m really grateful to all of you. I also want to thank all the case workers at DCF for the hard work they do. If you have a story or a comment on the show, then please write it down at the bottom of the show page at rumblestripvermont.com. Comments are really important, comments are part of the point. Music for this show is by Marie Helene Belanger and Isha Love. There are links to their work on my website, rumblestripvermont.com. This show runs on a kind [00:38:00] of Bernie donation model. So if you like what you’re hearing, please donate and I will send you my thanks and a really sweet bumper sticker. There’s a donate button on the website, in the upper right corner, it’s green. This is Erica Heilman. Thanks for listening.

Here’s another show from my friend Larry Massett’s brain. The story is called Aunties, and it’s from his soon-to-be-released podcast, Lick The Crickets. Lick the Crickets is a podcast that’s been coming soon for quite some time. The problem is, Larry can’t stop making shows for Lick the Crickets long enough to launch Lick the Crickets. But he will. Oh, he will. And it will be found at Lickthecrickets.com, and I will let you know when it’s up.

Aunties is performed by Paul Kiernan.

Art for this show is made by Charles Hope.

Leland Kennedy lives one hill over from me in East Calais, Vermont. I interviewed Leland last year when he was ten, and I’ve received some letters from listeners wondering what he’s up to and what he’s been thinking about since then. Leland’s pretty busy in the afternoons after school. You can usually find him biking up and down the road or working on survival techniques in the woods, or watching television. But he agreed to come over and talk with me about what’s on his mind these days. We talked about building fires, parachutes failing to deploy, and where he has his most interesting thoughts. Here’s an update from Leland.

Music for this show by Noveller and Kai Engel, from the Free Music Archive.

I have been remiss in reporting on calls to the local police. I apologize. Here is a sampling of reports to the Barre and Montpelier police in the last few months. Reported by Scott Carrier.

Music by Peter Cressy of Plainfield, Vermont

Scott Carrier produces the excellent Home of the Brave.

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For most of Jesse’s early childhood, her mother was addicted to crystal meth. She called it her ‘high functioning addict period’. She kept a spotless house, worked a regular job and had four well behaved kids. Then Jesse’s mom started using opiates, and everything changed. She lost the job, lost the money, and it became harder to keep a car.  The eviction notices started coming. For a time, with the help of Suboxone, she got clean. Then in 2010, her youngest son died in a car accident. He was seven at the time. After that she relapsed and everything got a whole lot worse. She never agreed to go to the Knoxville substance abuse treatment center that was suggested numerous times. Things were getting worse faster than we could build up hope.

In this show, Jesse talks about what it was like to grow up at the mercy of her mother’s addictions. Her home life, her school life, and her thoughts about her own future.

Music for this show is by Peter Cressy, of Plainfield, Vermont

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Barry Forbes lives on Route 116, five miles east of Middlebury and eight miles south of Bristol, Vermont. He says if you’re trying to find the place, just slow down and his hounds will let you know where he is. Barry lives in a double wide trailer directly behind the house where he spent his entire childhood, and he’s never been away from this place for longer than thirteen months, when he was in Vietnam. Across the road from his house is a mountain where he’s been fishing and hunting and trapping since he was seven years old.

March is muskrat season in Vermont and Barry took me out and showed me a few muskrat lodges. But the truth is, muskrat season was just an excuse to be around him for awhile, and talk with him about his lifelong passion for hunting.

Music for this show by Peter Cressy of Plainfield, Vermont.

Thank you Mark Davis.

Thank you to The Vermont Folklife Center for introducing me to Barry years ago….

[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/249825433″ params=”color=ff5500&inverse=false&auto_play=false&show_user=true” width=”100%” height=”20″ iframe=”true” /]Twenty years ago, Ben Hewitt and his wife Penny bought forty acres of land in Cabot, Vermont and started their first homestead. In Vermont, the word ‘homestead’ generally refers to people who build their own houses and live self sufficiently to one degree or another…with varying degrees of success. One of the most important characteristics of the homesteaders I’ve known is a deep affinity for the physical world. Knowing how it works, and how to live in it.

Ben and Penny and their two boys are some of the most committed homesteaders in this state. They run a small hill farm and raise ninety percent of their own food. Ben makes a living writing about this life they’ve made. I visited him at his new homestead in Stannard, and we sat and talked by the woodstove that currently doubles up as the cookstove. And we drank some really good beer.

Welcome.

If any of you out there are homesteaders and you have a picture from your homesteading life, I’d love to feature it at the bottom of this page. My friend Robby sent me a CLASSIC, which you’ll see below…and I’d love to add more…

Credits

Ben Hewitt’s blog is HERE.

Music for this show was made by Brian Clark of Calais, Vermont. You can listen to more of Brian’s music HERE.

Robby Porter, Calais VT 1973. Photo by Alex MacPhail…for bettter resolution, click here.

“Hunting is an important part of putting meat on the table on my homestead.” –Robin Follette

​Shivani Arjuna’s homestead, Coulee Meadow Farm

Doug Welch and his oxen, Buster and Bud, in the northern Adirondack foothills.

[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/249471566″ params=”color=ff5500&inverse=false&auto_play=false&show_user=true” width=”100%” height=”20″ iframe=”true” /]In celebration of the day before Super Tuesday, here’s a story from writer Sarah Miller called Berned in Reno. It’s an account of her deep feelings for Bernie, and canvassing for his campaign in Nevada before the caucus.

Sarah Miller writes for theawl.com, newyorker.com, time.com, thecut.com and others. This story appeared last week on the website, The Awl and you can read the full version here.

[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/245930720″ params=”color=ff5500&inverse=false&auto_play=false&show_user=true” width=”100%” height=”20″ iframe=”true” /]This week, a special guest show from Scott Carrier, producer of Home of the Brave.

Years ago, Scott was hired to conduct interviews for a mental health research project. He drove around Utah administering a test to possible schizophrenics. The test was comprised of 100 questions, and took approximately an hour to complete.  This is the story about it.

It has been a very troubling few years at Vermont’s Department of Children and Families. In 2014 there was a string of child deaths in Vermont–children in families involved with DCF. These deaths prompted intense anger and at least four investigations into the department.

Then on August 7, 2015, Lara Sobel, a caseworker at DCF, was shot as she left the DCF offices in Barre, Vermont. She was shot and killed by a woman who was angry after losing custody of her daughter to DCF the month before.

The Department of Children and Families flares up in the news, then the news subsides. We hear from the governor, from the DCF commissioner, from legislators and journalists and commentators. But the people we never hear from are the people who actually do the work. And this is by design. The work that DCF caseworkers do is intensely private, and in order to protect the privacy of parents and children, caseworkers are not allowed to talk publicly about their cases. In a way, their silence shields us from some of the darkest, most complex, most intractable problems in our state.

In this show you’ll hear from three DCF caseworkers from three different areas of Vermont. For their own safety, I’ve chosen not to use their names. They talk about what it’s like to have a job where the lives of children and families are at stake.

TRANSCRIPT below thanks to Jennifer Jorgenson of UVM!

Credits and Thanks

Music for this show by Brian Clark and Peter Cressy

I would like to thank Luciana at DCF, and all the caseworkers who gave me such generous time in the making of this show.

Thanks also to Tally Abecassis, Mark Davis, Scott Carrier, Kelly Green, and Colin McCaffrey for various and sundry and important support.

TRANSCRIPT

Erica Heilman:               Welcome to Rumble Strip Vermont, I’m Erica Heilman. On the afternoon of Friday, August 7th, 2015, Lara Sobel, caseworker at the Department of Children and Families was shot as she left the DCF offices in Barre, Vermont. She was shot and killed by a woman who was angry after losing custody of her daughter to DCF the month before. In the aftermath of this killing, there was a rash of truly disturbing commentary in social media [00:00:30] from people expressing sympathy with Lara’s killer, people who look on DCF case workers as home wreckers, baby snatchers. But there’s a whole different contingent that believes DCF doesn’t intervene in families enough. In 2014, there was a string of child deaths in Vermont. Children in families involved with DCF. These deaths prompted intense anger and at least four investigations into the department.

[00:01:00] DCF flares up in the news, then the news subsides. We hear from the governor, we hear from the DCF commissioner from legislators and journalists and commentators. But the people we never hear from are the people who actually do the work. And this is by design. The work that DCF case workers do is intensely private. And in order to protect the privacy of parents and children, case workers are not allowed to talk [00:01:30] publicly about their cases. And in a way, their silence shields us from some of the darkest, most complex, most intractable problems in our state. These are the problems and the stories that DCF case workers live with every day. In this show, you’ll hear from three DCF case workers from three different areas of Vermont. For their own safety, I’ve chosen not to use their names. They’ll talk about what it’s [00:02:00] like to have a job where the lives of children and families are at stake. Welcome. I figured we would start just by talking about what does DCF do? Because I don’t know that everybody knows that really what it is, and also what it isn’t.

Speaker 2:                    So family services, our primary role is to ensure the safety [00:02:30] and care of children in the state of Vermont. We are not baby snatchers. We are not police. Our main objective is to work with families that have children and to ensure that their children are safe and working with them, connecting them with different services within the community, and ensuring basically that [00:03:00] the care or the risk that there is for the children in the home is either eliminated or mitigated in some way. When we receive reports of abuse and neglect of children, poverty is pretty much what we see all the time, but that is not to say that child abuse and neglect doesn’t occur in middle class or upper class homes. We just don’t get that many reports from there.

Erica Heilman:               Can you [00:03:30] give people a kind of a… If you can just give people a sense for what kinds of worlds you enter into in this work?

Speaker 3:                    Yes, I can try to answer that. So this work does bring me to all walks of Vermont and even beyond. Our district, the Hartford district is the largest of the 12 district offices. We cover the larger towns of Randolph, Bradford, and White River [00:04:00] Junction. And we also cover all of the rural towns in between that. We do home visits on back dirt roads. Sometimes they’re not even real roads. And we do these visits in the winter in our state cars, and we hope the tires are going to get us to where we need to go. And we’re usually doing these visits alone. We sometimes team if we feel there’s a safety concern, but generally if I’m doing a home visit, I go out and do these home visits alone, [00:04:30] and they can be anywhere from right here in town in White River to sometimes an hour and a half away. I have currently 25 children in custody on my caseload. I also serve, I think, about 10 additional children under conditional custody orders. So I have approximately 35 children that I am assessing safety for on sometimes a daily basis.

Speaker 2:                    Primarily we’re working with families that are really impoverished [00:05:00] and that there’s mental health issues and/or drug related issues. Some families are living with a known untreated sex offender, so we get calls from anybody from the next door neighbor to a doctor to teachers reporting that they have concerns about the kids or the kids have disclosed that they’ve been physically abused or sexually [00:05:30] abused. So we meet with the families and try to sort it out. So this is a mental health issue, so how can we connect a person to a local agency. If it’s a substance misuse issue, again, having them participate in a drug and alcohol assessment, developing safety plans around, “Okay, so if you lapse, then is there somebody that’s clean and sober [00:06:00] that can care for your child while you’re using? And is that person safe to be around children too?”

Erica Heilman:               And how would you characterize most of your relationships with those parents? Are most positive and amicable or how would you describe them?

Speaker 2:                    I would say most are positive. There’s definitely tension in the relationship, because I’m pushing them to follow through with their substance [00:06:30] misuse program or trying to extract them from a relationship that’s not healthy for the children or for them. So there’s tension in those things. But I feel like I’m kind of like a coach, kind of like a life coach pointing in the direction. So there’s this road and this road and this road, and you can take any of these paths you want. You’re the one that’s in control here. [00:07:00] And it’s up to you to do this.

Speaker 4:                    I think one of the hardest parts about this job is that we all have our own set of values, our standards of living, and each of us is very different. And when we meet with families, it’s really important that we not put our own value judgment on these families, because we’re all different. I can’t stand dirt on the floor and all those kind of things, and when I walk into someone’s house and there’s dirt on the floor, [00:07:30] that’s my value. That’s not theirs. And that doesn’t constitute a right for DCF to come in and remove children. And I know I hear that all the time. You’re going to take my kids because I have a dirty house. We’re not the dirt police. We are there because there’s a risk to the children, either from an external source or from something that the parent has done, not based on the fact that you have dirt on your floor.

Do we get involved? Yes. If there’s something on the floor or something that the children can have access to that can cause them harm, absolutely. Dried dog feces [00:08:00] on the floor left all over with a baby crawling is not safe. We are there for imminent risk into concerns about the child’s safety and wellbeing. We are not there to criticize you because you don’t have enough money to pay for your heat.

Erica Heilman:               You’ve been here long enough to see the way that people respond to the work as they come in. Looking at the social workers around you, what do you notice happen happens?

Speaker 3:                    I think what’s most difficult for myself and [00:08:30] for coworkers that I have seen leave, having difficult relationships with our clients is expected. Having difficult relationships with other professionals can be incredibly wearing. I do hear DCF is not doing enough. Why can’t you get involved with this child? And people don’t necessarily understand that DCF is a child protection agency, not a quality of life agency. When teachers contact me because a child has not come to school having breakfast or having [00:09:00] a jacket, those are horrible things, but that’s not necessarily a reason for DCF to become involved with them. And I think that a lot of people don’t know that.

Speaker 2:                    Unless there are objects in the home that are hazardous, then we have no call to pull children out of that. So the condition of the home doesn’t immediately affect the child. [00:09:30] That’s not child abuse. Does it tell you something about how the people in that home are living? Is it a picture of depression? Yeah, absolutely. There is a lot of stuff in people’s houses and it’s filthy, and sometimes a whole family is just living in one room, just mattresses and [00:10:00] beat up couches and just really chaotic and animals, and I didn’t want to sit down and there were just things crowding in, it’s just claustrophobic. It’s almost always dark. There’s always blankets across the windows. And most of the stuff is just broken down, like broken toys and [00:10:30] garbage and debris and clothing.

It is really hard to describe what you go into. I don’t know, it’s… But you don’t want to judge them for that. And we’ve been asked by state’s attorneys, “Well, take pictures.” And I just won’t, because I feel [00:11:00] like that’s such an invasion. I’m already invading and now I’m recording how they are living in their homes. Poverty is just the key issue. I don’t know who said this, but I totally agree with it. They said that poverty is the worst form of violence that there is. And I totally agree with [00:11:30] that.

Erica Heilman:               So if someone is concerned about a child and makes a call to family services, DCF may or may not investigate. We don’t know. Because after that phone call, the case becomes a private matter between DCF and the family. This privacy is endlessly frustrating to the accused, to teachers, to defense attorneys and journalists, really anyone who wants to know [00:12:00] what’s going on and isn’t DCF, and it’s impossible to hold the state accountable for its handling of these cases if we can’t see them. On the other hand, this privacy protects children and can protect people who are falsely accused. And because of this privacy, we don’t really know what these case workers do. In this next segment, case workers talk about some of the problems they work with. And this is not easy to listen to, but in order to understand the nature [00:12:30] of their work, we have to hear about some of the challenging situations they face.

Speaker 3:                    Kids being physically abused because their parents don’t know any other way to parent them. Kids being exposed to substantiated sex offenders. Substance abuse is an epidemic in Vermont right now. That’s not a secret to anybody. How that relates to child safety is [00:13:00] parents not waking up until noon. Three year olds taking care of their six month old baby brother. Children not eating because their parents can’t get out of bed. Children not getting to school because their parents can’t get them there or can’t get them on the bus. Kids are being left outside while the parents are inside doing drugs on a winter day. Situations where children are seeing [00:13:30] their mothers being abused by their mother’s partners. Those are some of the situations that I have come across and what I am experiencing, or what I know about the family is probably the tip of the iceberg that the children are actually being exposed to. The children that I am involved with, this has been their life for years before I have become involved with them.

Speaker 4:                    [00:14:00] I used to have a majority of my investigations or assessments would involve sexual abuse or physical abuse. Now a majority of them involving risk of harm, because these pregnant moms who are using in utero, using while pregnant, and we’re opening assessments before the child’s birth to determine whether or not they’re safe. I mean, that’s the stuff that we here as the office is seeing right now. I mean this explosion of infants who have parents [00:14:30] who are using. The example I could think about is when I was, technically by the legal terms, assaulted by a mother. She spit in my face during a removal of her children. Got information that she was using, and we went to her house and she was completely out of it. She was slurring her words. She was not able to stand appropriately. She was argumentative, combative to the point that the police had to put her in handcuffs.

The house was an absolute disarray compared to what it used to be. [00:15:00] There was dirty diapers all over the floor. The baby was left in a crib with just a diaper on and the feces had exploded out of the diaper and they were caked onto the baby. I mean, she had runny nose that was crusty and was screaming because she was so hungry. And mom had been passed out on the couch, not able to take care of her. She had a sibling there that was trying to get her a bottle who was like three, four years old. And mom was erratic, [00:15:30] combative, aggressive, just out of control.

Speaker 2:                    I’ve seen bruises on children, scratches, welt marks, child pornography. Something you want to kind of just scrub your brain of once you see it. I’ve read an autopsy report on a four month old baby. You just see the fear [00:16:00] in kids’ eyes, their confusion and desperation in parents’ faces. It’s really hard work. You try not to think about it too much or to take it in too much because you couldn’t possibly do your job if you did.

Speaker 3:                    [00:16:30] Some families that I am currently working with I was working with six years ago, and every service under the sun has been into these homes, sometimes on numerous occasions, because more children have been born into these homes that warrant different services coming into place. And there’s not always a positive outcome. There is situations where children are remaining in homes that may not to you or I be a [00:17:00] safe or adequate home, but that’s also how this family is choosing to live, and it’s not unsafe for the child. The ideal would be to have service providers go into the home and work with these families, and they come out and everybody’s happy and everybody’s needs are getting met. But they can not always make the changes that are being recommended because there are incredibly complex issues that we’re working with, especially when children are still placed [00:17:30] at home.

That’s when the agency sits with the highest risk. And that’s when I personally feel like I sit with risk. When children are still in the home of parents that are struggling with substance abuse, unresolved mental health, yet the risk does not warrant the child coming into custody, but does warrant that I remain involved, but changes are not being made, and the family is doing the best that they can. We are going in and saying, “This is [00:18:00] what you need to do. This is what you should do. This is what your child needs you to do.” And sometimes all that mom can do is get up and make sure that her kid has a piece of toast that day.

Speaker 2:                    The other day I was working, and I want to be careful here that I don’t give away too much information so it can be identified. But I was working with these two other service providers, met with this mom and her infant. And we all had [00:18:30] a conversation with her concerned that I’m going to have to make that next move and write an affidavit. If she’s not following through the safety plan. She leaves the room to take a smoke break and me and these two other people are talking, and they’re a like, “God, I just don’t understand her attitude. Why is she using again? She’s only going to use again. You know that, right?”

[00:19:00] Yeah, I know that. But look at their situation. She’s in this motel room, she doesn’t have a partner. She doesn’t drive. She doesn’t even have a car. She’s thousands of dollars in debt for medical bills. Who wouldn’t use? This person, she was a foster child too. She has family, but [00:19:30] they’re involved with us as well. There is no one in her life that she can lean on. No one. She’s got a couple friends that seem to be okay, but they’re struggling too. Very similar situations. What is she going to do is going to go to CCV and ask for an application to go to school and [00:20:00] go out, get a job.

And that’s part of the problem too, is, “Okay, so where does the child go?” Oh, childcare. Well, everybody knows how expensive that is. It’s about $300 a week, with the reach up grant that they’re getting it’s around $1,000 a month. Pull yourself up by the bootstraps? How? How are you going to manage all of that? [00:20:30] You don’t. And you find yourself in a motel using. I understand it, but the child’s still at risk. So work with what we got.

Speaker 3:                    I talked a little about the gray areas of this work and doing home visits, usually [00:21:00] weekly, if it’s a high risk case, and leaving with the feeling that something is just not right. I don’t have facts to write an affidavit, but something doesn’t feel right. And then something happens. For example, a child went to school with bruises and had clearly been physically abused as determined by a medical professional. And I write an affidavit outlining all of my experiences with this family, [00:21:30] and I ask the judge for this child to come out of this home and to come into foster care. And that request is denied. I may have one incident where something happened that shouldn’t have, but the majority of what I’m reporting are things that don’t reach a level of removal. So not a only is this child remaining in this home, but I now have to continue to work with the family that I have just asked a judge to remove their child from their care.

What small amount of safety may [00:22:00] have been created between the relationship of social worker and parent is now completely gone. I still have to go in week after week to make sure that the child is not at imminent risk, and those are the cases that keep me up at night. Those are the cases where I feel like something bad is going to happen to this child. And then something does happen. Then the public says that DCF didn’t do enough. What the public doesn’t know [00:22:30] is that I was in that home every single week, week after week, trying to make things better, even requesting custody and having it been denied. And people say that social worker didn’t do her job, that social worker didn’t do enough, this baby got hurt because DCF didn’t do their job.

Speaker 2:                    You always worry. I’m not alone. We all worry. We all have bad dreams. [00:23:00] There is a tremendous amount of responsibility. And the last two years, it just made it harder. And I’m grateful to be in the current position I am. I’m helping out the Barry district office temporarily, ever since Lara was shot, killed. But honestly, I’ll be glad to be done with this work in mid-November. I’m scared to death [00:23:30] that a child’s going to die on my watch, and I really can’t prevent that. There’s so much outside of our control.

Erica Heilman:               What don’t people understand about that?

Speaker 2:                    I think there’s a misconception that DCF family services is just… They get a report and we’re just going to waltz in and pull that child or the children right out of [00:24:00] the home. And that people think that’s what we should be doing. And that’s the last thing we need to do. We cannot possibly do that. Our resources are tapped out. We cannot do that, and it’s not the right thing to do either. It doesn’t solve the problem. Just a quick illustration. We go in and remove children because they’re unsafe, and then that family has more children. [00:24:30] We’re there in the hospital when they’re giving deliveries sometimes. We’re there a few months after they’re born. And those children come into custody and then another child’s born.

We’re not addressing the problem with the issues. We’re not working with the family as much as we need to, to really address the real causes that’s creating the instability, the safety issues in the home, in the social work, [00:25:00] school, we talked about upstream practice versus downstream. And most of our work is downstream. We’re not looking into the real causes of poverty and how that leads to mental illness or how that leads to substance misuse. And that’s what we need to do more of. And it’s not just up to DCF family services. It’s the community, everybody [00:25:30] to step up to the plate.

Erica Heilman:               I spoke with eight family services case workers while I was making the show, and they all said, not surprisingly, that morale isn’t great. But what they said that did surprise me and even, admittedly, confounds me, is that they really like this job. They like working with families and they believe in what they do, but they said that they don’t have time to do good work. Their caseloads are too big, the opiate epidemic [00:26:00] in Vermont is out of control, and there’s a near Soviet amount of paperwork involved in this job. They said they don’t have to time to do social work anymore.

Speaker 4:                    I have workers right now, ongoing workers who have a caseload of 35 kids. How do effective case work with 35 children? You can’t. And I watch my staff fry. I watch them… And these families deserve better than that. They deserve to have a [00:26:30] social worker who has her wits about her, who has the ability and the time to spend to work with them and to engage rather than a social worker who they can’t get ahold of because she’s jumping from one fire to another. I still have kids from when I started 20 years ago coming to see me and checking in. I have those relationships because I had the time back then to create those relationships. And I just feel sad for the new workers now because they’re not having a… They’re not being able to make those connections with clients.

Speaker 2:                    [00:27:00] The best part of the job is meeting with families and meeting with kids. That’s the enjoyable part, at least it is for me. But it’s amazing how much of the other stuff gets in the way of really doing that face to face work. Spend a lot of time in court and just waiting. Just waiting for the hearing to start and [00:27:30] just trying to track down other service providers who can vouch that the families followed through on X, Y, or Z. Yeah, they’re going to their therapy sessions. Yeah, they got their daily dose every day this week. So children do slip through the cracks and children have died while we were intervening.

Speaker 3:                    Families deserve to have a social [00:28:00] worker that has face time with them on a regular basis, that they’re able to access on the phone, that they need to know what is expected of them, why we’re involved. I’ve had families come to me and say, “I don’t even know why you’re work working with me. I don’t even know why you’re involved with me.” So the families that we work with deserve to know why a state child protection agency is involved with them. And in order for them to feel respected and in order for them to feel like their cases are moving forward, they need to have contact with their social worker. And unfortunately [00:28:30] with the numbers that we have right now, that doesn’t always happen to the degree that I want it to. That’s probably the hardest thing that I sit with personally. When I leave at the end of the day, I think, “Should I have made this extra phone call? Could I have done this extra report? Could I have done this extra check-in.”

And I can speak to the difference from six years ago to now. I was able to do what I would call kitchen table social work six years ago. Sitting with families [00:29:00] at their kitchen table, really laying out, “These are the issues. This is what we got to work on. This is how we’re going to do it. Let’s pull up our sleeves. Let’s get to work. Let’s make things better. Now it’s crisis response to a situation that’s already happened because I haven’t had the time to sit with that family at their kitchen table and to talk about what the issues are. I am then responding after something has happened. So it does feel like triage work at times.

Erica Heilman:               [00:29:30] In cases where a judge believes a child is at imminent risk of harm, she will order that the children be removed from the home and placed in a foster home or kinship home. For most kids in foster care, the initial goal is reunification with their parents. The social workers keep working on their case plans with the parents, and they oversee the kids who are now in foster care. But as soon as kids are removed from the home, a clock starts ticking. The parents have to prove [00:30:00] to the state that they can safely parent the children. And if they can’t do that quickly enough, the state will seek to terminate their parental rights.

Speaker 3:                    So the hardest decision that I have made and that I feel really any social worker can make is that decision that you are going to file, in court, a petition to terminate parental rights. I, as the social worker have made that decision with, with my management team, with our legal team, and I don’t make it alone, [00:30:30] but I am the one that sits at the round table with mom and dad and says, “This is the direction we’re going in.” And that is incredibly difficult. Sometimes it is met with an understanding that the parent says, “You’re right. I haven’t done what I need to do. I’m not surprised you’re doing this. Okay.” That is one example. Another is screaming and yelling and storming out, attacking me personally. [00:31:00] I usually have my supervisor sitting in with me to have these conversations, but working with a family for so long and then having to sit with them and sometimes saying, “You have made some amazing changes for yourself, but that does not equate to your child being able to come back into your home safely.”

And that’s probably the most difficult conversation. Parents who are making changes, parents who have gained sobriety for three months. [00:31:30] That’s incredible. Congratulations to you. But in the permanency timeline for a child, we need to be making those decisions sooner rather than later. So parents that I see starting to make changes, but just not soon enough or just not great enough, those are the difficult conversations. A parent who has completely blown off everything I’ve asked them to do, that conversation is less difficult. A parent who is showing some progress [00:32:00] but still having to make that decision in the best interest of the child. That’s a difficult conversation to have.

And I have had plenty of cases where I have had to go through a termination of parental rights trial, termination was granted, that family has had another child. For continuity of care they come back onto my case and I have to work with that family again. And [00:32:30] I’m the woman that took their first kid away. So I’m going to take their second kid away. Because we want reunification to be our primary goal, that can be very difficult, because in order for reunification to happen, there needs to be a trusting relationship between social worker and parent. They have to trust me this time around, even though I took their first kid away from them.

Speaker 2:                    Even in the worst cases, [00:33:00] cases where there’s just overt abuse physical, sexual abuse, emotional abuse, even in the worst cases you just don’t come away like, “Woohoo, I did my job and we won.” Lawyers feel that way. We don’t. [00:33:30] And sometimes you’re glad. “Oh, good, these children are going to be safe. They’re in a good foster home. And foster parents are going to adopt them.” And you’ve been watching them for the last year or two, just thriving and overcoming all kinds of deficits, from a child that’s three years old, it’s not speaking, or a child that’s not potty trained, [00:34:00] or a child that’s so insular, all of a sudden they’re doing so well and schools are reporting how their behavior has changed and how they’re blossoming and they’re coming into themselves. And all that, of course, feels good, and to see that and to witness that. But there’s real trauma for those kids. They’re separated from their family. I can’t even begin to think of what that might feel [00:34:30] like. That’s real trauma. That’s like death. In some ways worse than death, I think.

One case in particular there were two children involved, pretty dysfunctional family, was a case where mental instability was a major [00:35:00] issue. Really impoverished family. The children are in foster care, sibling group. And the dad was pretty much a sober person. The mom is abusing all kinds of substances, so that’s what brought them into our custody. I became their case worker. We developed a case plan and both the parents needed to do A through Z [00:35:30] of things to ensure the safety and care of their children. And they needed to demonstrate that over a period of time and show us that they could sustain that level of safety. So months go by, and in that time you’re meeting with them, you have a six month case plan review, you’re having treatment team meetings, but by the time their anniversary, in which the children come into custody.

The question comes up for the social worker, [00:36:00] what is the permanent plan for these children? Are they going to be returning home or are they going to be adopted? So with this family, nothing has changed. Things actually got worse. So the parents weren’t pulling it together. So I, through our attorneys, petitioned the court to terminate the parents’ rights to both of their children. [00:36:30] And there’s no doubt in my mind these parents don’t love their children. They absolutely love their children, but they just don’t know how to care for their children. And the parents had split up and the dad, who was sober, but had significant delays, cognitive delays, so neither one of them were addressing issues that were outlined in the case [00:37:00] plan. So I thought we had enough where both of the parental rights should have been terminated so that both of those children could be adopted.

But going through that process is excruciating because you have to testify for a lengthy period of time and justify your opinion, your recommendation for the TPR to go through. [00:37:30] Up until you file that petition for the TPR, you’re coaching that family, you’re supporting them, you want to see them succeed, you’re rooting them on. But then the federal mandate comes in that there has to be a permanency option for this child. And then all of a sudden, you flip everything on the family. And then your relationship is just distraught. [00:38:00] So you have to recount all the agencies and supports you had put in place so that they could be successful, and all of a sudden, they’re your adversaries. And I liked the father. I thought he was a good man, and he really loved his children, but I didn’t think he was competent to raise his children.

And that really hurts. That’s devastating. [00:38:30] And I remember being in that court and seeing him afterwards, and I just felt compelled, I had to say something, because I felt I really betrayed him, just like, “I’m sorry. I had to do my job.” And [00:39:00] he wouldn’t look me in the eye. He stood there for a moment and he brushed past me and I fell apart. I got back from courts and I shared my experience with my coworkers and I just started wailing. It just was [00:39:30] horrible.

Erica Heilman:               Does it feel sometimes like playing God?

Speaker 2:                    Yes. Yes. It feels like… I don’t know the Bible well, but that parable, I think it was king David, with the two women in saying, “This is my child.” “No, it’s my child.” And he’s about to split the baby [00:40:00] in half with a sword. You feel like king David.

Speaker 3:                    I do this work because I see that it’s possible for people to change. And I know if I had a smaller caseload and had more [00:40:30] time to sit with my families, we could be doing better work together. I do still have the cases where real change is being made, despite not having a social worker that can be at their house every week, despite having months of wait lists for a therapist or a substance abuse counselor, they’re making changes. But the job has become in your face more dangerous. So workers have left. Social workers have left our office. [00:41:00] Social workers have left many of the offices because there’s a real fear that something dangerous could happen. I have myself received threats, and what happened to Lara is a tangible thing, and some of the people that I work with defend what happened.

Speaker 4:                    I had a recent incident where I had an old client who happened to be at my child’s daycare. She had been at the daycare previously, bad mouthing me, saying negative things about me. [00:41:30] And then she showed up at my child’s daycare and asked which child was mine. And there was nothing I could do. It didn’t meet stalking requirements, nothing. My kid stood up and said, “This is my mom. That’s my mom.” And there was nothing I could do. I came into this job knowing that I wanted to be a social worker, I wanted to do this work. I knew the risk that it came with this job. My child does not. So how do I keep her safe when I have clients telling me they know where I live? [00:42:00] I mean, how do we keep our family safe?

Speaker 2:                    When Lara was murdered, none of us expected this would ever happen to any one of us in the state of Vermont. And for me, it was like, “Wow, I can’t believe that happened, and I can’t believe that happened to Lara. That doesn’t make any sense. None of this makes any [00:42:30] sense.” That seal has been broken and now it’s open for anybody. There’s different points where I thought the Berry district office is just going to just totally break down. It’s strange to work in that office and see those other social workers and just [00:43:00] look into their faces and their expressions are so unique. I don’t know how to describe them. I guess that’s what faces look like after something like that happens.

Erica Heilman:               There have been [00:43:30] 125 death threats at DCF since Lara Sobel’s murder. This show is dedicated to Lara Sobel and to her colleagues at DCF. I’d like to say one last thing. There’s a silence at the heart of this show, and it’s the voices of parents involved with DCF. Over the next few months, I’ll be looking for parents who want to share their perspectives about working with [00:44:00] family services. If you have thoughts about this, you can email me at rumblestripvermont@gmail.com, or if you have thoughts about the show in general, I encourage you to make a comment on the website. The music you heard in the show is by my friends Peter Cressie and Brian Clark. I’m Erica Heilman. Thanks for listening.

[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/238953388″ params=”color=ff5500&inverse=false&auto_play=false&show_user=true” width=”100%” height=”20″ iframe=”true” /] It’s the day before Christmas, and like a Christmas miracle, I received this report from Scott Carrier on recent police activity here in central Vermont. Here are a selection of calls to local police as reported in the Times Argus and Stowe Reporter.

Happy Holidays everyone.

Music by Hayvanlar Alemi. The song is titled Crossroad Metamorphosis

Photo Credit: This is just a small portion of an inspired murder scene diorama by my friend Colin Dickerman. Here is the whole scene:

[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/237865316″ params=”color=ff5500&inverse=false&auto_play=false&show_user=true” width=”100%” height=”20″ iframe=”true” /]How time flies! The holidays are such a nice time to catch up with friends and family. Here’s a waspy little roundup of highlights from a year in the Becht family. Happy Holidays!

Credits

Seasonal Update was written by Tal McThenia, a writer of books and articles and screenplays. To learn more about Tal, you can visit his website:  talmcthenia.com or check out his book website: www.acaseforsolomon.com

The Music

The Handbell Choir at Memorial Baptist Church in Pulaski, Virginia from their Christmas concert in 2012.

The guy who sings Oh, Holy Night. If you know who this is, please, please write to me at rumblestripvermont@gmail.com

NEWS FLASH: Listener/Investigator Patrick Freebern did some digging and discovered the original singer of the song, Steve Mauldin of Tennessee. On YouTube. (Duh?). And here is a video featuring Steve  of Tennessee, speaking at great length about how he is the original singer on this recording.

The Dogs

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M.T. Anderson is the author of Feed, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, as well as The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, which won the National Book Award. Whether it’s crafting a dystopian future, writing vampire fiction, or, in the case of his latest book, Symphony for the City of the Dead, chronicling the life of the composer Dmitri Shostakovitch, his books are meticulously researched and vividly told.

I first met Tobin (his middle name) when he came over with my friend Peter this past September to watch the eclipse…or  the SUPER Moon. The three of us sat and talked in my front yard in an old wicker couch until it collapsed, and the conversation carried on horizontally from there. We talked about astronomy, about words we hate (slacks, homemade) and what we were like in high school. It was the kind of voracious conversation you have with a brand new friend.

We got together recently at my house to talk about his new book Symphony for the City of the Dead: Dmitri Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad.  We also talked about….other things. His writing habits, God, demonic possession, and middle age. A little something for everyone.

Welcome.

Credits:

Music by Noveller, of the Free Music Archive

Thanks to Tally Abecassis for her thoughts on this show. If you haven’t listened to her podcast, First Day Back, I recommend you check it out. Cuz it’s great. Also thanks to Colin Dickerman.

Links to Tobin’s work and articles about his illustrious career:

Click here for Symphony for the City of the Dead

Click here for Feed

Click here for The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing

M.T. Anderson’s blog

Profile in The Washington Post

Interview about Feed in Boing Boing

[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/234650376″ params=”color=ff5500&inverse=false&auto_play=false&show_user=true” width=”100%” height=”20″ iframe=”true” /]Today…Hot Bird.

This is a short show in celebration of the season of turkeys, and catching them. Then eating them.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone. And for those of you listening outside the United States, I hope you happen to have a really great meal planned with good friends. With or without a hot bird.

This show features Barry Forbes, a hunter in Middlebury, Vermont, and I made that show with tape from the Vermont Folklife Center.

The recent school consolidation bill promised to lower our taxes. Then it promised equal opportunity for all kids. It’s unclear how it will deliver on either of these promises, but one thing is sure. It could radically change culture in small town Vermont. This is a show about some of the long-term political and cultural effects of Act 46.

Comments: To make a comment or to see comments, scroll to the bottom of this page.

THE SHOW: Click here to listen to the show.

THE OUTTAKES: For a more in-depth review, here is a rough edit of my full interview with Superintendent John Castle:

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Credits

Lincoln Petell is the chairman of the school board in Holland, Vermont

Susan Clark is a facilitator, educator, and the co-author of “Slow Democracy: Rediscovering Community, Bringing Decision Making Back Home.” She is also Town Moderator of Middlesex, Vermont.

John Castle is the superintendent of the North Country Supervisory Union.

Articles about Act 46

School Consolidation is Anti-Democratic: Eric Davis, December 17, 2015, VTDigger

If Vermont Were A School: Commentary by John Castle, April, 2015, VTDigger 

Deliberate Speed on Education Governance by Susan Clark, April, 2015, VTDigger

Design for a 21st Century School Governance System, by Margaret MacLean, May, 2014, VTDigger

Vermonters for Schools and Community advocate for local control of education, VTDigger, January 2015

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In Case of Emergency is another show from Larry Massett’s new podcast series, as yet unnamed.  The series isn’t out yet, and I have no idea how to describe what it is. It’s not like any podcast series I’ve ever heard. And it’s gonna be good.

Here is….In Case of Emergency.

Credits (links to recordings below)

My Heart’s in the Highlands, Arrangement by Arvo Part, sung by Stephen Wallace

Fire Trail, Antonio Sanchez

The picture is from Japanese designer Maiko Takeda, a show of spike-embellished, wearable art, from the website called BeautifulNow

[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/231822021″ params=”color=ff5500&inverse=false&auto_play=false&show_user=true” width=”100%” height=”20″ iframe=”true” /]The time has come to draw names for the Schwag Membership Pledging and Sustaining Campaign Event Raffle. This is the first consolidated shilling campaign I’ve done and I’ve learned a lot. I’ve learned that you’re listening as far away as Arthur’s Pass in New Zealand and I’ve learned that there are listeners right here in my town who are willing to dig into their public radio fund to support this podcast. I’ve received letters with great show ideas and stories about your lives and what you’re thinking about these days….I’m humbled in a way I can’t describe.

Thank you for your generosity, your letters and emails, and your ears. I am your biggest fan.

[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/229606253″ params=”color=ff5500&inverse=false&auto_play=false&show_user=true” width=”100%” height=”20″ iframe=”true” /] It’s almost November. It’s getting cold here. The days are getting shorter. I’m already missing the colors and sounds of summer and fall. So today I’m going to play one of my all-time favorite stories, which just happens to be a story that’s filled with the sound of summer. It’s called Stories from the Green River, and it’s by my friend Scott Carrier, who produces Home of the Brave…and if you haven’t subscribed to it yet, you should. There is nothing like it…anywhere.

Scott tied a canoe to his station wagon and drove north from his home in Salt Lake City, to the Green River Lakes in the Wind River Mountains.  That’s where the Green River–and this story–begins.

Credits

These stories originally aired on Weekend All Things Considered back in 1991. The music was written and performed by Pat King.  To subscribe to Scott’s podcast, Home of the Brave, visit homebrave.com.

[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/228542605″ params=”color=ff5500&inverse=false&auto_play=false&show_user=true” width=”100%” height=”20″ iframe=”true” /]Dear Listeners,

I love making this show and I am endlessly grateful to those of you have donated. These donations keep my car running and give me time to work on the show. So recently I was listening to the pledge drive on my local public radio station and I thought, I’m going to do that. Except my pledge drive will only be seven or eight minutes long and there will be inspirational music AND excellent prizes.

So here is my version of a pledge drive, with very special schwag for five lucky winners of the Schwag Show Raffle. The raffle will be drawn at 5:00PM Eastern Time on Thursday, November 5th.

Good luck everyone, and once again….thank you for making this show possible.

Erica

[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/227656999″ params=”color=ff5500&inverse=false&auto_play=false&show_user=true” width=”100%” height=”20″ iframe=”true” /]My friend Brett Berk got a very early start as a teacher, and by the time he was twenty-five, he was the director of a progressive preschool in the East Village in New York City. Blocks, clay, and instead of costumes, the kids had scraps of fabric they could adorn themselves with. There were occasional guest appearances from a gay, pink haired Cherokee performance artist. There was a lot of rolling around in Tompkins Square Park.

So by the time he was thirty and his friends started having kids, Brett had been working professionally with kids for a long time. And after watching us flail around for a few years as early parents, he figured he’d write a book about us, and for us. The Gay Uncle’s Guide To Parenting was born. In this conversation we talk about some of the hilarious choices he’s seen parents make, and what he makes of them. We talk about poop and sleep and food and what, in his mind, the job of parenting is all about. Welcome.

About Brett Berk

Brett Berk, M.S. Ed., has worked professionally with young children and families in New York City for almost twenty-five years, holding positions as a classroom teacher, a preschool director, and an educational consultant and evaluator. He is a widely published writer on issues pertaining to parenthood and child development, with articles appearing in Babble, Cookie, Momlogic, The Chicago Tribune, Time Out New York Kids, Parenting, Yahoo! Shine, and Vanity Fair, among others. He is also the author of the humorous instructional non-fiction book “The Gay Uncle’s Guide to Parenting” (Crown, 2008)

In addition to his work in early childhood, Brett publishes widely on cars and the auto industry. Foremost among his outlets, he is the automotive columnist for Vanity Fair, and Writer At Large for Time Inc.’s newly launched site The Drive, where he writes about cars and their relationship to our larger culture. keep up with him at brettberk.com.

Here’s a picture of Brett and a sheep.

[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/226435328″ params=”color=ff5500&inverse=false&auto_play=false&show_user=true” width=”100%” height=”20″ iframe=”true” /]My friend Larry Massett sent me this weird story he wrote, which I’m hoping will be the beginning of a whole new weird podcast. It’s hard to say what it is, which in my book is a good thing.

Here’s Press 4.

[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/225531902″ params=”color=ff5500&inverse=false&auto_play=false&show_user=true” width=”100%” height=”20″ iframe=”true” /]Jessamyn West is a library activist and computer technology savant who lives in central Vermont. She’s also kind of Internet famous. Jessamyn was one of the original moderators for the community blog MetaFilter—which is like the civilized version of Reddit. She was recently contacted by the White House for her thoughts on their choice for the next Librarian of Congress, and she speaks internationally about the digital divide. She’s also got WAY more Twitter followers than me. And probably you. No offense.

Jessamyn has worked as a technology consultant in libraries all over the state, and she holds open hours at a local tech center helping people with their computer problems. In this interview, we talk about her passion for public libraries and the role of the modern librarian. And we talk about how different people manage their personal relationships with their personal computers. Which, as we all know, is complicated.

Jessamyn Links

Jessamyn has a long bio. Wikipedia says it best…

A link to other links by and about Jessamyn

Librarian.net: Site where Jessamyn writes about library related things

Jessamyn’s exhaustive and awesome Donald Barthelme fan page

Here’s a transcript version of our interview, on Medium.

Some great clips and commentary from the interview, on MetaFilter

[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/223397407″ params=”color=ff5500&inverse=false&auto_play=false&show_user=true” width=”100%” height=”20″ iframe=”true” /]For twenty-five years Mark Johnson hosted The Mark Johnson Show, first up in Burlington at WKDR, then at WDEV here in central Vermont. Last month he retired from the show.

Mark kept us company on our commutes, in our kitchens and on job sites all over central Vermont. And if you live around here, you’ve either called the show, known the guest, or known some of the callers. The show was smart and relaxed and personal and Mark was very much…himself. I always felt like maybe the show was happening right across the road from my house. That’s how ‘local’ it felt.

I invited Mark over to talk about how he produced a two-hour public affairs show for twenty-five years all by himself. He shares some high points, a few low points, and you’ll also get to hear a little from Governor Shumlin. And a caller named Marsha. Welcome.

Next month Mark’s heading back to his native tribe of print journalists, and will be working with the online news site, VTDigger, as a senior reporter/editor.

COMMENTS WELCOME: If you have a comment or a story about Mark’s show, there’s a comment box below. That would be nice. To hear your stories. Your comments.

PHOTO CREDIT: The banner image of Mark Smith and Shap Smith was taken by the Vermont Press Bureau.

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Summer is coming to a close here in central Vermont. It’s been awhile since we’ve heard from the local police logs. This summer there were some problems with odors and stuck squirrels. A machete also was seen.

Here’s Scott Carrier reading a sampling from the last couple months’ reports to the Times Argus and the Stowe Reporter.

Music by Hayvanlar Alemi. The song is titled Crossroad Metamorphosis

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Steve Fugate roams the roads of America, walking thousands of miles with a sign stuck over his middle-aged head that reads “Love Life” — because of what happened to his son. This story was recorded by Mark Baldwin and produced by Larry Massett. It originally aired on NPR’s Hearing Voices.

You can follow Steve’s writing and walking at Trail Therapy.

If you throw a rock from Fred’s porch and you have a pretty good arm, you can almost hit Canada. He lives way up in Coventry, Vermont, and when I drove up to his place, I found him covered in paint, in one of his barns. He was just finishing building his fifth stage coach, parts of which he’d painted bright yellow and cherry red.

Most of his barns—and there are a lot of them—are filled with old farm equipment. He says he’s trying to show the evolution of farm machines in New England from as far back as he can go, up through the 1960s. He says he figures someone else can carry on after that.

To be honest, historical collections don’t interest me very much. But Fred’s collection does. We picked our way together through miles of plows and cultivators and buggies and logging sleighs, in barns that mostly Fred built or shored up himself. We didn’t talk very much. If there was hayseed still in the back of a sleigh by the time he hauled it home and up into the hay mow, it’s still there, and to Fred that’s part of the story. In other words, this is not a clean or polished collection. There’s still the feel of use on these objects. And my guess is, there are a lot of ghosts of old farmers in those barns at night, and they all know each other.

Fred and I talked for a couple days in the front parlor of his house, downstairs from the room he was born in ninety-four years ago. We talked about a lot of things. His father, his farm collection, the women in his life, his nine children, and some more ephemeral things. I guess we talked about the past, but to me these are not stories about the past at all. These stories come up out of a blood connection to a place.

Welcome.

Thank you to listener Lou Snyder for writing to me with stories about Fred. I love it when stories happen that way. See this

You can actually see Fred’s collection in this story from WCAX News.

To make a donation to Fred’s collection, send money to:

Fred Webster, 378 Webster Road, Coventry, Orleans, VT 05860

This summer there have been five bison attacks in Yellowstone National Park, the result of visitors taking selfies with bison in the background. Today on Fresh Air, an interview with author Sarah Miller. Her recent book, Bison Selfies, is a brave exploration into this new phenomenon. In this interview we discuss selfies, bison, and the American consciousness.

Credits

This article originally appeared in Jezebel in July, 2015. Sarah Miller writes for theawl.com, newyorker.com, time.com, thecut.com and others. She is not actually writing a book about bison selfies.

The Fresh Air music is by The Microscopic Septet

After reading Miller’s book, this listener was careful to follow safe bison-selfie procedures.

“In the cathedral, priests with long black beards and scarlet robes are gliding through the shadows…I feel faint. It’s the heat, the fatigue, frustration — whatever, but there’s a lump in my throat and my eyes are filling with tears. The cop is starting to make big signs of the cross in the air. If w don’t get out of here quick, we’re going to convert.”

This is a story from Larry Massett about a very, very long day in Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, in 2002.

This story aired originally on The Savvy Traveler in 2002, and on NPR’s Hearing Voices.

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This is an interview with a very old friend of mine, and the person who trained me as a private investigator. She taught me everything from basics like how to look up criminal records to the very advanced skills I learned. Susan Randall has been a PI in Vermont for fifteen years. She works on the some of the biggest cases in the state…and she’s really good. Susan can find anyone, and she can get them to talk about anything. And most of the time she’s working on fifty to seventy-five cases at the same time.

Last week I went over to her house. We lay in deck chairs in her back yard and we talked about the job. About crime, lawyers, and what it means to give so much of your life to exploring dark stories.

Susan Randall does criminal defense work in both federal and state court. She also does civil litigation. In the past ten years she’s started to focus on creative storytelling that’s necessary in sentencing mitigation work. She works primarily in Vermont but has worked all over the country. She runs Vermont Private Eye.

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Kevin DeMars estimates he’s been homeless ten times in his 58 years. I met with him in his apartment in Rutland, Vermont and we talked about why he’s been homeless so many times, and what it was like to live in the woods. It’s a difficult and raw conversation at times, and Kevin struggles with some mental health issues that he’s been working through in counseling for years. But he talks very clearly about what it’s like to be someone who can’t always live comfortably in the world of people.

Thanks

Big thanks to Scott Carrier for all his help.

Thanks to Joyce Cloutier of Veterans, Inc. for introducing me to Kevin and for all the great work she does.

Thanks to Freesound for the clock sounds I used in this show.

kuKendall Wild worked for nearly half a century at the Rutland Herald and he’s a legend in Vermont journalism. He died on April 2, 2015. By all accounts he was eccentric, competitive, and utterly committed to getting the story…and getting it first. Wild was the paper’s managing editor all through the sixties and seventies. There was a whole generation of journalists who came up through the ranks under Kendall and they went on to become formidable journalists, writers and political heavies in their own right. I invited a few of them who are still in the area to come sit on Bill Porter’s couch in Montpelier and tell some stories.  So they did. They talked about the wild ride of working under Kendall, and they talked about what it was like to work in journalism during one of Vermont’s most exciting and tumultuous chapters in politics. They also talk about beer. Come listen.

If you have a story of your own, or a comment you’d like to make, just go to the bottom of the show page and comment there. It’s always nice to hear from you.

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Story Contributors:

Bill Porter worked with Ken Wild for 20 years, first at the Rutland Herald and later at the Times-Argus in Barre, and remained an admiring friend until Kendall’s death.

Nick Marro worked as a reporter at the Rutland Herald from 1967 to 1972 and then moved to the Barre Times-Argus when Bill Porter became managing editor.  He went to the Vermont Press Bureau as a reporter in 1974, was Bureau Chief from 1980 to 1983, and then he was a reporter in the Press Bureau in the 1990’s.

Howard Coffin was a reporter for the Rutland Herald from 1996 to 1978, hired by Kendall. After that he acted as news director for Dartmouth College and UVM, and press secretary for U. S. Senator James Jeffords. Howard has written nine books, including four on Vermont’s Civil War history. He lives in Montpelier.

Glenn Gershaneck worked with the Rutland Herald from 1970 – 1978, then at the Times-Argus from 1983 – 1985. He went on to work as press secretary for Senator Robert Stafford, Governor Richard Snelling and Governor Howard Dean. He’s acted as both the secretary and deputy secretary for the Agency of Transportation, the deputy secretary for the Agency of Administration, and the deputy state auditor.

Ruth Porter is a fiction and writer and is married to Bill Porter.

Irene Racz worked for the papers from late 1974 until 1985. She and Allen Gilbert then became partners in a consulting business called PressKit, which offered writing, editing, media relations, and related services to clients in mostly the government and nonprofit sectors. In 1997, she left PressKit to become public affairs director at Vermont Student Assistance Corporation. She has been enjoying retirement since 2013.

Tom Slayton worked as reporter and editor for the Rutland Herald and Times-Argus for 20 years, from 1964 to 1984. For 10 years during that time, he was Vermont correspondent for the Boston Globe. For the subsequent 21 years, he was editor-in-chief of Vermont Life magazine. He’s been awarded honorary doctorates from the University of Vermont, Southern Vermont College, and Sterling College. He was awarded the Franklin Fairbanks Award, which recognizes those making a significant contribution to the cultural life of the state.

Allen Gilbert worked with Kendall at the Rutland Herald from 1976 to 1983. He served as a reporter, city desk editor and assistant Sunday editor. He went on to teach for three years at a German university with other former journalists, then partnered with Irene Racz to establish PressKit, a policy writing and research firm. In 2004, Allen became executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union in Vermont, where he still works today.

Thanks also to Robby Porter.

Thanks also to A.J. Marro and the Rutland Herald for letting me run photos from their archive.

Kendall and Bill Porter at Nick Marro’s wedding. Drinking Schlitz.

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Here’s a show from Larry Massett about cars. And honor.

Larry owns two Porsches, and he talks about them a lot. In fact it’s almost all he ever talks about. His friend, Joe Frank, is a BMW man.

Which is the superior car? The Porsche? The BMW?  Joe and Larry have agreed to decide this with a race. But in the meantime, they’re just going to go on and on and on about their cars. Welcome.

Joe Frank is a writer, producer, and story savant. Like if you were making a pyramid of all the great storytellers you’ve ever heard, he’d be floating just a little above the top of the pyramid. Which his pretty high up there. You can hear he work here….

Thank you to Lisa Miller for filming the race, which you can see below.

Music for this show is by Redvers West-Boyle and Dark Fire

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This was my first year as a soccer mom and I’m here to tell you, it’s harder than it looks. I never played team sports, I still don’t really understand soccer, and I spent an entire season screaming ‘GET IT IN THE BASKET!’

Being a soccer mom is weirdly emotional in ways I hadn’t anticipated. I’ve experienced exultation and shame and misery and anger. There are long periods of waiting around. And lots of stinky socks. And sometimes it’s so beautiful to watch the game that it’s made me cry. Secretly. In my Walmart foldout chair.

This show features two area experts—my son’s coach and my sister, a veteran soccer mom. It’s a show about a beautiful sport and it’s also about parenting and shame and humility. And cow bells.

More about the Experts and the Music

Craig Stone is a native of Newcastle, England. He came to the USA as a college student, playing four years of college soccer at the Division 1 University of Evansville, Indiana.  Following school, Stone coached in the Washington D.C area for 10-years –as well as moonlighting as an online editor, producer and manager with Education Week, a national publication focusing on K-12 education–before moving to Vermont in 2009 and joining the state’s Olympic Development Program staff; he also coached with Capital Soccer Club, a community-based travel club based in Montpelier, Vermont.

Stone is a staff coach with the U.S. ODP Region 1 Boys U13 team–the Vermont Olympic Development program, and also Head Coach & co-founder of the Vermont ODP U-12 Academy. He also still attempts to play the game as often as possible, but with a continual decline in quality. He is married to Alison Milbury Stone, and has one son, Ned.

Melissa Burroughs is a soccer mom and teacher at St. Johnsbury Academy in St. Johnsbury, Vermont. She no longer employs the cowbells at games, though she doesn’t rule it out.

 Jeff Burroughs is the Assistant Headmaster at St. Johnsbury Academy in St. Johnsbury, Vermont, and he coaches the girls Varsity team at the Academy. He holds a Premier Diploma from NSCAA. He is famously quiet at games.

Music for this show is from The New Year, an awesome band. You’ll find links to where you can purchase the music below. Mike Donofrio is the bass player and he is my friend and he is so good.

For the last couple years, in addition to producing this show, I’ve also been doing interviews for an organization called The Wake Up to Dying Project. The basic goal of the project is to encourage people to think and talk more about the fact that we die, and at the heart of the project is a sound exhibit that features audio stories–lots and lots of them. Last month I did an interview for this project with a mother who had lost a baby after three weeks of life. I was incredibly nervous about this interview, and I realized that I was worried that by talking about the loss of this child, I’d feel even more afraid of it than I already do with my own son. I didn’t want to be that close to something that scared me so much.

But when I left the interview I felt strangely comforted. There is something comforting in talking about this thing we try so hard not to think about. And though there’s much sadness, and confusion, and grief in this story, there’s also tremendous resilience and love.

This is Susan Wahlrab. She’s a painter and she lives with her family in the deep woods of Calais Vermont. Eighteen years ago she lost her son, Grayson, to a virus after three weeks of life. Here are excerpts from our conversation.

The painting you see featured on this page is by Susan Wahlrab. It’s called What Are You Opening To

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Here’s a story from Otto Trautz of Cabot, Vermont. It takes place in 1966 and starts with a phone call and a very compelling proposition.

This story was originally told at extempo, central Vermont’s live storytelling event produced by the wondrous Jen Dole. You can find more stories at: www.extempoVT.com.

I was meeting a friend at a coffee shop and a song came on the radio that I hadn’t heard since I was in my late twenties. It reminded me of a time when I’d stay up all night long with friends, talking and drinking around bonfires. It was before children and spouses, and before everyone moved to wherever it is they went. It was a time when we had endless amounts of time.

So when I heard this song after so long, I remembered this time. And it hadn’t occurred to me until right then, twenty years later, standing in this coffee shop, that that time was over. And twenty years had passed.

It all happened so…gradually.

In this show, you’ll hear from women of all ages, from five to eighty-five. They talk about how they imagine their lives will be, how their lives are, and how their lives have been.

Welcome!

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Credits

I produced this program with my great friend Tamar Cole, who is a screenwriter, playwright and writing coach. She lives in Montpelier, Vermont

Many thanks to these great people for their time and their insights:

Mary Wesley

Lee Casagrande

Bess O’Brien

Mary Jacobsen

Leda Schubert

Marilyn Skoglund

Helen Rose Warshovsky (photographed above…)

Brenna Christianson

Aine Fannon

It’s time again for a sampling from the Barre and Montpelier police logs, as reported in the Times Argus. This month there were a number of disturbing animal reports. Sick raccoons, catatonic woodchucks, and more. Also, a number of naked children. Come listen if you dare.

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Scott’s podcast, Home of the Brave, is great, and I highly recommend you subscribe to it. He’s one of the most interesting radio producers in this dimension.

Music by Hayvanlar Alemi. The song is titled Crossroad Metamorphosis

Radio production and private investigation have a lot in common. You ask questions, find out what happened, and try to figure out why. This is a show I made with Larry Massett for NPR’s Hearing Voices in 2011. None of the people you hear in this story were investigation clients of mine where they did pardons according to https://nationalpardon.org/pardons-canada/. They were all young men on furlough, putting their lives together after doing time in prison. Also, all of the case stories you hear have been fictionalized to protect the privacy of legal clients. In addition, Working with a car accident lawyer Maryland can make a significant difference in your ability to successfully file your claim, deal with aggressive insurance companies, and pursue your.

Warning: There are references to sex and violence in this story, and it may not be appropriate for children.

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A commentary from Marc Estrin about the three things he learned in twenty-five years of school.

The only three things.

Marc Estrin is a writer, cellist, and political activist who lives in Burlington, Vermont. His most recent book, And Kings Shall Be Thy Nursing Fathers, features the ruminations of Tchaikovsky’s corpse. You can find it on Amazon here, or order it from a local bookstore.

Marc Estrin’s Novels
The Prison Notebooks of Alan Krieger (Terrorist)
When the Gods Come Home to Roost
Tsim-tsum
The Good Doctor Guillotin
The Annotated Nose
Skulk
The Lamentations of Julius Marantz
Golem Song
The Education of Arnold Hitler
Insect Dreams, the Half Life of Gregor Samsa

Marc Estrin’s Memoir
Rehearsing With Gods: Photographs and Essays on the Bread & Puppet Theater (with Ron Simon, photographer)

Larry Massett was driving up through northern California toward Oregon and ended up spending a little more time at Mt. Shasta than he’d had in mind, thankfully he had his flashlight in his trunk. Was it coincidence? Was it fate that drew Larry to one of the country’s most famous destinations for the spiritually curious?

In this story you’ll hear from some naked meditators, UFO solicitors, and there’s some howling at the moon. Leave a comment if you’ve got one.  It’s always nice to hear from you.

Thanks to Barrett Golding of Hearing Voices for letting me run this show, and also for spending time on the audio before sending it to me.

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Michael Chorney is a self taught musician, arranger and composer. If you asked me what genre of music he makes, I’d have no idea. All of them? None of them?

He spent years mastering different musical genres in both guitar and baritone sax. He’s played British Isles-inspired folk music, improvisational jazz, soul, rock. And over the years, in his own music, the lines between these genres have gotten really blurry. And that’s how he wants it, an ambiguous audio interface is a fun one, he says. Michael has been the bandleader of some of the most lush, uncategorizable music in this state. Bands like viperHouse, Magic City, Orchid, the So Called Jazz Sextet, and Hollar General.

I talked with him at his house, a renovated goose coop in Lincoln Vermont, and one of the quietest places on earth—or so he says. We talk about his music and growing up in Buffalo and driving to gigs with a blownout muffler. He talks about his collaboration with Anais Mitchell on the 2010 folk opera, Hadestown.

And he sings. You’ll hear a lot of music this hour, some of it from his upcoming album with Hollar General.

The photo here by Jay Sansome. Black and white photo of Michael is by John M Moyers.

This is a show about love, family and dementia. Part one features a show I made in 2008 about one family’s experience living with an elderly mother’s progressive dementia. Part two features an interview with one of the story’s main characters, Greg Sharrow, about what’s changed, and what he’s learned, in the five years since we made After the Forgetting.

After the Forgetting features Greg Sharrow, Bob Hooker, and Marjorie Sharrow. Greg did a lot of marvelous interviews with his mother for this show.

Bob and Marj

Greg and Marj

This is an essay about cooking and all the shame and rage and frustration that can accompany this art. Writer Sarah Miller describes her desire to be loved and appreciated for her fig galettes, and her decision to quit cooking altogether.

Sarah is the author of the novels Inside the Mind of Gideon Rayburn and The Other Girl, and she contributed to the bestseller The Bitch in the House. She has written for Details, Lucky, Marie Claire, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times and The Guardian.

Also thanks to Ralph Henson of KVMR in Nevada City California for recording the story.

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Today, a true story about two strangers who meet and talk very late one night on a northbound NYC subway. The story is from Otto Trautz, and was originally told live on stage at extempo, central Vermont’s totally excellent live storytelling event.

And if my name were Otto Trautz, I’d have great stories too.

Welcome.

To hear more true stories live onstage, visit extempo’s website here.

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Into Tuesday we’ll see gusty winds, an early morning cold front east of Route 2 and a massive low pressure system delivering winter-like temperatures and moderate rain east of the Greens. Here are Eyes on the Sky.

Eyes on the Sky was written by Montpelier resident Linda Coble.

And thank you to the brave meteorologists at Eye On the Sky, who have delivered so much bad news, so well, for so long. Winters wouldn’t be the same without you.

Welcome to The Mudroom. This is a commentary from Hilton Dier of Middlesex, Vermont. He proposes that much of Vermont politics is really about who has enough time and money to…show up.

Please fling us your comments at the bottom of this page! We love to hear from you.

Hilton is a renewable energy consultant and author of the incomparable blog, Minor Heresies using Advance Systems.

The Mudroom is a joint commentary series by Rumble Strip Vermont and The Dooryard.

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Ed Epstein is a portrait artist of some renown in these parts. But painting has comprised only a fraction of Ed’s artistic life. As a kid in the fifties he hitch hiked across the country with only a banjo and a few bucks.  He fell in love with the Bach cello suites and spent the next twenty years mastering the cello so he could play them. Ed has designed and built woodstoves, houses, and when his son showed interest in fishing, Ed built a boat so they could get out to that stand of reeds…where the bass are. Ed Epstein’s whole life has been an art project.

In this hour, we talk about the mysterious process of portrait painting…it’s difficulties and occasional satisfactions. But mostly in this hour, we talk about boats. Building them, sailing them for years, and what became of Ed’s beloved thirty foot schooner, Ruby.

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The beautiful photograph of Ed Epstein was taken by photographer Andrew Kline. More of his work can be seen here.

More of Ed Epstein’s work can be seen here.

Music this hour: The Cello Suites, by J.S. Bach, performed by Jan Vogler.

Unedited audio from the interview

There is a whole section of our interview that is not in this show, but well worth listening to, particularly if you’re interested in folk music. In it, Ed talks about his first forays out of New York City, and hitchhiking across the country in the early fifties with his banjo and I realized if I want my kid to have any sort of musical interests, my kid needs that, to see a few real live music legends himself, in person. Here it is:

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Self portrait from a picture taken of Ed in the early fifties.

The Sally Rubin

Jimmy the Iceman De Piro

Pan Trio

The Juniper Island, an 18′ standing lug yawl

Ed and Aryeh on the Sally Rubin, @1988

Tonight I was driving home from Montpelier with my son, and we were both happy because today really did feel like maybe spring will come this year, and we were listening to Miriam Bernardo sing. It was a recording I made of a house show a couple years ago. There’s something so beautiful to me about this live recording, and  I figured I’d share one of the songs with you. Here’s Miriam, and Michael Chorney on guitar and Rob Morse on bass. This is Love Came Here, by Lhasa de Sela.

Welcome to spring everyone.

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Upcoming Miriam shows:

April 4, Steady Betty at the lamp shop, Burlington. 9pm
April 17, Magic City at the Haybarn. 8-10pm
May 1, Waking Windows music festival in Winooski. Steady Betty 7:30pm
May 9, Betty Brew fest  at the big picture in Waitsfield. 10pm steady b.
June 4,6,7, Soloing with the Montpelier Chamber Orchestra. Unitarian Church. 7pm.

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The sock went missing in November, was encased in ice in someone’s driveway, and yesterday it was released. The end of winter is nigh everyone. This is for real.

It’s time again for a sampling from the Barre and Montpelier police logs, as reported in the Times Argus. This month saw a disproportionate number of shovel incidents. There were keys lost and found. A juvenile was out of control on Crest Street. Come listen.

The police log is read by radio producer Scott Carrier. Scott’s new podcast, Home of the Brave, has LAUNCHED, and I highly recommend you subscribe to it. He’s one of the most interesting radio producers anywhere. I’ve spent whole days binge-listening to his shows. It’s  time well spent.

Music by Hayvanlar Alemi. The song is titled Crossroad Metamorphosis

A couple months ago I ran a commentary by Marc Estrin called Poopy Old Man. In this commentary, he talks about feeling increasingly invisible to the people around him as he gets older. It’s a rather dark perspective on aging.

This is a response to that commentary, and offers a somewhat different perspective on getting older. Here’s a conversation between Larry Massett and Marianne Ross of Washington DC.

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Who are they?

Larry Massett is one of the world’s most interesting radio producers. He lives in Cabin John, MD.

Marianne Ross is the director of a multimedia company called Concerts in the Country, in Washington DC. She spends much of each summer in the Northeast Kingdom, working with Bread and Puppet Theater. Here’s Marianne:

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This is a conversation about love and objects. It’s from a late night conversation with my friend Clare Dolan. In the week leading up to Valentine’s Day, we sat on my couch and talked about a special kind of love that exists between people and objects. The conversation starts with Clare’s first friend in childhood…a small stuffed creature called Binny.

Clare is the curator at The Museum of Everyday Life in Glover, Vermont. It is a self-service museum located in her barn, and it ‘dedicates itself to deteriorating objects of no monetary value, but of immense ordinary-life consequence.’ The current exhibit is called Toothbrush from Twig to Bristle In All Its Expedient Beauty. Clare recently got so mad at her broken snowblower that she was moved to create a small, impromptu exhibit called Broken and Useless Snow Removal Devices of the Northeast Kingdom. I am including a couple pictures of the exhibit here, and some other pictures I like. If you have not been to the museum, do not dally. Do not wait. Put it on your bucket list. It will make you happy. Directions and more exhibit pictures are on her website.

Clare and her donkey, Nikolai

Raggedy Ann and Binny

One of my favorite exhibits in the toothbrush show.

A large, stabbed bear in the museum

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You can learn a lot about a place from the local police log. A couple weeks ago I was reading the Times Argus, and I read a police log that I was sure held some kind of message for me. There was a lost key, a found wallet, and a woman in yoga pants seen walking down Sumner Street. There was a dead deer missed by a car and a living deer hit. What could it mean?

I’m going to start running periodic police log shows. If you know of small newspapers around the state that run good police logs, leave a message at the bottom of the show page here. I’d love to hear about them.

This police log comes to you from the Barre Police, as published in the Times Argus. It is read by writer and radio producer Scott Carrier. Scott is coming out with a podcast of his own pretty soon, which is very good news. I will let you know when and where you can find it when it starts.

Here is a picture of Scott in sunglasses.

Music by Hayvanlar Alemi. The song is titled Crossroad Metamorphosis

From my house, if you take a left through the woods, then a right up a dirt road, and then another right up another dirt road, you come to a really old farmhouse. That’s where Leland lives, and where he’s thinking things over. Last week he agreed to talk with me about some of these things. Death, deep space, and Revolutionary War reenactments. Welcome.

The music in this show is from the remarkable Carla Kihlstedt. Learn more about her HERE.

Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, Quebec reenactment. Three generations of Kennedys.

 

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Here’s a short story about my son and piano practice and parental rage.

This is a show produced by Larry Massett, for NPR’s Hearing Voices. It features remarkable stories from Solidod, the last remaining member of her village of Mescalero Apache who lived on the edge of Death Valley. Here’s Larry’s introduction….

“When I first met Solidod she was living alone in a tiny room in a rather depressing subsidized-income apartment complex in Florida. She herself was anything but depressing, though. A few minutes after we met she showed me the little knife she carries with her in her buckskin purse. “But Solidod,” I said, “that’s kind of a dangerous knife, isn’t it?” I said- meaning, dangerous for an 80-year woman. “Yeah, it’s sharp, it came with a good knife sharpener” she laughed, “but it would be better if it was rusty. So the cut would get infected in case I stab somebody.”

Wow, tough lady. Tough, but also funny, curious, brimming with energy, and a world-class storyteller. As she told me about the adventures of her life I realized she’s been everywhere and done just about everything: horse-trainer, bodyguard, trans-Atlantic sailor, carpenter, gardener, artist, you name it. And she’s busy. She spends her days zipping around town selling the t-shirts she paints and the jewelry she makes, checking on old friends and chatting up new ones. Most people her age seem to be winding down; Solidod’s just getting started…”

Thank you Hearing Voices for allowing me to air this show. It’s a favorite.

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Here is a link to Solidod’s book.

This week’s episode is about one of life’s hardest and most humbling jobs. Parenting. You’ll hear stories about potty training, power struggles, living with teenagers, character-driven parenting, and negotiating new relationships with grown children. Plus some stories about beaches and dead birds.

The hour features two interviews. Melissa Burroughs is a mother and teacher, and has worked extensively with families. The show also features an interview with a mother of two grown daughters. She talks about how parenting changes when the kids have grown and gone. She prefers to go unnamed.

We live in a place where trucks are a kind of passion. It’s not overt. It’s an understated, Vermont kind of passion. According to TheCarStarter.com, Vermonters sometimes heat up when you get them talking about Ford vs. Chevy vs. Dodge. So I drove around and talked with some guys about trucks. Here’s what they said.

Leave a comment or story at the bottom of this show page!  We love to hear from you.

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Photo by Josh Larkin

We are all busy getting older, for better and for worse. Here is an unvarnished perspective on aging by author Marc Estrin.

Marc Estrin is a writer, cellist and political activist who lives in Burlington, Vermont. His most recent book, And Kings Shall Be Thy Nursing Fathers, features the ruminations of Tchaikovsky’s corpse. You can find it on Amazon here, or order it from a local bookstore.

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Marc Estrin’s Novels
The Prison Notebooks of Alan Krieger (Terrorist)
When the Gods Come Home to Roost
Tsim-tsum
The Good Doctor Guillotin
The Annotated Nose
Skulk
The Lamentations of Julius Marantz
Golem Song
The Education of Arnold Hitler
Insect Dreams, the Half Life of Gregor Samsa

Marc Estrin’s Memoir
Rehearsing With Gods: Photographs and Essays on the Bread & Puppet Theater (with Ron Simon, photographer)

Welcome to The Mudroom, a joint commentary series of Rumble Strip Vermont and The Dooryard.

In time for the holidays, we bring you a commentary about Buy Nothing Day, an annual day of protest against buying stuff.

Jessamyn West is a writer, blogger, librarian, and knower of many things technological and digital. She lives in Randolph, Vermont, and here she is standing on a bed.

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A Wiki link to Jessamyn…

A link to other links about Jessamyn

I don’t know what you’d call this. A commentary? A riff? An agricultural lament?

This is how Alan LePage started his show a few weeks ago, and I wanted to share it with you all.

Alan LePage is a legend around here in central Vermont. He’s a fourth generation Vermont farmer, mentor to many up and coming market gardeners, and he’s the host of one of WGDR’s most popular shows, The Curse of the Golden Turnip. For the past few months, we’ve been working on getting his show out into the world as a podcast. This means I’ve been editing a two hour show down to one hour, which is no easy task. I’m either cutting a fascinating bit about the history of broccoli in North America, or some offhand advice about how to build a cold frame out of junk in your garage. Alan gets great guests and the show is always packed with great information and stories. If you’re at all interested in gardening, I encourage you to tune in. And if you want to be apprised of our podcast progress, join the show’s Facebook page and we’ll let you know when the podcast becomes available.

Be confident in your decisions by checking out your provider’s top areas of care, education, patient reviews and more. Look for Dr. Matthew Galumbeck for more details.

You can also listen to an interview I did with Alan last year.

The beautiful photo you see above is by Josh Larkin.

This is a story produced by my friend Larry Massett. A few years ago Larry took a trip with public radio personality Andre Codrescu. Andre grew up in Romania in times of hardship. After twenty years as an American citizen, he feels he’s lost the local taste of the land where he spent his youth. Larry Massett records the story of a man now in the role of “tourist” in his radically changed native land.

THANKS TO HEARING VOICES

This program originally aired on Hearing Voices, and airs on Rumble Strip Vermont with permission by Larry Massett and Barrett Golding. Thank you both for letting me share this. It’s one of my favorite stories and it’s one I listen to over and over.

And over.

And over.

Larry wearing a hat in Montana

From the Saviour’s conception to offerings of gold, Frankenstein and myrrh, six year old Erin Magill of Moretown, Vermont tells her version of the Christmas story, with help from her creche figures.

I made this story some years ago. NOW Erin Magill is a COMPOSER, and you can hear her work HERE. Go Erin!!!

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This is a show about a game my son loves that I don’t understand. At all. It’s called Magic: The Gathering, and it’s a card game that’s sort of a cross between Dungeons and Dragons and chess. It involves spells and enchantments and creatures and math and strategy. The game was born in 1993, and millions of people play it around the world.

And even though I don’t understand the game, I appreciate that it happens between real people, in person. Hugely enthusiastic players, ranging in age from around seven to forty-five, get together and battle it out, trade cards, and talk about creature powers. I’ve been taking my son to a Friday night game in Montpelier, Vermont–held at the Book Garden. Last time we went, instead of sitting in a foldout chair for 3 hours, I recorded interviews with some of the players.

This show won’t explain the game. That is a task far beyond my skill. Instead, it will introduce you to some of the culture around this game, and the passion of its players. Game. ON.

Thanks

Big thanks to the Book Garden in Montpelier, and to Keith McCusker for setting me up in a comfortable room to do some interviews. And thanks to all the generous players who shared their stories with me.

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When my son was four I joined a temporary rock band. It was humiliating and terrible and I was middle aged and didn’t know what to do with my arms. I wanted to quit. This is a commentary about why I didn’t quit, and why it’s important to risk failure as an example for our kids.

This is an unedited interview I did with a young man in Barre, Vermont in 2011. He gave me permission to use this tape, but I’ve chosen not to use his name in order to protect his privacy. I’ll call him ‘O’.

I had interviewed O once before, when he was on furlough and living in Barre. About a year after that first interview I interviewed him again. I was curious about how he was doing after having maxed out his jail sentence. We met at the apartment he was living in with his girlfriend and daughter.

According to O, many in his family–his dad, grandfather, uncle, cousins–have been in and out of jail for as long as he can remember. I wanted to know how this family history affected his thoughts about his own life prospects.

I go back to this tape over and over. Pieces of it show up in other stories I’ve made, but there is more ‘content’ in this raw tape than any story I could write or edit.

Warning: There are references to sex and violence in this interview.

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Welcome to the Mudroom, a joint commentary series of Rumble Strip Vermont and The Dooryard.

Israel has been a substantial recipient of US foreign aid since the state’s inception. According to Mark Hage, Israel is also the recipient of some of Vermont’s finest ice cream, which is sold in Israeli settlements. Do we have a social responsibility to rally against Ben & Jerry’s presence in the Israeli occupied territories?

Mark Hage is a Palestine solidarity activist with Vermonters for a Just Peace in Palestine/Israel. He lives in Montpelier, Vermont. You can learn more about VTJP and its Ben & Jerry’s campaign, click on the link below.

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Jamie Cope’s house is filled with pictures of people…pictures so beautiful you practically want to lick them. Or at least I do. They are all black and white, and all printed with exquisite attention to light and shadow. There is an amazing intimacy in her portraits, as though she’s looking INTO the people she’s photographing, and they’re letting her. I couldn’t help wondering how she did it. What were they talking about? How did she catch them being so much…themselves?

We sat on her couch one long, sunny fall day in Montpelier and talked for the better part of an afternoon–about photography, marriage, and eating tacos on Olvera Street in Los Angeles. Come listen…

The photographs we talk about in the interview are all featured below, in the order in which we speak about them.

Thank you!

A very special thanks to John Snell and Jamie Cope for allowing me to feature these photographs! Thank you also to Rob Spring.

This program is brought to you in part by a grant from WGDR, Goddard College and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Also big thanks to David Schulman for allowing me to feature a track from his new album, Raise It Up, which you can find here.

Maud Morgan, artist

 

Harold Edgerton, Scientist, inventor of the strobe, MIT

 

Giselle

President of Raytheon

Wisconsin Friends

Jamie Cope

Town is a sound exhibit that I produced for the Kent Museum in Calais, Vermont. It weaves together personal stories and memories about growing up in Calais, and natural sounds recorded around town.

There’s no start or finish to these stories. It’s meant to be a kind of sonic wallpaper. In this audio, you hear reference to the former owner of the Kent Museum building, Louise Andrews Kent, and you hear her granddaughters talk about concerts once held upstairs in the ballroom, and her creation of the small dioramas downstairs. You also hear stories about mill fires, walking barefoot in summer, marriage proposals and God…

[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/171496420″ params=”color=ff5500&inverse=false&auto_play=false&show_user=true” width=”100%” height=”20″ iframe=”true” /]

THANKS: I’d like to thank the Calais area residents who shared their time and stories with me. They are: Geraldine Gilman, Don Singleton, Erlene Leonard, Janet Ancel, Olivia Gay, Stanley Fitch, Elaine Fitch and Elliott Morse.

The photos of the Kent you see here are provided by Nel Emlen. Thank you Nel!

And finally, all praise to the People of Kent! Over the past seven years, a team of hugely dedicated folks have brought art to this old, historical tavern and general store in the heart of our town. There’s a magic about that building. Ghosts and brilliant late afternoon light. Exposed lath and old plaster, weird pink closets and teal floors and bowls of plastic grapes in tucked away places, notes to self written on the wall from 1921, ancient wallpaper and lots and lots of clip lamps to light the art. (I’m a special fan of the clip lamps…)

The love these folks at the Kent feel for the building comes through in the way they present the artwork, and it’s palpable…which just makes the whole experience more fun than most art exhibits. So thank you People of Kent. We’ll see you next year.

This is a raw recording of my son teaching me how to play a card game called Magic. Does anyone know what he’s talking about? Please advise.

And featuring a picture of a cruel pinata in Hancock, Vermont, crafted by my friend Stacey at The Dooryard.

[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/167881968″ params=”color=ff5500&inverse=false&auto_play=false&show_user=true” width=”100%” height=”20″ iframe=”true” /]

Rodney and Theresa Elmer are a taxidermy power duo in Northfield, Vermont. In this interview, they talk about the art and psychology of mounting animals, and why they hunt.

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Credits:
Photos by Josh Larkin.
Music for this show from Katie Trautz and Julia Wayne of the Vermont duo Mayfly. Links to more of their work below.
Link to Mountain Deer Taxidermy website below….

And please write a comment on this show if you have one!! Comments and STORIES are always welcome. Just go to the bottom of this page, and write in the ‘Leave a Reply’ box. Thank you!

The farther you go from home, the stranger things get.

Here is a story by Larry Massett about the life and work of Paul Bowles.

This program originally aired on Hearing Voices, home to some of the best radio anywhere….

Jessamyn West studies and writes about the digital divide and she solves technology problems for a living. This summer she found herself unemployed, and forced to use some of the same state agency websites she’d been helping others to use–namely, Vermont Health Connect, and the Department of Labor.

The results were not pretty. Here’s a commentary about it.

[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/168089366″ params=”color=ff5500&inverse=false&auto_play=false&show_user=true” width=”100%” height=”20″ iframe=”true” /]

The Mudroom is a joint commentary series of Rumble Strip Vermont and The Dooryard.

Photo of Jessamyn by Liz West.

A Wiki link to Jessamyn…

For generations of Vermonters, Thursday nights in the summer have meant one thing….Thunder Road.
This quarter mile short track opened in 1960 and it’s home to some of the most passionate drivers and fans you’re likely to find anywhere. In these shows and outtakes, you’ll hear from some of the drivers and from Thunder Road co-owners and ring leaders, Ken Squier and Tom Curley. There are thrills and heartbreaks and heated coils and a lot of history. There’s even some opera. Welcome.

Shows (in the box above)
Thunder Road: Features Donny Yates, Tommy Thunder, Dave Campbell, Dave Pembroke, Ken Squier, and Tom Curley
Milk Bowl: Tom Curley talks about the culminating race of the season, the Milk Bowl.
An Interview with Tom Curley: I thought he’d give me five minutes. Turns out he let me stay longer and he said some remarkable things…about his work, his co-conspirator Ken Squier, and lots more. Plus there’s sound recorded from the booth during the Milk Bowl, 2013. This is the conversation from which I pulled tape for the other stories, so you’ll hear some familiar riffs, but I figured folks might like to hear Tom’s full interview.

Outtakes (in the box below)
Great segments from the interviews, and sounds recorded at Thunder Road. Enjoy!

Thanks:
A big thanks to Larry Massett. He was the editor for both Thunder Road and Milk Bowl and he is the greatest.

Also big thanks to Colin McCaffrey, who mixed these shows so expertly. And to Tread Hunter for best tires. And patiently…..

Thanks to you both.

 

 

Welcome to The Mud Room, a joint commentary series from Rumble Strip Vermont and The Dooryard.

A late night shopping cart reminds Marc Estrin of a song from Schubert’s song cycle, Winterreise (Winter Journey).

Marc Estrin is a writer, cellist and political activist who lives in Burlington, Vermont.

Marc Estrin’s Novels
The Prison Notebooks of Alan Krieger (Terrorist)
When the Gods Come Home to Roost
Tsim-tsum
The Good Doctor Guillotin
The Annotated Nose
Skulk
The Lamentations of Julius Marantz
Golem Song
The Education of Arnold Hitler
Insect Dreams, the Half Life of Gregor Samsa

Marc Estrin’s Memoir
Rehearsing With Gods: Photographs and Essays on the Bread & Puppet Theater (with Ron Simon, photographer)

[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/158099219″ params=”color=ff5500&inverse=false&auto_play=false&show_user=true” width=”100%” height=”20″ iframe=”true” /]

Welcome to The Mud Room, a joint commentary series from Rumble Strip Vermont and The Dooryard.

This is A Man of Wealth and Taste, a commentary in response to Dick Cheney’s editorial in the Wall Street Journal on June 17, 2014. It is written by Robby Porter. Robby is a woodworker and hydro plant operator and lives in Adamant, Vermont.

Please post and sling your comments at the bottom of this page. We love to hear from you.

Welcome to The Mud Room, a joint commentary project of Rumble Strip Vermont and The Dooryard.

In this first commentary we bring you Walt Amses, a writer and former educator in North Calais, Vermont. The essay is called The 17 Dollar Tomato, and it welcomes us to the special tyranny of gardening season in Vermont.

Send us  your tired and poor

We want to hear your stories of gardens past and present. Your failed attempts, your bolted greens. Tell us about your woodchuck problems,  your canning burns, your rotten tomatoes, your garden rock collections. Or maybe some trick of equanimity you know, that might help us all. Comment below. We love to hear from you.

For generations of Vermonters, Thursday nights in the summer have meant one thing….Thunder Road.
This quarter mile short track opened in 1960 and it’s home to some of the most passionate drivers and fans you’re likely to find anywhere. In this show, owner Tom Curley talks about the culminating race of the season, the Milk Bowl.

Everyone’s heard about Burning Man, the counter-cultural festival held every summer in Black Rock City Nevada. Sex, drugs, monumental installations….you know all about it. But you may not know about Boring Man, the counter-counter-cultural festival that’s sort of a mirror image of Burning Man. Here’s Larry Massett with a report from last year’s Boring Man.

I went to a friend’s house the other night and she led me into her den where her best wood stove was and she sighed and said, ‘And this is where I live.’

It’s been a long winter and a lot of us have spent the better part of four months huddled around our stoves. I walked around Calais and asked people to talk about their firebuilding methods, their stoves, and their moods.

A dry wall is built with no mortar. The stones are carefully selected and they interlock and gravity holds them in place. The Great Wall of China was built this way. Scott Carrier’s wall was built this way too. Here is his story.

For the last year I’ve been conducting interviews about death and dying for The Wake Up to Dying Project–a project that encourages people to think, and talk about death and dying.  The goal is to help people be a little more prepared, both practically and emotionally, for our own deaths, and the deaths of loved ones.  Today’s show features segments from an interview with Tim Kasten of Middlesex, VT. Tim has experienced more death in his family than many of us and he has significant medical conditions of his own. Death has become a pressing consideration for him, and as both a Buddhist and scientist, he approaches the subject with intense curiosity. Here are segments from our conversation.

Here is one final deer story, recorded this year after youth hunting weekend. Jack Fannon, 12, went out hunting on his parents’ land in Calais, with friend, mentor, and hunter safety instructor Bob Raskevitz. Here’s what happened….

Alan LePage has been an organic vegetable gardener in central Vermont for over thirty years–long before anyone cared much about organic farming–long, long before words like ‘sustainable’, ‘local’, ‘artisinal’ started being used, ad nauseam. His family has farmed the same piece of land since the civil war. Alan is also an expert mushroom forager, mentor, activist and philosopher. He has a voracious mind and he’s impossible to categorize, except perhaps as an event. I had to interview him twice. I hope you enjoy this interview. I sure did.

You can hear Alan LePage every Sunday morning on WGDR, 91.1, from 6:00 – 9:00 AM. The show is called The Curse of the Golden Turnip. You’ll hear music, and endlessly great advice and stories about agriculture, foraging, and agricultural policy.

[Amazing] photos are by Josh Larkin. Link to more of his work below.