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. Cre...
Sep 24, 2017•19 min•Ep. 111
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.
Sep 01, 2017•47 min•Ep. 107
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 Y...
Jul 28, 2017•12 min•Ep. 106
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 t...
Jul 08, 2017•18 min•Ep. 147
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 b...
Jun 29, 2017•31 min•Ep. 160
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 .
Jun 19, 2017•3 min•Ep. 110
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 lo...
Jun 07, 2017•19 min•Ep. 104
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 thir...
May 11, 2017•12 min•Ep. 97
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 pro...
Apr 28, 2017•18 min•Ep. 100
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 r...
Apr 13, 2017•34 min•Ep. 143
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 v...
Apr 03, 2017•19 min•Ep. 101
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...
Mar 22, 2017•22 min•Ep. 93
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 ...
Mar 08, 2017•21 min•Ep. 96
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 ...
Feb 24, 2017•17 min•Ep. 102
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 interes...
Feb 14, 2017•20 min•Ep. 95
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 w...
Jan 31, 2017•17 min•Ep. 115
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 t...
Jan 03, 2017•29 min•Ep. 108
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....
Dec 20, 2016•10 min•Ep. 90
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...
Dec 16, 2016•8 min•Ep. 91
“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 calle...
Nov 30, 2016•11 min•Ep. 83
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 .
Nov 24, 2016•3 min•Ep. 88
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 ...
Nov 10, 2016•21 min•Ep. 84
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 ...
Oct 25, 2016•18 min•Ep. 159
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 t...
Oct 18, 2016•26 min•Ep. 82
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 pe...
Sep 24, 2016•31 min•Ep. 141
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...
Sep 09, 2016•15 min•Ep. 81
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....
Aug 22, 2016•33 min•Ep. 103
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....
Aug 10, 2016•4 min•Ep. 87
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,...
Jul 30, 2016•34 min•Ep. 166
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. ...
Jul 02, 2016•10 min•Ep. 149
