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 rur...
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 th...
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 interesti...
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 c...
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 e...
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...
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 ...
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 abo...
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 a...
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 t...
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. ...
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...
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...
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 t...
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 d...
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…i...
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 com...
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, Pe...
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) uned...
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) uned...
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 abou...
