PODCAST

Rumble Strip

Erica Heilman / Rumble Strip, Erica Heilman

Good conversation that takes its time, hosted by Erica Heilman.

society & culture places & travel

All Episodes

00:19:24

Crime and Punishment Under Trump

Rumble Strip ·

2017/06/07

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

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00:12:15

Leland is Almost Done Seventh Grade

Rumble Strip ·

2017/05/11

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

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00:18:09

We Are Sending You Light

Rumble Strip ·

2017/04/28

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

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00:34:23

Robert Ford Last Ambassador

Rumble Strip ·

2017/04/13

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

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00:18:30

Hunger is Boring

Rumble Strip ·

2017/04/03

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

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00:21:55

The Wildlife

Rumble Strip ·

2017/03/22

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

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00:21:17

Judge Cashman

Rumble Strip ·

2017/03/08

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

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00:16:49

Your Neighbor

Rumble Strip ·

2017/02/24

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

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00:20:22

Deep Stealth Mode

Rumble Strip ·

2017/02/14

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

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00:16:49

Dunkin’ Donuts

Rumble Strip ·

2017/01/31

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

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00:29:15

Benedict Arnold’s Leg

Rumble Strip ·

2017/01/03

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

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00:09:45

Seasonal Update from the Keens!

Rumble Strip ·

2016/12/20

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

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00:08:23

Nicholas is Waiting

Rumble Strip ·

2016/12/16

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

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00:11:29

Lentils Suck

Rumble Strip ·

2016/11/30

“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

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00:03:27

Hot Bird. Again.

Rumble Strip ·

2016/11/24

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.

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00:20:30

Charlie Hunter Paints Outside

Rumble Strip ·

2016/11/10

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

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00:17:59

The Special Olympics Are Awesome

Rumble Strip ·

2016/10/25

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

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00:25:49

Jim Rooney

Rumble Strip ·

2016/10/18

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

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00:31:15

When the Food Runs Out

Rumble Strip ·

2016/09/24

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

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00:15:27

Jubal. Tail End of the Old School.

Rumble Strip ·

2016/09/09

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

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