We're marking the 20th birthday of podcasting in conversation with Erica Heilmann, a prize practitioner.

Here we are, Erica in Pitchham, Vermont, settled 1776 in the Northeast Kingdom, up toward Canada.

I seek you out because I feel you are the great artist emerging in this young medium.

People speak of podcasting as radio on the internet, but it's really something else.

It can't be like pen-palling with strangers, except that the human voice goes far and wide to the world.

And your podcast, RumbleStrip, shows just how deep it can go.

You get regular reminders talking, and then you listen and edit their voices for the almost religious attention and care.

What strikes your listeners is the ring of truth, first and last, in your work.

I want to hear about the art in it, the trick if there is one.

I think desperation?

This sounds a little polyena, but I believe it is true, which is that everybody I talk with knows something that if I knew it, I could get through my day better.

That everybody is an expert in their own life.

And so if they could just, in part, their particular singular expertise, then I could figure out what's going on.

And I think that makes it easy to listen because you're trying to figure out what it is somebody knows that you don't know.

And that's children, and that's everybody. That's the motor.

So it's basically selfish. It's a selfish pursuit that it's for me that there's something I can glean that will help me get through my life a little easier.

Credit yourself as the enabler, though, the liberator of these voices.

They do come out sounding experienced, confident, decided in their views, but sometimes as if they hadn't even, they'd never been asked about it before.

Well, that's when you know, I mean, in a conversation, when you arrive at a place with someone where you're both stumped, then you know you've arrived somewhere interesting.

It's like there's, you've come to another country that we are talking, we're throwing a ball back and forth and back and forth.

And then we drop it, and you don't know the question, and I don't know the answer.

And then we're somewhere new. We're somewhere that no one's ever been before, because it's you and me in this moment, and we are wondering what to do next.

...