Rumble Strip

This is a conversation with Jay Allison about the recent attack on the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Recently, Congress passed a rescission bill that eliminates $9 billion in previously allocated funding, including $1.1 billion for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), which effectively defunds public media, which includes NPR, PBS and member stations around the country. This is a conversation about what that means and what we stand to lose. Jay Allison has been working in and around public radio since it’s beginnings a half century ago. He's been an independent public radio producer, journalist, and teacher since the 1970s. He is the founder of Transom, where I learned to make radio, and 25 years ago he founded WCAI, a public radio station in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Jay's 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.

Transcribed - Published: 30 July 2025

No. 10 Pond is where I go swimming in the summer. All kinds of people go there. Kids, grownups, grandparents, mothers and fathers, dogs. But ALWAYS there is a group of ladies....standing thigh deep in the pond, talking together. All over the world since the beginning of time, ladies of a certain age have been standing thigh deep in water together, talking. It’s a scientific fact. So here in my town, for hundreds of years--even before recorded history--pieces of these ladies conversations have been drifting around on the pond. This is a show about No. 10 Pond, and the ladies who stand in it.

Transcribed - Published: 28 July 2025

This is the last episode in season 6 of What Class are You?, a periodic series I make for Vermont Public. Susan Ritz grew up in a wealthy family in Minnesota. For the past 36 years, she's lived in central Vermont, where she writes books and is an active philanthropist. In this episode of "What class are you?" we talk about the surprising complexities of having more than most.

Transcribed - Published: 18 July 2025

Today, episode 4 of season SIX of What Class are You?, a periodic series I make for Vermont Public about living in the American class system. In today’s episode, we revisit Kytreana Patrick, who was a guest from the first class series back in 2022. Back then, Kytreana was working as a cashier at Olney’s general store in Orleans, Vermont. Since then, Kytreana’s gotten a job at a factory that manufactures combat helmets. She’s got a small apartment in Newport, and this past January she gave birth to her first child, a daughter, Emberlyn.

Transcribed - Published: 17 July 2025

Dan Sedon has been working as a criminal defense attorney in Vermont, where he works with poor people and rich people and all the people in between. In this latest episode of What Class are You?, reporter Erica Heilman talks with Dan about what this line of work has taught him about the American class system.

Transcribed - Published: 16 July 2025

What Class Are You? is a periodic series I make for Vermont Public about our lives in the American class system. Sharon Plumb works for a statewide nonprofit in the outdoor recreation sector. She lives in East Montpelier with her husband and daughter. In this conversation, Sharon talks about the advantages she sees in the lives of people whose parents are able to help their kids financially all the way into adulthood.

Transcribed - Published: 15 July 2025

Ralph Rockwell lives in Wolcott, Vermont with his wife Carol and about 28 tractors. He runs a towing service part time and sells some of the tractors he restores, but he’s 72 and he’s mostly retired from a long career as a mechanic. In this episode of the occasional series "What Class Are You?" Ralph and I sit next to one of Ralph's tractors and talk about class.

Transcribed - Published: 14 July 2025

This is the fourth episode of What Now Sounds Like, a periodic series comprised entirely of your recordings from all over the world, in which we try to capture these strange times in audio.

Transcribed - Published: 2 June 2025

This was the inaugural year of Hardwick State, a weekend long university in Hardwick, Vermont, organized by the Civic Standard, and designed to take place during the awfulest time of the year. People from around Hardwick become professors and students. Classes are free, and everyone’s welcome to teach at Hardwick State. Maybe you teach something you do in your regular job. Maybe it’s just something you’re good at. Maybe it’s something you’re not very good at but you love it and you’re better than most. Here are some highlights from Hardwick State.

Transcribed - Published: 9 May 2025

Death in Venice is a story Larry Massett produced in the early 80s. Joe Frank narrates, and Larry wrote and performed all the music.

Transcribed - Published: 5 May 2025

We're raising money to rebuild Forrest Foster's barn. This is a very short story (plea) about it.

Transcribed - Published: 4 May 2025

The Haskell Free Library and Opera House was intentionally built to straddle two nations and two communities. Three quarters of the building is in Stanstead, Quebec and one quarter is in Derby Line Vermont, and it's been the local library for both communities for over a century. The main entrance to the library is in the U.S., and for as long as anyone can remember, Canadians have been allowed to walk the 70 feet of sidewalk around the building to that front entrance. But in late January of this year, the U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem paid a surprise visit to the library while she was up touring some of the Vermont border crossings, and she did a little show for everyone there. And starting in October, Canadians will no longer be able to visit their local library without passing through a border crossing. This is a show about it.

Transcribed - Published: 25 April 2025

This is a show about health insurance and how hard it is.

Transcribed - Published: 15 April 2025

Here is the third installment of What Now Sounds Like. It occurred to me the other day that this show is more like a long song, or even ambient sound. You can listen in the shower or washing dishes or even while you’re going to sleep. The goal is to keep each other company in a strange time.

Transcribed - Published: 2 March 2025

T.O. got out of prison in Rutland a couple weeks ago, after a six and a half year bid.  I met T.O. through my private investigator friend Susan Randall in May, 2017. He’d been a client of hers in a federal public defender case. T.O.’s been in and out of jail his whole adult life, and it’s become a kind of tradition for us to get together and talk when he gets out of jail. We don’t talk about his crimes. Mostly we talk about what it’s like to start over…over and over. Now T.O. is in his mid forties, and this time he was released in the middle of a Vermont winter.

Transcribed - Published: 14 February 2025

Here is episode 2 of What Now Sounds Like, a show I make that is entirely comprised of your recordings about the strange and desperate times we're living in. I'm hoping that shows made up of all of us will help us all feel less alone.

Transcribed - Published: 29 January 2025

What Now Sounds Like is made by all of us. You send me recordings that sound like this time we're living in, and I make shows with them. It could be an argument, your thoughts in the middle of the night, your songs and hummings....a recording of being on hold with your insurance company...whatever. And tell your friends to send their recordings too. Just email me at [email protected]. song, a conversation, a middle of the night thought, a call to your insurance company....I don't know. Youthis what I hope is the first of a series.

Transcribed - Published: 23 January 2025

The world is chaotic. Systems are failing. Towns are burning. If you need to make an appointment with your doctor you may have to wait til July. So it's time to make a show about it all. I implore you to record moments of your day and send me the audio and I will try to make a show that sounds like RIGHT NOW. Email the recordings to me at [email protected].

Transcribed - Published: 18 January 2025

A first generation experience of the American class system.

Transcribed - Published: 10 January 2025

Katrin Tchana on the gentrification of her hometown.

Transcribed - Published: 9 January 2025

Retired police detective Ingrid Jonas on class in law enforcement.

Transcribed - Published: 8 January 2025

Mark LaRouche, on the comforts of 'lower class', and addiction as a class all its own.

Transcribed - Published: 7 January 2025

Damian talks about the difference between white collar and blue collar, and we compare notes on our lives because we are exactly the same age and we both grew up in Vermont and then I went to college and took tap dancing and he joined the army.

Transcribed - Published: 6 January 2025

Forrest Foster found a new old truck, thanks to you listeners. We drove around and talked about the truck and about Forrest's new job and I complained about feeling old. Happy Holidays and thank you for your generosity. Happy Holidays to all!

Transcribed - Published: 17 December 2024

Things have been pretty grim around here. I lost my cat Zu Zu and she was only two and a half and she left behind her brother Kenny and Kenny and I aren’t doing so great. So. I’m going to play a story I made for Vermont Public about Erika Bruner, a veterinarian who specializes in end of live care for pets. She does at-home euthanasia…in barns, in basements, in fields.  I didn’t think I’d need her services so soon. But I did. She’s remarkable and she made a very difficult day a little less difficult.

Transcribed - Published: 11 December 2024

We raised ALL the money for Forrest's new old truck and we are so GRATEFUL!!!

Transcribed - Published: 16 November 2024

Forrest really needs a new old truck. Will you pitch in a few bucks?

Transcribed - Published: 13 November 2024

I’ve made lots of stories about my friend Forrest Foster, a dairy farmer in Hardwick. He prides himself on being an ‘independent dairyman’. But a couple months ago, Forrest sold the cows. The last couple years have been hard on him. He lost his wife Karen. His barn isn’t up to code so he recently lost his insurance and he can’t keep the wood furnace burning in the house while he’s doing chores in the barn. But hardest of all, and like so many families, Forrest has a son with an addiction problem, which is expensive and terrifying and fills his life with uncertainty. So. This is a story about why Forrest is getting done with dairy farming…at least for now.

Transcribed - Published: 4 November 2024

This summer, a one-in-a-thousand-year flood hit the village of Plainfield, Vermont. A local apartment building, which everyone called the Heartbreak Hotel, collapsed and washed away down the Great Brook. Twelve people were living there at the time, and they all survived. Most of their cats did not. We talk a lot about the importance of affordable housing and community and village revitalization. For over a century, the Heartbreak provided all three. This is a story about what was lost that night, and what it might suggest about how we move forward.

Transcribed - Published: 14 October 2024

All four of the people in this story are in recovery, but they spent years in the world of active drug addiction--a kind of world underneath the world. They’re aware of it in ways that most of us are not, and they agreed to describe it to me—what it feels like day to day, and its relentless demands.

Transcribed - Published: 10 September 2024

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.

Transcribed - Published: 20 August 2024

On the one-year anniversary of a 100-year flood, Vermont experienced another devastating flood. This is the story of one Plainfield, Vermont resident, who lost everything.

Transcribed - Published: 22 July 2024

There are about 15 million people in this world having thoughts and ideas that they can't put into words. People who have had had strokes or traumatic brain injuries often live with aphasia, or difficulty talking or using language. Their thoughts are intact, but the language gets stuck. But music mostly originates in the undamaged hemisphere of the brain. People with aphasia can often sing. This is a story about a choir comprised of people with aphasia, and what it's like to struggle for words.

Transcribed - Published: 19 June 2024

This is a follow-up show to Finn and the Bell. If you haven't heard that story, you might want to start there. At Bread and Puppet in Glover, Vermont, there is a magical pine forest full of small homemade buildings and shrines to memorialize dead puppeteers and friends. It’s a place where my friend Tara Reese’s sons Finn and Lyle spent a lot of time when they were little, running around in the woods in the summer. Now there is a memorial here for Finn in the pine forest, built by some of the kids he used to play with here. Finn died by suicide on January 3rd, 2020. In 2021, Tara and I made a story about him called Finn and the Bell. People all over the world listened, and we received hundreds of emails and texts and artwork and poetry. Tara received letters that were addressed to ‘Finn’s Mom, Hardwick’, with no address. But this is a story just about Tara, and about her evolution of grief. About what happens after the worst thing happens. We recorded this conversation on Mother’s Day, at Finn’s memorial in the pine forest. This show ends with a song. The Bell was written by Jim Terry of Napa, California. He plays music with his sons, Graham and Clark and they’re called The Terry Family Band. Jim wrote this song after listening to Finn and the Bell. Thank you so much Jim!

Transcribed - Published: 22 May 2024

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.

Transcribed - Published: 6 May 2024

A conversation with dairy farmer Forrest Foster in his sugarhouse in the blessed, FINALLY almost springtime in Vermont.

Transcribed - Published: 25 April 2024

This is a show I made a few years ago that very significantly involves Total Eclipse of the Heart, which is my favorite song. I am playing it again now because it is ECLIPSE WEEK. I hope you enjoy it.

Transcribed - Published: 10 April 2024

Kasey Phipps is transgender and has always been transgender. But Kasey didn’t grow up in a place where the word transgender was well understood. Or understood at all. It’s only in the last four years that Kasey’s put a name to this lifelong experience of living life in the wrong gender. This is just one story about the experience of being trans.

Transcribed - Published: 26 March 2024

Ashley Messier grew up in Essex, Vermont with an abusive father and with little money, and she found herself repeating the cycle in early adulthood. This is a story about multi-generational poverty and abuse, and the temporary relief of opiates.

Transcribed - Published: 15 March 2024

Ashton runs a concrete business and in his free time he makes community meals at the American Legion in Hardwick. We sat down to talk about class, which then turned into a conversation about eating, and how eating together as a community seems to blur boundaries between people of different backgrounds.

Transcribed - Published: 13 March 2024

Kathleen lives in Derby, Vermont in a subsidized apartment with two cats, two pugs, and about 400 clocks. She was working as a home health aide until COVID hit. She received COVID funding and rent assistance until she didn't. And now she's working at the deli at Price Chopper. And she's months behind on her rent. And she's facing eviction.

Transcribed - Published: 11 March 2024

Many of you got in touch with me after Isaac's story aired in the first week of What Class Are You. Isaac's on his way to Columbia in the fall, on a full scholarship, and you came up with amazing ideas for how you might be helpful, so I went back up to Newport to discuss it all with Isaac. And it turned into a really interesting conversation on a number of fronts.

Transcribed - Published: 10 March 2024

When I met Ethan Perry, he was taking a break from his job at Family Dollar in Orleans VT. At the time he was 29. When I asked him what class he is, he said he grew up lower-middle class. His mother was a teacher and his father a carpenter. He said that now he considers himself lower class, but not impoverished. We talked for a few minutes and then I drove back up to Orleans, and we sat in my car up on the hill that overlooks the Ethan Allen Furniture mill and we talked.

Transcribed - Published: 8 March 2024

Mike Donofrio moved to Vermont with his family when he was two years old. He grew up, he left Vermont for college and law school, then he moved back and worked in the attorney general's office. Now he's in private practice in Montpelier. And he plays bass in a few bands. I asked him what class he is. Here is some of what he said.

Transcribed - Published: 6 March 2024

John Rodgers runs a construction business up in West Glover, Vermont most of the year. He runs a plow business in the winter. He rents properties, he runs a cannabis farm with his son, he's a stonemason. He's one of the busiest guys I know. And for sixteen years John served in the Vermont Legislature — eight years in the Senate and eight in the House. I met him on his farm, which has been in his family for about 200 years, and we talked about what it costs to be in the Vermont legislature, and some of the cultural tensions that he’s feeling in the state right now, as people with more money move to the state.

Transcribed - Published: 4 March 2024

In this episode I talk with one of my favorite poets and writers, Garret Keizer. Garret has written extensively on the history of labor unions and for this show we drove around and talked about the obscene class inequality in our country, the power of labor movements, and what happens when you address gender and race equity, but ignore income inequality. And…other things. Like jazz.

Transcribed - Published: 1 March 2024

This is episode 5 of What Class Are You. Kytreana was one of the first people I interviewed for this series. I was driving around the Northeast Kingdom and my last stop was Olney’s General Store in Orleans, right across the road from the Ethan Allen furniture mill. There were some people sitting out in the front of the store talking and vaping. And when I walked up and asked if I could ask an awkward and probably offensive question, Kytreana Patrick said, "absolutely, pull up a chair."

Transcribed - Published: 28 February 2024

This is episode 4 of a special series called What Class Are You, wherein I drive around asking people to talk about class and privilege and power and money and how much or little of it they've got. Kate is forty-three. She lives in the woods here in central Vermont. She's part of a community of young people around here who live frugally and often communally, in yurts, and tents and buses. Kate lived this way for 20 years, saving up money to buy this piece of land...but it's gotten harder to find affordable land here in Vermont after the great Covid migration. When I asked Kate what class she is, she said 'lower middle class by unconventional means.'

Transcribed - Published: 26 February 2024

Irfan Sehic and his family fled the war in Bosnia when he was seventeen, and landed in Barre, Vermont. Irfan did a lot of jobs when he got here, then went to college, and now runs an insurance company out of his house. I’ve interviewed Irfan for Rumble Strip before, about the war, which you can find on this site somewhere, but in this story, Irfan talks about the American class system as he sees it, starting with the middle class.

Transcribed - Published: 23 February 2024

What Class Are You is a series about money and privilege and how much or little of it you've got. This story is about Isaac, an 18-year-old in Newport, Vermont.

Transcribed - Published: 21 February 2024