I spent an afternoon talking with some of the kids backstage, about their lives in musical theater. And even though we were sitting on the floor in a Xerox room, they were willing to sing songs from the show…from their hearts. This is theater magic. Welcome.

Thank you SO MUCH to Kelly Green, associate producer on this show. Also Ramsey Papp for her help and guidance. And thanks also to my wonderful sponsor, Honey Road. The best restaurant in Burlington. Click below to read about the menu…

Toj Marceau as Cranston

Reagan Papp as Willard

Leland lives over the hill from me in East Calais. We’ve been friends since he was in first grade, and every year around this time we get together and he tells me what he’s thinking about, worried about, what his plans are. He got his driver’s permit two weeks ago so he drove me over to Number 10 Pond and we sat and talked about the ups and downs of his first year of high school, about girls, about avocado toast…

Credits

Music for this show is by Vermont musician Brian Clark, who is the lead singer and songwriter for the band Anachronist. Which is awesome.

Rumble Strip is sponsored by the best restaurant in Burlington, Vermont. It’s called Honey Road. Click on the image below to read about their menu of Eastern Mediterranean small plates…

If you drive around rural Vermont, you see logging skidders parked in people’s dooryards. You see them working in smaller woodlots and residential woodlots, felling trees with a chainsaw at twenty below zero, dragging cables through waist deep snow. It’s dangerous work, and they’re a resilient lot. And they prefer logging by hand.

This story is about them.

Credits

This show is part of The Resilient Forest series produced by Northern Woodlands and first aired on NEXT, a weekly radio show and podcast about New England. The Resilient Forest Series is supported by the Davis Conservation Foundation and the Larson Fund. Most of the loggers you heard are part of the landscape of the vast working forest of Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom, the subject of a special report in the Summer 2019 issue of Northern Woodlands magazine. You can find that reporting HERE.

Rumble Strip is sponsored by the best restaurant in Burlington, Vermont. It’s called Honey Road, and I ate there a couple weeks ago and honestly it was the best meal I’ve had in years. Plus the place is wicked fun. Ask for the drink that comes in two glasses….you won’t regret it.

Original music for this series is produced by Vermont musician and Rumble Strip collaborator and friend Brian Clark. In fact, here is a picture of his band, Anachronist, looking very serious:

Gamelan Sulukala is a group of fifteen people in central Vermont who come together at the dead end of a dirt road in the basement of the Goddard College library, to play Indonesian music on an ornate, court gamelan made on the island of Java.  There is no harmony. Instead, each sound is part of an intricate layering of patterns. No one instrument, or musician stands alone.

Except the people in gamelan are people who very much stand alone. Writers and strawberry farmers and scientists and Renaissance music lovers…I guess what I’d say they have in common is they all seem to need to be alone a lot…which describes most central Vermonters I know. Also…they come here with a common purpose….to get lost in something that’s more than the sum of their parts…

Thanks so much to Steven Light and Kathy Light, who lead and inspire this group. Thank you Tobin for all your help on this show. And thanks also to all the gamelan players who talked with me.

Here’s a great article in Seven Days about Gamelan Sulukala.

This show is sponsored by the best restaurant in Burlington, Honey Road, at the corner of Church Street and Main Street. It is amazing. Go eat there and tell them I sent you! And click below to learn more….

I do remember that I hated high school graduation. Not because I didn’t want to graduate, but because I knew I was supposed to be excited but I didn’t know how to be excited about a future that didn’t exist yet and that I couldn’t imagine.

So a couple weeks before graduation, I went to St. Johnsbury Academy and I talked with nine high school seniors…about what they’re afraid of, what they’re excited about….and also, prom. We talked about prom.

Credits

Thank you to the students: Jack Luna, Fiona Sweeney, Hope Reeve, Riley Taylor, Grace Nadeau, Ce Ce Jones, Shawn Guckin, Lucas Masure and David George.

Music is by Vermont musician Brian Clark.

Thanks to Phoebe Cobb and Melissa Burroughs for their help and patience setting all these interviews up!

Sponsor!

This show is sponsored by the excellent people at Honey Road, making the best food in Burlington on the corner of Church and Main. Click on the picture and check out the menu…

The criminal justice system is not designed to answer to the needs of crime victims. It’s designed to figure out if there’s enough evidence to bring a case. If there is, a defense attorney builds a case for the defendant and a prosecutor builds a case for the state of Vermont. The alleged victim in the case becomes a witness in their own story. They may have felt the impact of a crime, but they play no direct role in how the crime is adjudicated. For most people brand new to the system, this comes as a shock.

In every Vermont prosecutor’s office, in the Vermont State Police, in the Department of Corrections, there are people who see to the needs of these victims, from the time a crime is reported until long after the attorneys have gone home. It’s not their job to build cases or determine guilt or innocence. Their job is to support the victims in their cases. And that can mean a million different things. But always it’s complex and deeply personal.

This is a story about the victim advocates.

This show features:

Kate Brayton, victim advocate for Vermont’s Major Crime Unit

Amy Farr, victim advocate for Vermont’s Attorney General’s Office

Val Gauthier, victim specialist at the FBI covering Vermont and the Plattsburgh area

Aimee Stearns, victim witness coordinator at Vermont’s U.S. Attorney’s office

Danielle Levesque, victim service specialist at Vermont’s Department of Corrections

Kelly Woodward, victim advocate at the Franklin County State’s Attorney’s Office and victim advocate at the Northwest Unit for Special Investigations

Big Thanks to Toni Monsey for introducing me to these women, and to Jessica Dorr, Corrections Services Director.

Music for this show by Vermont musician Brian Clark and Kai Engel

This show is sponsored by Honey Road, the best restaurant in Burlington, Vermont. Click below for menu and accolades….

Welcome to the fourth episode of Problems, a radio drama about Pam and Joel, two old friends who support each other through their problems…because no problem is too small to complain about.

In this episode, Joel pays a visit to Pam at her house and brings her a small gift. Joel’s daughter, Whitney, has started at public school. Pam’s daughter River had a harder time at public school, and now she’s back at the local private school.

Welcome.

Captain JP Sinclair has been at the center of over five-hundred death investigations and a hundred-and-one homicides in the state of Vermont. He served as the state’s chief criminal investigator and he led the Vermont State Police’s Bureau of Criminal Investigations. He was also instrumental in forming a major crime unit in the state of Vermont to handle the state’s most egregious cases.

And we used to play little league together.

JP and I went to Charlotte Central School together from Kindergarten through eighth grade. And when you go to a school as small as ours, you remember each other. And what I remember about JP is just that he was just a decent kid. He helped Mrs. Atkins clean up the cafeteria after lunch.

JP retired from the Vermont State Police in September, 2018.

We talked about his life in the VSP. We don’t get into the explicit details of homicides, but I do want to warn people that we talk about the Melissa Jenkins case. Jenkins was a mother and teacher here in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont, and she was raped and murdered by a married couple in 2012. So if you don’t want to be reminded of this story, you might want to skip that section.

JP Sinclair now runs a mill and works as a logger in the Northeast Kingdom. You can find him at Sinclair Millworks and Timber Harvesting

Credits and Sponsors

Thank you to writer and editor Mark Davis for his excellent feedback on this show.

Thanks also to Brian Clark who wrote the music for this show.

This show is sponsored by Honey Road, the best restaurant in Burlington, Vermont. Click below for menu and accolades….

I interviewed T.O. back in the summer of 2017. He’d just gotten out of prison, where he’s spent the majority of his adult life, and he was trying to figure out what to do next. After we met, he found employment and he enrolled at the Community College of Vermont. Things were going well. But what does it feel like to start a brand new life? It’s hard. And it’s complicated.

Credits

Music by Brian Clark

Patience

Peep dis…

Peace…

What’s Love?

What’s love?

P.e.a.c.e.!!!

It’s EZ

It’s EZ..2 have friends..

Peace n blessings…T.O.

So a bunch of Jim’s friends were coming out to the bus to do what they always do the night before deer season, which is mostly drink beer, tell deer stories, eat burned hamburgers, bitch about hunting permissions and land use and give each other a hard time. And no surprise, there was plenty of profanity. And since there’s no movie theater, no bowling alley or much cell service in this valley, fun is something you have to make up together as you go along….