The Vermont Conversation with David Goodman

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The Vermont Conversation is a VTDigger podcast hosted by award-winning journalist David Goodman. It features in-depth interviews about local and national topics with politicians, activists, artists, changemakers and ordinary citizens. The Vermont Conversation is also an hour-long weekly radio program that can be heard on Wednesdays at 1 p.m. on WDEV/Radio Vermont.

  1. 1d ago

    Author Chris Bohjalian on writing, activism and challenging the language of genocide

    A teen golf prodigy launches a powerful drive that kills a golf caddy at a tony New York country club. Investigations and hidden scandals soon follow. So begins best-selling Vermont author Chris Bohjalian’s spellbinding new book, “The Amateur.” His 26th novel is classic Bohjalian: a riveting tale told by a female protagonist that weaves together mystery, intrigue, romance, betrayal and secrets that had me frantically turning the page to find out what happens next. Bohjalian is among Vermont’s most beloved and prolific authors of literary and historical fiction. His work has been translated into more than 35 languages, and three of his novels — “Secrets of Eden,” “Midwives” and “Past the Bleachers” — have been made into movies. “The Flight Attendant” is an Emmy-nominated series on HBO Max. He has also written three plays. The New York Times Book Review named “The Amateur” one of “The Novels Everyone Will Be Talking About in 2026.” Bohjalian often writes from the perspective of a female protagonist. “I do it because I think a woman is more likely than a man to go on the emotional odyssey that the tale demands,” he told me. He said he considers it high praise when a reader tells him, “I thought you were a woman.” Bohjalian, who lives in Weybridge, has won numerous literary awards. He wrote the “Idyll Banter” column for the Burlington Free Press for nearly 25 years, has written for The New York Times and The Washington Post, and writes periodic essays on his Substack. He is a graduate of Amherst College. Bohjalian has also been recognized for his efforts to educate Americans about the Armenian genocide. He has family who survived the genocide, which was launched in the Ottoman Empire in 1915 and resulted in the deaths of as many as 1.2 million Armenians. He has written regularly on the topic, including his 2012 book, “The Sandcastle Girls,” which is a love story with the genocide as its backdrop. He is keenly aware that history often repeats itself. “Genocide begins with language, by demonizing the minority, by reducing them to something less than human, something like an insect, a vermin, a parasite, a germ,” he told me. “Just as the Ottoman Empire used that language about the Armenians, or the Nazis used that sort of language about the Jewish citizens of Europe, increasingly in the United States we see immigrants or people from other countries demonized in much the same way.” He cited the example of President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance “demonizing Ohio Haitian citizens, claiming that they were so animalistic they ate dogs and cats.” “I vacillate wildly between whether I believe that democracy in America is really in jeopardy or simply believing that we are in a cycle right now where there is a stupidity, a cruelty and a savagery that is cyclical, and eventually we will swing back,” he said. Bohjalian kicks off a national book tour for “The Amateur” with an event at the South Burlington Public Library on Saturday. He has another novel due out in 2028 and is at work on a play. His advice to aspiring writers?  “Write because you love it. Write in the genre you love to read. Write every day.”

  2. Jul 22

    ‘I’m sorry that this isn’t what we promised.’ Immigration attorney Jill Martin Diaz on fear and hope in Vermont’s immigrant community

    President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown is intensifying. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents detained over 10,000 people just in the last week of June. This month, ICE agents killed two men in less than a week, including a young Columbian father in Maine who reportedly had legal status. Despite the Trump administration’s insistence that it is only arresting “the worst of the worst,” most of the people arrested by ICE have no criminal convictions. Fear is now a constant in immigrant communities. “It's like watching a slow car crash every day,” said Jill Martin Diaz, an immigration attorney and executive director of the Vermont Asylum Assistance Project. VAAP is a rapidly growing legal services and technical assistance organization for immigrants. Since becoming VAAP’s first paid staff member in January 2024, Martin Diaz now oversees a paid staff of 10, a network of 28 volunteer attorneys and over two dozen volunteer interpreters, among others. VAAP is also the hub of a newly formed network that now offers coordinated immigration legal services throughout the state. The network includes the Association of Africans Living in Vermont, the Center for Justice Reform Clinic at Vermont Law and Graduate School, Vermont Afghan Alliance, and Vermont Legal Aid.  “We've seen a really steady stream of people being arrested in Vermont,” said Martin Diaz. VAAP attorneys make weekly visits to Northwest State Correctional Facility and report encountering an average of 12 to 18 immigrants in detention. Martin Diaz warned that “rights and protections are being stripped away every day in mundane-seeming memos and orders from courts. And we're just watching the system slip between our fingers as we're trying to support Vermonters to access their needs.” Anxiety has been compounded by a Supreme Court decision that allows the Trump administration to end temporary protected status. The decision may result in the loss of legal protection for over a million immigrants who have fled war or environmental disasters in their home countries. Martin Diaz said this Supreme Court decision will impact several dozen Haitians, some of whom have lived in Vermont for decades and “find themselves now without temporary protected status, vulnerable to being arrested by ICE and prosecuted for removal proceedings, and most acutely unauthorized to work.” Martin Diaz formerly taught immigration law at Vermont Law and Graduate School, directed its Center for Justice Reform Clinic and practiced at Vermont Legal Aid, and was a lecturer in the department of social work at the University of Vermont. In 2023, Martin Diaz was named by the LGBTQ+ Bar Association as one of the 40 best LGBTQ+ lawyers under 40 and has received awards from the Vermont Bar Association and American Civil Liberties Union of Vermont.  Martin Diaz said “that for every terrifying story about ICE hurting people, killing people in the streets, the stories about unfair things happening in courts of law, there are also stories of hope, of the system working as it should, of things going well, that doesn't make the news.” The attorney and activist concluded with a message for immigrants who are fearful: “I'm just so sorry that this is happening. I'm sorry that this isn't what we promised.”

  3. Jul 15

    Some joy, some tragedy. 2 Vermont authors on the struggles of rural living

    Summer reading is often about traveling to far-away places and meeting fascinating people. But for two Vermont authors, the exotic destination for their new books is their home state. Hardwick author Brett Ann Stanciu’s latest book is “Call It Madness.” It features a young protagonist, Avah Lavoie, who journeys to a remote village in northern Vermont to salvage an old farmhouse that offers answers to mysteries about her family. The book’s title is taken from a David Budbill poem and “reflects the sorrow and stubbornness of family life,” says the author.  Stanciu told me she “wanted to write about a small Vermont village that has people who are very wealthy … people who are in the middle and people who are really scrambling in the bottom.” If her fictional village sounds suspiciously like the real town of Greensboro, there is a reason: Stanciu is the treasurer and zoning administrator for the Northeast Kingdom town. The Marlboro College graduate is the recipient of two Vermont Arts Council grants and was a 2025 nominee for the Pushcart Prize, the prestigious literary award. She is editor-at-large for Vermont Almanac. Stanciu was a guest on Vermont Conversation in 2021 to discuss her nonfiction book “Unstitched: My Journey to Understand Opioid Addiction and How People and Communities Can Heal.” For Corinth author Catherine Tudish, the title of her latest book, “A Thousand Souls,” refers to the population of the fictional village of Neptune, Vermont. The characters include a boy who travels to South Carolina to meet his father for the first and only time, a shy girl who loses her stutter when she befriends a black bear, and a beloved sheriff who breaks up a drug operation only to get arrested himself for helping undocumented workers evade immigration enforcement. Tudish is the author of three books and has taught writing and literature at George Washington University, Harvard, Dartmouth and the Bread Loaf School of English. Tudish said she is drawn to writing about Vermont because of “the qualities of observation of the people who live here, a very particular kind of sense of humor, and a great interest in people who come from away and what we're like and how we behave. We can sometimes be objects of humor, but I think that there's also a great kindness inherent in people in Vermont.” Tudish said her fictional town of Neptune is based loosely on Strafford, which is enjoying a moment of fame for its illustrious son, musician Noah Kahan. It turns out that Tudish knew Kahan as a child. Kahan “was a very interesting 3-year-old. He seemed very curious and focused and asked a lot of questions in a way that I think other 3-year-olds didn't. So I'm not surprised that he's ended up doing something sort of extraordinary.” Stanciu said a common thread between the main characters that she and Tudish write about is that “Vermont is a place of multiplicity, that people come from all kinds of walks of life, they do all kinds of different things, have many different skills, lots of different experiences, some joyous, some tragedy. But between that, there's this sense of respect for the individual for what they're doing.” “It doesn't always mean that the characters in these books are behaving well,” said Stanciu. “But they're struggling in one way or another to try to figure out their lives within this complicated network of the people around them, the village, the rural communities and the influence of the landscape.”

  4. Jul 8

    ‘How the Democrats Screwed Bernie.’ Former Sanders chief campaign strategist Tad Devine on the 2016 presidential race

    In 2016, U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., was an insurgent candidate taking on Hillary Clinton, the heavily favored pick of the Democratic establishment for the presidential primary. As Sanders barnstormed the country and brought out millions of people to hear his message, the Clinton machine’s operatives and super-PACs swung into action to stop him by any means necessary. Tad Devine was deep in the trenches of this fight. He is a veteran Democratic political consultant and was chief strategist for Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign. Prior to that he had been a senior adviser in the presidential campaigns of Al Gore in 2000 and John Kerry in 2004. Devine has written an explosive new book about the 2016 Democratic primary campaign, “How the Democrats Screwed Bernie.” His inside account comes as a new generation of populist Democrats, including New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner, is once again challenging the Democratic establishment and receiving fierce pushback from the old guard. Devine writes that “the entrenched leadership of the Democratic Party seems determined to forget the mistakes it made during the primary season of 2016.” He blames the Democratic elite for “two catastrophic defeats in the recent past and who knows how many more to come in the future.” Devine insists, “The Democratic Party must stop impeding voters from determining the outcome of primaries.” Could Bernie have beaten Donald Trump in 2016? “Donald Trump's own pollster showed up at Harvard for the post-election review, and when asked what would have happened if Sanders was the nominee, he said he would have won,” Devine told me. “He understood that those white working-class voters who fled Hillary Clinton would have gone back to Bernie Sanders.” Devine said the reason the Democratic Party is “completely out of touch with the American people” is because it participates in “a rigged system” in which the richest donors can buy elections. He said that in other countries, “if they threw money into campaigns anonymously, they would go to jail.” “We have to break from that stranglehold of money in politics and establish ourselves as a party that is willing to seek funding through people at the grassroots level.” There are two ways to fix the corrupt campaign financing system, Devine said. “One is elections, and the second is the Constitution and overriding the Supreme Court. That is the only way home right now for America.” Devine said that “overwhelming majorities of Democrats, Republicans, independents support changing the system of campaign finance.” What they need is “a visionary leader or leaders to come out and to move the nation in that direction.”  Is there any particular leader who he thinks has promise? Devine suggested Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro or California Gov. Gavin Newsom might emerge. But he noted that Barack Obama was an Illinois state senator until 2004 when he was elected a U.S. senator, and then won the presidency four years later.  “People can come up very quickly in this day of instant communication.”  When that leader emerges, he predicted, “I think politics will change in America and will give it back its soul.”

  5. Jul 1

    ‘Strive for that more perfect union.’ Rep. Becca Balint on resurgent white nationalism, war in Iran and her mixed feelings about America’s 250th

    The Supreme Court ended its term with a series of blockbuster decisions on birthright citizenship, immigration, transgender rights and campaign finance. I spoke with U.S. Rep. Becca Balint, D-Vt., who is the vice ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee. “It's shocking to me that we ever got to this place that we were having the Supreme Court weigh in on birthright citizenship,” Balint told me, sounding incredulous about the decision. “It's so clear that white nationalism has absolutely taken hold here in D.C. among my colleagues in Congress, certainly in the White House, and on the Supreme Court,” Balint said. “You see that when you don't have a unanimous decision saying actually that the Constitution says what the Constitution says. They're trying to redefine citizenship to leave out a whole lot of people.” Balint asserted that the Supreme Court “is beholden to white Christian nationalism right now, and it's terrifying to me.” “It is past time” that the U.S. Supreme Court be reformed, said Balint, who was first elected to Congress in 2022 and is running for a third term. “I want actual ethics with teeth, with consequences. I want term limits. I am absolutely open to expanding the court. I think that when (Democrats) have had power, (they) have not used it to its fullest extent.” Balint spoke to me after stepping away from a tumultuous scene Tuesday afternoon on the House floor, which was paralyzed by infighting among Republicans. House Speaker Mike Johnson canceled votes and sent members home for two weeks when far-right GOP lawmakers rebelled over the stalled SAVE America Act, the elections bill that President Donald Trump has demanded be passed despite a lack of votes in the Senate. The Supreme Court also issued a decision last week revoking temporary protected status for immigrants from Haiti and Syria who fled violence and political repression. The status has enabled over 350,000 Haitians and 6,000 Syrians to live and work legally in the U.S. The specter of mass deportations looms. “The ending of TPS is a death sentence for some of these people,” said Balint. “The whole point of having this protected status is to protect people from having to go back to a dangerous, unstable, unsafe place for them.” Many Haitians work in healthcare, especially long-term care for the elderly. “They are doing the hard work of keeping us healthy, and they are already not compensated enough for their labor,” said Balint. “They're starting to feel like Americans see them as expendable.”  “It is heartbreaking and infuriating that we are treating people so poorly that have contributed so much to our communities, to our states and to our nation. I know that we will get through this dark time, but for some people it will be too late.” Balint also addressed the U.S. and Israel’s war against Iran. “We have lost 13 service members, and thousands of Iranian civilians have been killed for no good reason,” she said. “We're in no better position … in Iran now than we were before the war.” Balint has voted several times to end military aid to Israel. This week she led 75 House colleagues in sending a letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio condemning Israeli military engagement in Lebanon. “I don't know how you can look at what is happening and what has happened in Gaza, and what continues to happen in the West Bank — I mean, it's a bunch of terrorist vigilantes in the West Bank — and now what I see is indiscriminate bombing in Lebanon. I don't know how you can look at that and think that we're on the right track.” I asked Balint her thoughts on America’s 250th birthday this week. “I've been thinking about this a lot,” she replied. “Growing up as a gay woman, I always felt like a second-class citizen. I never imagined that there would be a time when I could marry my spouse. I never imagined that I would have employment protections,” Balint said. “This country is going to break your heart, and also the freedoms that are guaranteed in the First Amendment are an incredible, beautiful thing to behold. There are very few places in the world where you have that kind of freedom. But we have to protect it. We can't accept it as a given.  We have to be vigilant.” “Americans perhaps are understanding in a new way that nobody is coming to save us. That we have to be the ones day in and day out protecting both the beautiful things that we have and also continue to strive for that more perfect union that we give voice to.” “We all have to have the skin in the game.”

  6. Jun 24

    Cartoonist Tillie Walden celebrates early American queer love in Vermont in new book

    In the early 1800s, Charity Bryant and Sylvia Drake spent 44 years as life partners living together in the small Vermont town of Weybridge. They are one of the earliest lesbian couples in America whose story is documented, thanks in part to a new graphic novel by Tillie Walden. Walden is a rising star in cartooning. She served as Vermont’s fifth cartoonist laureate from 2023 to 2026, following cartoon luminaries such as Alison Bechdel and the late New Yorker cartoonist Ed Koren. In 2018 at the age of 22, Walden won the first of her two Eisner Awards, known as the Oscars of cartooning, becoming one of the youngest Eisner Award winners ever. Walden’s latest book, “Charity & Sylvia,” has been named the 2026 selection of Vermont Reads, a program of Vermont Humanities that invites communities around the state to read the same book and hold discussions and events. Walden moved to Vermont from Texas to attend the Center for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction and became a professor there in 2022. Walden, now 30, is the author of 16 books. She lives in Norwich with her wife, the cartoonist Emma Hunsinger, and their young son. Walden faced many challenges in reconstructing the lives of Charity and Sylvia. For one, she did not know what they looked like. The closest image she had was a silhouette of the couple, framed by locks of their hair. “When it came to deciding their faces, it was mentioned in a letter way back when that Charity looked a lot like her brother, so I went to Massachusetts and found the portrait of her brother, and I based her off of what her brother looked like,” Walden told me. She based her depiction of Sylvia on a photograph that she had of her niece. Walden also found another source for inspiration: her Vermont neighbors. “I needed actual human beings to populate Weybridge, Vermont, in 1810, but there was nothing to go off of, so I really did just look at my neighbors and I drew their faces and their bodies and their personalities into the book,” she said. “Small town Vermont hasn't changed that much, really.” Walden wants “Charity & Sylvia” to offer a more realistic view of queer love. “Marginalized groups often have to represent themselves in media as very digestible and very acceptable, because that's how you find mainstream appeal.” “What I'm actually interested in is how gayness, queerness — whatever you call it — interacts with more complex parts of life, like faith, like conservatism, like being an American, like being a Vermonter. And I was very moved that Charity and Sylvia were not perfect role models,” she said. “Queer people aren't perfect. No marginalized person is perfect. No person anywhere is perfect.”

  7. Jun 17

    ‘Going to where the silence is.’ Journalist Amy Goodman on 30 years of speaking truth to power

    For 30 years, journalist Amy Goodman has been “going to where the silence is” to report stories that the powerful would rather you not know about and the corporate media have often ignored. She has stared down armed soldiers in Nigeria, survived a massacre in East Timor, documented dogs attacking indigenous pipeline protesters in North Dakota, and been manhandled and arrested while covering the 2008 Republican National Convention.   Amy Goodman is the host and executive producer of “Democracy Now!” — the award-winning independent daily news program that she co-founded in 1996. She is also my sister, and we co-wrote four bestselling books. She is the first journalist to receive the Right Livelihood Award, widely known as the “Alternative Nobel Prize,” for “developing an innovative model of truly independent grassroots political journalism that brings to millions of people the alternative voices that are often excluded by the mainstream media.”   Now a new documentary film called “Steal This Story, Please!” traces Amy’s career and the growth of “Democracy Now!” from a radio broadcast on nine stations into one of the leading U.S.-based independent daily news broadcasts in the world on television, radio and online. The film is directed by Oscar-nominated filmmakers Carl Deal and Tia Lessin. This week, “Steal This Story, Please!” is showing in Vermont in Burlington, Brattleboro, St. Johnsbury and Montpelier. Amy has gone to some of the places around the world where the light is dimmest, often putting herself in danger, and has been persistent in her belief that our freedom of the press is critical to a meaningful democracy at home.  “The idea that movements matter, that we have to go to where the silence is as journalists. … It's often not silent. It's raucous, it's rowdy, people are organizing, but it doesn't hit the corporate media radar screen,” she said. “That's where ‘Democracy Now!’ lives, and that's really where the hope is.” Last week came the development that the U.S. Department of Justice is closing its antitrust investigation into a merger that would allow Paramount Skydance to buy Warner Bros. Discovery for $110 billion, and with it countless media properties that include CBS and CNN. “People who care about war and peace, climate change, reproductive rights, LGBTQ issues, racial and economic equality are not a fringe minority, not even a silent majority, but the silenced majority — silenced by the corporate media, which is why we have to take the media back,” she said. “The media can be the greatest force for peace on Earth.”

  8. Jun 10

    Are smartphones birth control? Economist Caitlin Myers on sex, abortion access and talking across divides

    The birth rate in the U.S. has dropped by an astonishing 22% since 2007. Are smartphones to blame? Yes, according to a groundbreaking new study by Middlebury economist Caitlin Myers. Her smartphone study is garnering national attention this week, confirming an idea that people have long speculated about but until now have lacked data. Myers and co-author Ezekiel Hooper showed that from 2007 to 2011, after the iPhone was introduced, there was a sharp decline in births, up to half of which can be attributed to the smartphone. They say that smartphones have led to “reducing in-person interactions, increasing pornography use, and reducing sexual frequency.” Myers says a declining birth rate is not necessarily bad, but that there are “many aspects of it that really concern me, aspects that relate to economic growth and supporting older generations, but also questions of what does this mean for humans.” “Everybody's just doom scrolling on their phone alone and isolated and not forming relationships.”  Myers is the John G. McCullough Professor of Economics at Middlebury College and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. She is well known for her research into the effects of abortion policy on people’s lives. She has testified in the U.S. Senate about the economic consequences of the 2022 Dobbs decision ending the constitutional right to abortion, and she spearheaded the amicus brief in the Dobbs case that was signed by over 150 economists, highlighting the negative impact of limiting abortion access. Myers also runs a national database of abortion providers. Myers said the Dobbs decision has resulted in about 30,000 additional births “concentrated among people who are younger, have less education and have really limited financial resources.” “The post-Dobbs era is an inequality story,” she told me. “There are parts of the country like ours where the Dobbs decision almost paradoxically expanded abortion access” due to increased availability of telehealth and medication by mail. But in states like Texas, Louisiana and West Virginia that have enacted near-total abortion bans, only 80% to 85% of people who want an abortion are getting one. That leaves up to one-fifth of people who want an abortion “trapped. They aren't finding the means, the information, the resources, the safety and security to travel long distances or to order pills through the mail, and they're giving birth as a result.” Myers grew up in rural West Virginia and Georgia. She empathizes with those who don’t think like her. “As a Southerner it breaks my heart when I hear people dismiss the people I grew up with, the places I'm from, the beliefs that they have.” “We all know it's not just about dismissing far-away Southerners. There are divides within our own state.” Myers wonders “whether we could potentially bridge these divides rather than saying, ‘Yeah, I just don't think this is going to work out,’ like we're never going to agree.” She wants to do her “tiny little part to create a world where we give each other more grace.”

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The Vermont Conversation is a VTDigger podcast hosted by award-winning journalist David Goodman. It features in-depth interviews about local and national topics with politicians, activists, artists, changemakers and ordinary citizens. The Vermont Conversation is also an hour-long weekly radio program that can be heard on Wednesdays at 1 p.m. on WDEV/Radio Vermont.

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