Rumble Strip Erica Heilman / Rumble Strip, Erica Heilman

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.