On the value of not knowing

Do you ever experience creative blocks when trying to develop story ideas? If so, what do you do about it?

I have creative blocks of every variety. It isn’t often that I don’t have anything that I’m working on; I usually have a stockpile of story ideas. But I inevitably come to a point where I don’t know what to do or why I’m doing this, and I feel as though maybe somebody should have told me to get off the bus, or like I’ve lived through my expiration date and didn’t know.

But it’s not the end of the world if I’m having a still moment, and inevitably, curiosity wins the day. There will be something. You can even mine your own neurotic life for areas of inquiry. So if I’m worried about my age, then I start thinking, “How do I make a story about that?” Or maybe I go to a party and talk to somebody about a school in Granville and think, “What the hell’s going on over there?” Once there’s any sort of spark, you just make the call. I never think before acting on a story idea. I back into every story. If you crash around enough, you inevitably will find something.

Sure, there are dark nights of the soul where I’m exhausted and worn out. But what else is there to do? Rumble Strip is the way that I process the world now. It’s the way I make sense of things. Sometimes I don’t feel like making sense of things, but when I do, the show is what saves me.

You’ve said that when you started making Rumble Strip, you had no idea what it was about. Do you have a clear idea of what the show is now?

I really deeply did not know what it was about, initially. I wish more people started projects where they didn’t know what it was about before they started. I think that’s a great starting place for anybody.

I still don’t like answering the question because I’m bad at it, but it’s about helping people fall in love with each other across divides, I think. Generally, it’s about falling in love with strangers. It’s about the recognition that every single person is a world expert in their own life, and if we could understand what they understood, we could get through our days a little better. That I know is true.

I’ve interviewed people with unusual outlooks or ideas, and sometimes I’ll hear from a listener who’s like, “Wow, that person was a real kook.” It feels like they’ve completely missed the point—or worse, like I’ve only widened the gap between them and the subject. Do you do anything to shape how a listener receives your work?

Yes. First of all, I think there’s a difference between like and love. I don’t have to like people, but I do have to try to love them. Those are really separate things.

I can interview a neo-Nazi and be pretty sure that I don’t want to have dinner with them. But they arrived here somehow. I believe that there is utility in understanding how they got here. I also think that whether or not I like them, there’s a necessity to try to love them, and try to identify humanity in them.

I only have one rule in my show: I will not put out a show if I don’t believe I built a bridge, so that the listener can be inside with that person, instead of looking at them from the outside. The job is to make stories where we are not making guinea pigs out of other people.

How much of a role does editing play in how you tell stories?

I edit the shit out of everything I record. It’s like a 100:1 ratio.

We’re really smart when we listen—we can hear dynamic. There are always two things happening at the same time: talking—what we’re saying; and dynamic—the sound of how we’re talking.

What somebody doesn’t say is often just as interesting as what they say. Silence in a conversation has value. It’s not an absence of something; it has a substance. When I’m listening to tape, I’m listening to the sound of it in addition to the content. Content, dynamic and silence—all of those things have equal value.

Do you ever work on projects that have constraints like deadlines and sponsors?

I work for Vermont Public as a reporter, so that’s my money job. I love the job because they’re really good to me, and they let me make what I want to make. I never leaned on Rumble Strip as a means of income. I don’t think I would have had the nerve to start it if I thought that I had to be successful at it. I knew I was doing it in order to stop feeling profound regret or the foretaste of regret. That was why I started it and why I still do it. If I did it for money, I don’t know what would happen to it. It’s just not what the point is.

If you’re doing work that you care about for public radio, why then do you feel the need to also make an independent podcast?

I don’t have the license to fail at my job the way I have license to fail with Rumble Strip. And that’s important—the capacity to experiment. Rumble Strip remains that place where I can go for broke in a way that I can’t with radio.

Do you go into interviews with a clear idea of what story you want to tell, or is it more about talking to a person and seeing where it goes?

I often spend days before an interview imagining the person and thinking, “Who are they? If this is true, then what about that?” Essentially, warming up my imagination about a person or subject.

There was a young woman who I interviewed for a show about addiction, and I spent days thinking about what her life was like, and not just in broad strokes. Where was she the very first time she used? What was it, and what happened the next day?

I’m looking for anecdotes, so where would those be? What can I ask her that might really get my mom into the experience of active addiction? It can’t just be, “Tell me how that felt.” I have to really think about what the bridge might be to my mom from that young woman.

So there’s a lot of preparation. But then you sit down and hit record, and it’s terrifying because you really don’t have control over what’s going to happen. But it doesn’t mean you’re not prepared. You’re very prepared, but you’re also prepared to be wide open. You’re prepared to not have the next question. You’re prepared to look stupid, and to not know. You have to be able to not know sometimes, and let go of control, because that is where the most interesting conversations happen.

The best interviews are ones where you and the person find yourselves in some mysterious place where neither of you expected to be, and both of you have run out of things to say or ask. Suddenly you’re both just looking at what’s going on together. That takes preparation, and you have to allow for that. And that has a sound to it.

Tell me more about this mysterious place.

To me, that’s what god is. It’s the realization that we are here right now in this state, and we are together. There is nothing better than that. There’s an understanding that you are more alike than different, that you are both just trying to get through the day as best you can, and that you recognize that in the other person too. It’s a moment of shared humanity. What that silence is saying is, “Here we are”. That’s all it is. Two strangers together saying, “I don’t know, what do you think?” That’s beautiful.

How do you handle it when an interviewee says something you find objectionable or untrue?

I’m there to figure out what you know and what you think; it’s not my job to argue with you about it. If I’m reporting or investigating something, then of course I’m going to try to get to what the facts are, but that’s not usually what I’m doing.

After a big flood here last summer, I did a story with a woman who lost her home. She was in dire straits. Near the end of our conversation, I asked her, “What’s next? What do you do now?” She said, “Well, I don’t know, it’s hard. There’s a housing crisis, and millions of people are coming into the country taking our homes.”

I didn’t agree with that, but I wasn’t going to argue with her about it. That’s not the point of the show. The point of the show is for you to climb into her experience. I published the episode, and shared a link to her GoFundMe. A listener wrote to me saying, “How dare you not challenge her on that, and how dare you ask us to give her money?”

I wrote back and said, “I’m not a reporter; it’s not my job to correct her. I don’t agree with her, but I think it’s more interesting to hear that she believes that than to not hear it. I liked the balance between the story of a flood and the story of this belief of hers. There’s interesting tension there, which you clearly felt! But instead of seeing that as informative or interesting, you want to be right. So that’s actually an interesting question for you. You don’t think she’s worth helping because you don’t agree with her. Isn’t that kind of the problem that we’re dealing with here?”

She lives next door to me. That is what is true—she lives there, I live here, and she has lost her home. Those are bigger realities than her watching too much Fox News.

I don’t want to go down rabbit holes talking about people’s misguided political understandings. That’s just stirring coffee. Everybody’s doing that; it’s boring and stupid, and it’s not taking us anywhere. So what is beyond that?

Have you run into situations where someone you’re interviewing is not cooperating with your intentions for the interview?

I interviewed a 95-year-old lady recently for a show, and she was like, “I don’t need this. I don’t need to have any more conversations.” I was asking questions and leaning in, and she was just not having it, giving two- or three-word answers. So you think, okay, what can I get from her, where actually that is the interesting part? The interesting part is that she’s got nothing more to say.

Sometimes you have an idea of what it is that’s going to be interesting, and then you’re wrong, and you have to think on your feet. A lot of radio producers or reporters just manhandle it. They’re like, “No, this is what it’s going to be about.” Any interview where you’re not reacting to what’s happening in the moment is such a fucking bore. If you’re not playing ball—catching and throwing—then what’s the point?

I hate when an interviewer is obviously trying to set up their subject to say something that they’ve already said somewhere else.

Right!

So, do you have the same… Do you do this because you also have a weird interviewing compulsion?

I think so. I relate to what you said about falling in love with strangers. I think if we pay attention to someone or something that we otherwise wouldn’t, it can be very beautiful. So I like directing people’s attention to new places, people and ideas.

But why? Why do we care? For me, I think it comes back to the same thing—that there’s something heartbreaking about recognizing you’re in the same slipstream with strangers. Just the project of being human. To be reminded that in fact, other people are real and we’re real. I think we don’t always know that.

Every now and then we realize, “Oh, that person is real. They have a whole life with wicked boring struggles, heartbreak, good days and bad days.” It’s beautiful to remind each other of that. And not only are we real, we are more alike than different.

I don’t totally understand my compulsion to interview people, because I also find myself actively avoiding social situations all the time.

I think extroverted introverts are the best interviewers. I have to be alone a tremendous amount for my own sanity. My most important relationship is with myself. People leave the house, and I’m back to my real life, which is wondering what’s going on. I have to be alone to ask that question.

There’s this woman, Rose, who counts votes with me. Whenever we have something going on in town, a few people volunteer to show up and count papers, and I always work with Rose. We’re nothing alike, but I feel so filled up when I get to be with her for a little while. We’re not talking about anything important, just “How’s your son?” or whatever. But I don’t want it to end because there’s something I’m getting from it. In the parking lot, I don’t want to say goodbye to her.

In life, we have our family, our colleagues, our close friends, and then there’s everybody else—just people. Those people are as important to me as my dearest friends, because they’re the context of my life. They are the glue. They remind me that I am somewhere. We think our lives are just about the important people and the important parts, but it’s the lady at the store, the five-second conversation about butter. That’s your life.

But small talk can also feel like hell. There are versions of it that are meaningful, but talking to strangers at a party can really feel like a kind of death.

This is interesting. I hate small talk too. Small talk at a party is death. So what is the difference between that and my conversation with Rose at the town clerk’s office? They’re both small talk, but there’s a different investment. What is it?

Maybe it’s the opportunity to commune with somebody who I’m not going to be at a party with, who I’m never going to see at a dinner. That feels like opportunity to me. We get to find out where there’s overlap in our Venn diagram. That’s comforting to both of us because it makes us feel like the world is less bifurcated than we’re told. You can find love between people who have nothing in common, and that’s profound.