Rumble Strip creator Erica Heilman on making independent audio and asking people about class
Erica Heilman has been making Rumble Strip since 2013, when she was in her 40s and feeling, she told me, “the foretaste of regret.” It is, on its surface, a podcast about life in Vermont, but it’s also so much more; on the podcast’s website, Heilman describes it as “messy, obsessively crafted stories of the everyday.”
Rumble Strip is a bit of an odd duck in the world of podcasting. There is no release schedule; episodes drop seemingly at random, with varying runtimes and meandering subjects. There are no ads for online mattresses or toothbrushes or mid-century modern furniture, and its creator doesn’t know how many people listen to the show. The podcast is part of the independent audio collective Hub & Spoke, but aside from a few trusted friends and collaborators who occasionally send her feedback before episodes are released, Heilman largely makes the show by herself, from her closet.
But if the show is an odd duck, it’s of the Mandarin variety — colorful, beautiful, and much-loved. The New Yorker called Rumble Strip “limitless” in 2022, the same year it landed on The New York Times’ best podcasts list. “Finn and the Bell,” an episode from 2021 about a teenager who died by suicide and his community’s attempts to pick itself up in the aftermath, won a Peabody Award. It’s a show that regularly evokes a strange, unnameable ache in the chest.
A Vermont native (she left for college and a stint in New York before returning in 2004), Heilman has watched her home state transform over the years, and in many ways Rumble Strip has documented that transformation. She recently published a series of episodes about one particular aspect of that transformation, collectively called What Class Are You?, in which she asked the question to friends and strangers alike. I called her to talk about making the series and what independent podcasting looks like today.
Heilman spoke to me over Zoom from her home in Vermont, where house cats and stray friends wandered through the frame. Our interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Podcasting was sort of a new thing back then [in 2013], and I was on a stationary bike, and I had a sudden, like, 8-year-old voice in my head that said, “You should start a show.” And there’s a community radio station like, five miles away and I was like, “Jesus Christ, Erica, you gotta just fuckin’ do it.”
So I started a show at the community radio station knowing I wanted a podcast, but I knew that if I started at the station, I’d have to do it. I’d backed myself into it. But I didn’t know what it was about. I didn’t know what it was going to be. I didn’t expect anybody to listen to it and they didn’t for years. So that’s how it started. It was a compulsion, at the beginning. And there was no big plan about it. But even after the first two terrible episodes, I did feel profound relief. Like, “Oh great, finally. I needed to do this and now I’m doing it.”
It was like a wash of relief after being chased by this compulsion for a lifetime. Do you ever feel that sort of compulsion?
It’s so interesting hearing about that as the origin story. It feels very different from how podcasts are made today.
I live in a very, very white state. And when people say there’s no diversity here, it always rubs me the wrong way. There’s deep diversity here, but it’s both class and culture diversity. And the tensions there are really deep and fascinating. But we don’t really want to talk about class, because ultimately it begs the question of what we are going to do about it. Nobody wants to give anything up.
I couldn’t figure out a way into it. And one day I just was feeling desperate, and I thought, “I’m just going to go out and ask people, ‘What class are you?’ and see what happens.”
My editor said sure, try it, and I drove around the [Northeast Kingdom] asking people that question. And it led into fascinating directions that weren’t just about politics. It’s a question that gets deep into culture and power and education. And it led to really interesting conversations with people that got to a kind of diversity we’re not really good at talking about yet. We’re getting better at talking about race. We’re getting better at talking about gender. But if we ignore class in those inquiries, in those discussions, then I think we’re failing.
I think the people who listen to podcasts are generally college-educated people who can understand the fate of Isaac. They understand where he’s going and what that might look like. And so they could figure out how they could plug into that. Whereas the fate of Kytreana is more opaque. It’s less clear to them how the texture of her life feels and where she’s going.
When I asked Ethan, who is a young man I met in Orleans who worked at the Dollar General, “What do I not understand about not having enough?” — and [Ethan] is a person who grew up with a mother who was a teacher and a father who was a carpenter, and he works and he works — he said, “You probably don’t know what that feels like to not have enough to eat.”
If I could make a wish for podcasting, it would be that people in small places everywhere start doing this, making small stories that sound like where they’re from. Is it terrifying? Absolutely. It’s terrifying to make things.
But it’s magical, making this thing. It’s an act of faith every time. And every time I think “Maybe this time I won’t be able to do this.” And what will happen then? I don’t know. But there are moments where time slips, and I look up and it’s three hours later, and I’ve been in kind of a reverie talking to a stranger. And I leave and I feel giddy, and I know that they feel it too. And I’m not religious or spiritual but to me that is God, or love, or whatever you want to call it. That is the container that we all exist in, and that’s what I hope the show touches. Just a little reminder: “Oh yeah, that’s me too.”