The Vermont Conversation with David Goodman

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.

The Vermont Conversation with David Goodman is a news podcast hosted by Unknown Host, with 0 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80. PitchCentric scores this show on Booking Probability, Listen Score, and live audience signals refreshed every 24 hours.

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  The Vermont Conversation with David Goodman

  ‘What can I do?’ Ami Fields-Meyer on what global dissidents can teach Americans

  Aug 12, 202643 min

  As President Donald Trump intensifies his campaign of retribution against his political opponents and unleashes masked federal agents on immigrant communities, many American citizens are asking: What can I do? For answers, we can look to dissidents who have stood up to authoritarianism. “Authoritarianism is about stealing your rights and stealing your money,” said Ami Fields-Meyer, co-author with journalist Julia Angwin of “On Courage: How to Be a Dissident in an Age of Fear.” The authors spoke with over 100 dissidents in their research. These include a 73-year-old abortion escort in Virginia, young activists in Egypt who have challenged a dictator, students in Hong Kong defending democracy, and a civil rights lawyer who lost his job in the Trump administration while fighting for fair housing. Together, they offer a modern roadmap for resisting authoritarianism. Authoritarians start by targeting vulnerable groups, then extending to political opponents and the broader population. They say, “It's not me who's taking your money or your rights. This is happening because of somebody else. It's happening because of the trans people. It's happening because of the undocumented people,” Fields-Meyer told me. “The response has to be to expand the circle of who we are committed to.” Fields-Meyer has been a senior policy adviser to then-Vice President Kamala Harris, a senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation and a strategist to national civil rights organizations and political candidates. His articles on democracy and public policy have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times and other outlets. The authors share lessons from global dissidents. Fields-Meyer described how dissidents “repurposed their communities into extraordinarily powerful political forces. The dissident movement that helped bring down communism in Czechoslovakia was a group of theater actors (who) repurposed their theaters into organizing hubs. They stopped printing playbills on their printers and started printing protest leaflets. This is something that we see all over the world.” This includes Fields-Meyer’s home community of Brooklyn, where mutual aid groups formed during the Covid-19 pandemic are now using the same texting groups “to protect people from the federal agents who are waiting outside their doors.” Fields-Meyer said that strengthening community helps counter the ways that autocrats seek to divide people. “Authoritarianism is all about saying, ‘Don't believe your lying eyes. You thought that you saw Renee Good shot in the street? No, you didn't. You thought that you saw Alex Pretti shot in the street? No, you didn't,’” said Fields-Meyer. “What we learned from Soviet dissidents is that when lies abound, you can work with other people and be with other people and be emboldened to say, ‘I do see what I see.’” “We need to be able to hold hope and hopelessness at the same time,” said Fields-Meyer. “If we do, history tells us that we're going to win.”

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  The Vermont Conversation with David Goodman

  ‘You have a choice on how you respond.’ Kelly Brush on thriving after a life-altering accident

  Aug 5, 202641 min

  Few people have turned adversity into opportunity as dramatically as Kelly Brush. Brush was on the Middlebury College ski team when she was paralyzed in a ski racing accident in 2006. Twenty years later, Brush is a leader of a national movement to empower people with spinal cord injuries. “I'm so glad that I'm able to do that and support … thousands of other people that I don't even know and their families and create things that just feel a little bit better,” Brush told me. I asked Brush what enabled her to stay positive following her accident. “Whenever something happens in life, you have a choice on how you respond,” she replied. “Even when there's things that are really hard or really sad, you feel that, and then you make the choice to move you forward in a good direction.” Brush has mixed feelings about people calling her an inspiration. If “an understanding of who I am and what I've done creates inspiration, that's great. But not the inspiration that comes just because I exist and I'm in a wheelchair.” Brush is concerned about how people with disabilities are especially vulnerable to delays or cutbacks in health care. She has personal experience of this: she recently had to undergo major back surgery and had to seek care in an emergency room when her primary care provider couldn’t see her for several weeks. “People with disabilities have greater health care needs,” she said. “When the health care system isn't set up well, we are then paying more for those greater needs. I see it time and again with complications that come from spinal cord injuries.” Brush, who recently turned 40, is the founder and spokesperson for the Kelly Brush Foundation , which grants about $1 million per year to people with spinal cord injuries to purchase adaptive sports equipment and maintain an active lifestyle. Its best known fundraiser is the annual Kelly Brush Ride , which draws nearly 1,000 bike riders and will take place this year on Sept. 12 in Middlebury. There are also Kelly Brush Rides in Park City, Utah, and the Bay Area. Brush is especially proud of the community that she and her foundation have helped build. “When I got hurt, I didn't know anybody else with a spinal cord injury,” she said. Now her foundation connects people with spinal cord injuries with one another. “There's something really different about being able to build community with people who are doing things similarly to you, as well as just the ability to feel seen and be seen by other people who are living a similar life to you outside of adaptive sports.” Brush lives in Charlotte with her two young daughters. She worked for 10 years as a pediatric nurse practitioner, but is taking a break from that to lead her foundation and look after her children. I asked Brush what she hopes people take away from her story. “To be excited about the fact that I've been able to live such a full life and continue to have all the same highs and lows that so many people have and I do it from my wheelchair,” she replied. “I definitely have some more struggles than others. But my life is awesome and really fun. I hope people can see that and see the beauty in life, no matter what comes up and what happens, and find and follow that.”

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  The Vermont Conversation with David Goodman

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

  Jul 29, 202639 min

  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.”

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  The Vermont Conversation with David Goodman

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

  Jul 22, 202641 min

  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.”

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  The Vermont Conversation with David Goodman

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

  Jul 15, 202637 min

  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.”

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