We speak with author Lily Brooks-Dalton, along with:

• Filmmaker Jay Craven
• Dan Nott, author of the Vermont Book Award-winning graphic novel “Hidden Systems”
• Paul W. Gates from the Lake Champlain Maritime Museum
• Writer and environmental journalist Megan Mayhew Bergman
• Cyril Brunner, Innovation and Technology Leader at Vermont Electric Cooperative

The Vermont Reads 2025 podcast was produced by Ryan Newswanger; with script, interview and production help from Noel Clark; and with script and narration help from Miciah Bay Gault.

We’re grateful to our supporters: the Trout Lily Foundation and the Jack & Dorothy Byrne Foundation. Vermont Public is our Media Sponsor. And thanks to Junction Arts and Media for the use of their recording studio.

Music in this episode was created by:

• Theo Gerard
• Adi Goldstein
• Rick Gallagher

This first episode focuses on Power. We speak with author Lily Brooks-Dalton, along with:

- Federico Cintrón Moscoso, Ph.D., Program Director of El Puente Puerto Rico, a group working on sustainability issues for Puerto Rican communities

- Writer and environmental journalist Megan Mayhew Bergman

- Dan Nott, author of the Vermont Book Award-winning graphic novel Hidden Systems

- Cyril Brunner, Innovation and Technology Leader at Vermont Electric Cooperative

In this episode, we discuss a film made in Pittsford, Vermont in 1950 to promote democracy in postwar Japan. We review the changes that needed to be made to town meeting during this pandemic year. And we talk with political theory professor Meg Mott about ongoing threats to town meeting and self-governance.

This episode is part of the “Why it Matters: Civics and Electoral Participation” initiative sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Federation for State Humanities Councils.

In this episode, we take a look at how Vermont has been depicted in movies, from A Vermont Romance in 1916 through 2005’s Thank You for Smoking. We explore a documentary shot in Chelsea in the early 1970s, and consider the stories that we tell about ourselves, both onscreen and off.

Image of Kenneth O'Donnell by Suzanne Opton.

We talk with Ben Rose, former Executive Director of the Green Mountain Club, about James P. Taylor, an early visionary and promoter for the Long Trail. We listen to a 1987 interview with Catherine Robbins, one of the "Three Musketeers," the first women to hike the trail in 1927. And we speak with Wendy Turner, one of the first women to serve as a caretaker at a Long Trail lodge.

In this episode we examine the lives of several influential African American Vermonters who lived in our state before the Civil War. In two cases, before Vermont was even a state.

We learn about Lucy Terry Prince, who created the oldest known work of literature written by an African American; Alexander Twilight, the first person of African descent to receive a college degree in the United States, who educated almost 2500 students during his tenure at the Orleans County Grammar School; and Martin Freeman, an educator from Rutland who moved to Liberia because he couldn't achieve the same rights and privileges as his white peers.

Vermont's early bike clubs were the province of elites: mostly wealthy, white men. But underrepresented groups took up the new technology soon after, and today's bicycle groups provide mobility and community to a wide range of residents.

One expert believes that's due to Vermont's constantly changing conditions.

"Weather can be pretty extreme," says Roger Hill, a forecaster who runs Weathering Heights and appears on Radio Vermont stations. "There's a sort of normalcy bias that we all have that we carry with us. We don't realize that it can be really off-the-charts extreme."

Hill says Vermont's position halfway between the tropics and the poles contributes to that variability. And it's caused many of the state's most historic weather events.

In this podcast, Roger Hill describes the past and future of Vermont's weather patterns. Amanda Gustin and Eileen Corcoran examine an antique weather station. Steve Long shows how a landscape tells the story of the Hurricane of 1938. And Larry Coffin recounts Vermont's "Year Without a Summer."

When most of these institutions were first built, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, they had a simpler purpose. "It was bathrooms and books," says Bixby Memorial Library director Jane Spencer. Farmers would stop off to use the public restrooms on visits to town, and nearby residents would supplement their education by reading for pleasure.

Libraries were a common way for Vermonters who made fortunes out-of-state to honor their hometowns with function and style. The Bixby, for example, occupies an ornate Greek revival building in Vergennes.

"These buildings were significant structures in the towns," says Paul Carnahan of the Vermont Historical Society. "People had a lot of pride in those buildings."

While some have traded in their filigrees for more modern touches, they're still key to town life. And in an age when books are losing their primacy as sources of information, local libraries have adapted to house more than just bathrooms and books.

On this podcast, preservationist and historian William Hosely describes the architectural significance of Vermont's libraries. Joy Worland, from the Vermont Department of Libraries, talks about how the state's decentralized system is unique. And the Bixby Library's Jane Spencer and Paula Moore discuss how their institution has evolved. 

Household production across New England spiked in the late 18th century. In Vermont, a state-sponsored silk production initiative brought women into a new trade. In the years since, innovative artisans like Elizabeth Fisk and Patty Yoder have reinvented traditional crafts — and in the process, redefined what’s sometimes been dismissed as “women’s work.”

On this episode, the Shelburne Museum's Katie Wood Kirchoff and Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich discuss New England textile artisans who blurred the lines between art and business. The weekly knitting group at Montpelier’s Yarn store talk about finding community through fiber arts. Plus, Amanda Gustin and Mary Rogstad explore an exhibit at the the Vermont History Museum that reveals the psychology of silk production.

The counterculture valued self-reliance over profit. And as the movement spread, Vermont finished its long transformation from one of the most conservative states in the country to one of the most liberal.

But the decade was also good for business. While back-to-the-landers worked to build sustainable cooperatives, profit-driven businesses thrived. Huge companies like Burton Snowboards and Ben & Jerry's got their start, while inventors and artisans found major markets for their goods.

In this podcast, hear from three entrepreneurs who found Vermont in the 1970s to be the right place at the right time. Hinda Miller, one of the inventors of the sports bra, turned a personal hunch into a product that changed sports forever. Duncan Syme, co-founder of Vermont Castings, built a wood stove business that served natives and newcomers alike. And Fred and Judi Danforth, of Danforth Pewter, managed a sought-after product line while working to preserve their artisan roots.

Flanders accumulated a cache of one-of-a-kind recordings that mainly captured the sounds of European settlers and their descendants. But she's just one of a long line of Vermonters who have dedicated themselves to preserving the sound of our state, believing that Vermont music tells us something about who we are.

In this podcast, we talk to Middlebury College special collections curator Rebekah Irwin and performer Linda Radtke about Flanders' collection. Plus, documentarian Mark Greenberg and Big Heavy World founder James Lockridge show that there's more to the history of Vermont music than English ballads.

Ninety years ago, a rainstorm that swept across the eastern United States caused massive flooding in Vermont. The waters destroyed farmland across the state. Thousands of animals drowned. Eighty-four people lost their lives, including the state's lieutenant governor.

To this day, the 1927 flood is considered the biggest natural disaster in Vermont’s history.

But the flood was an even bigger turning point. The rebuilding process set in place some of the infrastructure that we still use today. And right before the Great Depression and the New Deal years of the 1930s, it focused the federal government’s attention – and some of its money – on a state that had never really asked for it.