Curiosity, neurosis, and love: an interview with Erica Heilman (part 1)
Erica Heilman of Rumble Strip, ready for an interview in a garage
I’m beginning a series of interviews with independent podcasters. I’m doing this mainly because as podcasting has grown into an industry during the last several years, I feel like we don’t hear much from independents any more. Yet many of us who remain independent and smaller - and determined to keep producing - can learn a lot from one another.
Erica Heilman has been producing her podcast, Rumble Strip, since 2013 (she thinks). I started listening a year or two after that. If you don’t know Rumble Strip, the stories are raw, funny, sad, intimate, surprising. They unravel in the voices of the subjects, most of whom live in Vermont, with Erica herself often appearing only occasionally. They’re about the messiness of life. All of which is inadequate to describe this prickly, wonderful show. The Atlantic recently named Erica’s pandemic series Our Show the best podcast of 2020.
If you’re new to the podcast, try the first episode of Our Show and this piece, Joslyn House, to get an idea of what Erica does.
Erica came to podcasting by way of documentary film and private investigator work, among other jobs. She lives with her 17-year-old son in St. Johnsbury, Vermont.
She has strong feelings about the origins of podcasting, and worries that that history is getting lost in the shiny new podcasting landscape dominated by big names and big budgets.
So that’s where we started our conversation.
Erica Heilman: In the beginning part of what people came to podcasts for was a different sound…something that sounded different from what was on the radio. The only other place you were hearing anything in audio back then was on the radio, and you never hear people on the radio talking about what they did for lunch yesterday, or what they're afraid of in their regular lives. The news is always about crisis, right? So that didn't exist before podcasting in any really substantial way. And I've always thrilled as much to the sound of a voice as to the content. So clearly I am not a reporter. That’s not what reporters value.
I do think there's still an audience for the shows that we [independent podcasters] make…but it seems as though the great excitement that has come to podcasting, the enthusiasm that people feel about podcasting is not a result of hearing something small or something subtle or something strange. It seems as though it's trying very much to become something slick and packaged and consistent.
But the beginnings of podcasting, I think, were small and strange and eccentric and handmade. That's what podcasting was. And that's what was exciting about podcasting.
Ashley Milne-Tyte: It feels like it’s become quite focused on celebrities, on big names as hosts and guests. For a lot of beginning podcasters there's almost an expectation that what you're trying to do is get someone famous on your show, or why the heck would anyone listen? Which makes me a little sad, because we’re losing the idea that regular people are incredibly interesting. Can you talk about what you love about talking to regular people?
Erica Heilman: My inclination is almost always not to talk to people who other people already know. When you talk with them, they often sound as though they've said what they're saying before, and that's just less interesting to me than somebody who is discovering something for the first time in a conversation. You can hear that in a voice and that's just good tape.
And this almost feels like religion to me, that when somebody makes something and nobody's waiting for it - there's no audience, nobody cares that they're making it - but the person's just going to make it anyway, just cause ‘why not?’, that to me is an auspicious beginning.
“It was curiosity, love, and neurosis that made podcasts in the beginning. And I love shows like that.”
They sound different from shows that are carefully planned, with a panel of people saying, ‘What’s the show that people really want to hear right now?’
Ashley Milne-Tyte: Talk about your relationship with your show and how that's evolved over the years, and be as open as you want about audience size. How has your relationship with your creation and its listeners evolved since the early days?
Erica Heilman: Well you're the one who tried for years to help me figure out those audience metrics. And I finally just gave up! I just don't care. So I don't know [the size of the audience]. But one of the things that's interesting to me about doing a podcast for years, is that you develop a weirdly intimate relationship with your audience in a way that does not happen in radio, or not that I've experienced in radio. And I think it's because people choose to come and listen. It's not passive listening. They have to go find it and then hit ‘play’.
“So they’re actively participating in the show and for whatever reason, they feel more invited or welcomed to comment on what they’re hearing, so it feels more like there’s a relationship.”
Also if you make something that's really shite, the audience is likely to say, ‘Well, that was weird. I wonder why she did that?’ because they're in it for the long haul.
They got on the train somewhere because they're curious to know where you're going to take the train. They know that this show is, in some way, a reflection of my life and what I'm struggling with, what I'm interested in, what I'm worried about. And the listeners are on the train with me. They're up for that. Which isn't to say that the shows are about me at all…but I'm in those shows in a very, very personal way. And I think that's a unique thing to independent podcast producers, that kind of listener relationship.
Ashley Milne-Tyte: How did that all start for you?
Erica Heilman: Well, nobody listened to my show for years. I don't even think my family listened to my show, or I had to kind of prod them to listen initially. I mean, years. And this is another thing. I was over 40 [when I started the podcast]. So I had spent a whole lifetime feeling as though I wanted to be making something, but not actually making it.
And so finally with podcasting, I had a way to make something that I didn't need permission to make. And by that time, I was like, ‘Erica, it's time. You just have to keep doing this.’ And it was embarrassing. It's embarrassing to make something in a vacuum, but that's part of it. Like the shame was part of the development. I made shit in the beginning, you know? It was a shitty show and nobody wants to listen to a shitty show and they didn't, except for a few friends.
But I did it anyway. And it gets better - like all shows get better if you keep making them.
Ashley Milne-Tyte: Rumblestrip has been airing on Vermont Public Radio for quite a while, right?
Erica Heilman: Yes, and I know it's a much bigger audience than my podcast, or probably. And I'm thrilled that it's airing. I'm thrilled that hopefully somebody out there is hearing it, but the numbers of people listening don't touch me. You know, they don't.
But when I make something that sort of feels handmade and John in Colorado writes and he's like, ‘Oh my God, I loved that one! It kind of reminded me of the one you made a couple of years ago,’ it's a relationship. And it's meaningful. It's a real community of people.
In part two of our interview: Erica’s son asks why she doesn’t have any goals for her show. We discuss the idea that you can only do a podcast if you have a budget. And when is the ‘right’ time to end a long-running show?