Erica Heilman
Erica Heilman is the host of Rumble Strip. Follow her on Twitter here.
How did you get introduced into the audio space?
I used to work in documentary television but it requires a lot of money and people to make television—or at least it did back in the 90s when I was doing it. Radio I could do alone, for cheap. So I started the podcast. I had no audience for years which was humiliating but also probably useful because it was not a very good show at the beginning. No one’s show is good at the beginning (which is liberating if you think about it right). Also, spending years making something no one listened to helped me understand that making the show was a kind of ‘life compulsion’. This was useful information.
How do you describe Rumble Strip to people? I find myself always recommending it, but always grappling for the right words to use.
It’s a show about all the living we do between the important parts. Between the births and birthdays and weddings and holidays and deaths. How do people get through, say, 11am? I always wonder this. So I guess it’s a show about miraculous ordinary life.
I’ve always believed that every person I meet knows something I need to know in order to live…do…survive my life better, and this show has proven to me that I’m right. So in a way it’s a show I make for very selfish reasons.
Which episode would you suggest people get started with? (I started with the lawyer one.)
I would probably recommend Finn and the Bell or Fifty: A Phoenix Moment, two shows I love and which are diametrically opposed in tone.
What is the key to a good interview?
I suppose there are a thousand ways to do a good interview. Some interviews are just about a THING and the thing is so interesting that just talking about the thing is enough. But most of the time I think good interviews are as much about tone as they are about content. In other words, there are things said. And there’s the way things are said. And there is a dynamic that develops between the interviewer/interviewee that has a sound to it. In a good interview I’m acutely aware of both subject and sound/dynamic because good interviews are about both.
Additionally. I am always very nervous before interviews…so I guess good interviews involve being nervous beforehand? In a good interview I have no idea what’s going to happen. A lot of times good interviews involve impromptu drives in cars or walks to rivers or visits to relatives. Good interviews almost always feel...mutually cathartic? Sometimes good interviews involve calling the interviewee after the interview to see if they are ok because interviews can be disorienting. At times, good interviews require cutting out some parts because the interviewee didnt mean to share that much. This is obviously not the case for good interviews by investigative journalists but I am not an investigative journalist. Good interviews are as much about what we don’t know as about what we do know. Most important, I think good interviews are always, at their root, about love.
Also, sometimes I thought it was a good interview and it wasn’t a very good interview.
Podcasting can be draining, what keeps you going?
I don’t know. I’m wondering that even today. Certainly being part of a podcast collective helps. I’m a member of Hub and Spoke, a group of independent podcasters who also make their shows for love. I mean they make money too, but their podcasts started much like mine—compulsively, in closets. It is incredibly helpful to have a group of smart, thoughtful people to talk with. But I’m really struggling after Finn and the Bell. That show was a culmination of so many disparate things that I love and am afraid of—things I love and hate about where I live, the mortal terror of losing a child, and the intense challenge of finding a format…or a way that the show moved…that could be worthy of the story. It was a very hard show to make. And now it’s done and I’m trying to figure out where to go from here. But that happens all the time in podcasting, at least independent ones like mine that are ongoing and not series-based. It’s just a long cycle of coming up with an idea, then starting and finishing alone, starting and finishing. Sometimes it’s hard to remember how to start and finish again, or why. I wonder if I’m getting any better at what I do, or if I’ve fallen into tropes and boring, reductive patterns. The show, ultimately, is about me. What I’m thinking about, worried about, wondering about…it’s a way for me to answer my own existential questions. Even shows about deer hunting or stuffed animals—they all answer some question that I can’t quite articulate. But maybe after years and years, my questions will become dull to listeners, my existential concerns repetitive, and how will I know? Who will tell me it’s time to end it? Or maybe the audience will just fall away and I’ll be making the show for myself like I was in the beginning. I don’t know.
How do you come up with ideas? Do you have a big list?
Sometimes there’s a burning personal question I have that I want to find a way to answer…the Fifty show was like that. I was turning 50 and I didn’t know how to feel about it so I went out and interviewed a bunch of friends of different ages, and my son. And I forced other friends to be in a band so I could record Total Eclipse of the Heart, which seemed like an essential part of the story. So that’s one way. Sometimes people give me good ideas for a person I should meet. Sometimes there is a pressing issue in the national or local landscape that I want to do something about—recently I made a series for VPR about how hospital staff are coping—and not coping—with the latest Covid surge. I think first person stories like these are an excellent accompaniment to news coverage, and I love making stories that inform the news.
Sometimes I have no idea what to make. And I worry. But it usually only lasts a couple days.
What is your relationship with your voice and how would you describe it?
I remember my sister once said after listening to my show, ’that doesn’t sound like you,’ and I felt really embarrassed. But you know what? I turn on the mic and do the best I can. And after years of doing it, I’ve come to some relative peace about the way I sound on the show. It is me. It’s an authentic version of me. And it helps to have awesome, strange, funny, brilliant listeners. I can tell by what they write to me that they know what I’m trying to say or what I mean. They are patient through my failures and they (mostly) laugh at my jokes and write in with their astute observations, so when I’m talking into the mic in my closet, it helps to think of them.
Thanks, Erica!