VPR News

Everyone has interesting things happen to them - at least once in a while - but not everyone knows how to tell a good story about their experiences. Susanne Schmidt is someone who does. She's a storyteller and regional producer of The Moth , which puts on storytelling events across the country.

A special Vermont Edition collects interviews with cartoonists and graphic novel creators, showcasing local work in the unique art form that presents novel-length stories in a comic strip format. It's a combination of words and images that doesn't shy away from difficult subjects: these Vermont cartoonists tackle mental health, crumbling marriages, world wars and the current political climate.

A rough winter for roads throughout the state means potholes are plentiful and making for some bone-rattling car rides. Experts from the Agency of Transportation join Vermont Edition to talk about how potholes form, how they're fixed and how they can be prevented.

Last Friday morning, my family stood in front of Brattleboro Union High School for one of the local youth-led climate strikes. This strike drew a crowd of all ages, including grandparents and babies in arms, but teens were at the helm, chanting into the megaphone “No more coal! No more oil! Keep the carbon in the soil!”

It's been almost a year since Utah developer David Hall announced that he would be giving up on his plan to build a 5,000-acre "sustainable community," designed for up to 20,000 people, in the Upper Valley. Now people from the four towns that pushed back on the development are trying to figure out what's next, working together to come up with regional solutions to many of the same issues other rural communities around Vermont face.

The Burlington area is a hub for refugees and immigrants in Vermont, but area officials and businesses are concerned about this population shrinking. Recent federal restrictions have limited the number of refugees coming to the state and there's another problem too: some New Americans are choosing to leave Vermont.

This past Town Meeting Day , voters in South Burlington backed a plan to tax rental cars. However in a case like this, where local residents vote to make a change to their town charter, it still needs to be approved by the Vermont Legislature before it can go into effect. So why is that? And might that process change?

They were everything from tanneries to landfills to copper mines. They are Vermont's 14 Superfund sites; locations that were so polluted they required a long-term cleanup plan of the hazardous material contaminations. We'll "visit" some of them at a time when the Environmental Protection Agency is doing five-year reviews of six of the sites.

Author Katherine Paterson, who lives in Montpelier, is being recognized for “an exceptional lifetime body of work" by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Paterson is known for books for kids and young adults like Bridge to Terabithia , The Great Gilly Hopkins , Jacob Have I Loved , and many others. She took home this year’s E.B. White Award—a prize she says has personal significance.

It’s been a rough winter for owls—and the Vermont Institute of Natural Science says it’s mostly affecting young owls experiencing their first winter.

Lindsey Stoddard has something in common with Rain, the narrator of her new young adult novel Right As Rain . Like the young girl whose life is uprooted when she abruptly moves from Vermont to New York City's Spanish Harlem neighborhood, Stoddard has experienced a similar locale change as well.

VPR's investigative reporter Emily Corwin has been looking into the care received by young psychiatric patients in crisis. As with adults, children and adolescents can spend days in hospital emergency departments. And some parents and doctors have complained about the quality and amount of care they receive from psychiatrists while in the ER.

Thursday in Washington, Sen. Patrick Leahy voted to block President Donald Trump's emergency declaration on the southern border. We're talking with the Senator about that resolution, security and humanitarian concerns at the Southern border, Sen. Bernie Sanders' 2020 presidential run and more.

When my prematurely-born daughter approached the end of her seven week stay in Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center’s Intensive Care Nursery, the hospital informed me that before discharge, I needed to watch several videos about vaccinations – including one with footage of an un-vaccinated child with whooping cough struggling to breathe as his distraught parents looked on.

February was the one-year anniversary of the averted school shooting in Fair Haven that VPR explored in its five-episode podcast JOLTED . A new episode is now available with updates about how things have changed since last year.