Episode 171: Unconventional
/Show transcript:
Welcome to The Broad Experience, the show about women, the workplace, and success. I’m Ashley Milne-Tyte.
This time…what it means to have an unconventional career path…
“I don't regret having such a strange and wandering work life. I don't regret it mostly because I don't see the point in regretting it, but I don't feel proud of it either. I feel like I am of a piece in this way. I mean it's how I roll. It's how I am.”
The messy business of getting to where you want to be – coming up on The Broad Experience.
When I left university I had quite a few friends who seemed to know exactly what they wanted to do with their lives. They went straight off to train as accountants, teachers, lawyers. I was envious…. To 21-year-old me, it seemed like they had everything sorted out. I had naively assumed that by the time I graduated from university I’d have miraculously turned into a fully fledged grownup who knew what she wanted to do with the rest of her life. That was not to be.
My own twenties were spent in a series of jobs in insurance, publishing and digital marketing…but they were jobs. I never felt I had a career until I was in my thirties and in radio. And even now, almost 20 years later, I still wonder if my choppy work life can be called a career.
On today’s show, we focus on the messiness of the unconventional career path. My guest is Erica Heilman. As some of you know, Erica is the host of the podcast Rumblestrip. Many of the characters, the stories she tells, are set in Vermont, where she’s from and where she lives…with her son Henry. He’s 17 now.
But I don’t want you to think this is two audio producers navel gazing because that’s not the point of this show. Many of us have had unconventional paths and I’m betting Erica and I aren’t the only ones who have asked ourselves sometimes, what the hell am I doing?
Erica and I are podcast pen pals – never met in person but we go back and forth a lot about the highs and lows of being independent podcasters.
AM-T: “All I know about your background is that television featured in it somewhere and that being a private eye featured. So how on earth did that bring you to audio?”
“Yeah, I think that I have one of the most, I mean, I didn't know this at the time ‘cause I was just trying to get through growing up and then becoming a grownup, but I have the most circuitous route to audio and also kind of the most hapless and sort of feckless life trajectory. I never had a plan. I mean, I went to musical theater school, for four years I took tap dancing.”
AM-T: “Who does that other than people who want to be on Broadway?”
“Who does that indeed. Oh my God. Who does that? And this was before Glee! Like who the hell does that? Nobody was doing musical theater, or they were doing it but they weren’t talking about it, because it was before Glee. The crazy thing is it never occurred to me. I mean a lot of the people I went to musical theater school with are still doing musical theater professionally and cause duh, like that's what we were there to learn how to do, but it never occurred to me in a million years that I would ever do musical theater professionally. So I don't know why I did that, but I think it was partly that I wanted to, I wanted to learn how to do something really well…but again, all my intentions were quite vague and once I graduated from college, I never was thinking I was going to go to New York and, you know hoof it around Broadway auditioning, which is what everybody else did.”
But she did end up in another famous city…
“And so I moved to Chicago and I started selling muffins at a muffin shop. And then I took up with an experimental theater company and we ended up doing Oklahoma…”
AM-T: “I love Oklahoma.”
“I mean what is not to love about Oklahoma, right? But, except for that this was nothing like Oklahoma. It was only like Oklahoma in very abstract ways. You know, like a mini leather dress Oklahoma kind of approach, and then selling muffins during the day and thinking…and I spent a lot of time that first year out of college - I don't know if this is true for everybody, but I was really depressed. It was as though the soundtrack had stopped…”
AM-T: “It's a big transition to go from college/university life to work life. You have less freedom, you feel boxed in, it’s hard.”
“Well, you don't know what's supposed to happen. Like I, because I have this problem of not being able to anticipate even what might happen tomorrow, I really didn't know what was going to happen…anyway, I moved to Chicago and sold muffins and thought you know, maybe what I’m doing now is selling muffins and this is what I’ll always do.”
It wasn’t. In the end, she only stayed in Chicago for a year. She found it harder and harder to drag herself to rehearsal for the theater company. Instead she’d sit in front of the news – specifically a show some of you in the US will know, it used to be called the McNeil Lehrer News Hour. Now it’s just called PBS News Hour.
“And every night I would have to leave midway through the show to go to play rehearsal. And every night I was resentful because I loved that show. I loved that show. I loved that it dared to be boring. I mean, that was their motto in fact - was dare to be boring - which is what I think news should get back to.”
Agreed.
So she leaves Chicago, heads home to Vermont, and gets a job milking cows for a few months. She then uses that money to go traveling with a friend, they get round-the-world tickets – and when she comes back to the US many months later…she still doesn’t have any concrete career plans, but then out of the blue…
“I met a woman who happened to work at McNeil Lehrer News Hour. And she said there was some sort of very lowly positions there. And I said, ‘I'm going to - that will be my position. I will have that position.’ And so I went and I got it and I moved to New York. And then what followed were a series of years in documentary television.”
That lowly position at the news show led to other opportunities in TV documentaries…and it turned out ultimately that TV wasn’t entirely Erica’s thing…but she was learning more and more about interviewing people, which is really what she felt like she wanted to do. She’s deeply interested in people, their feelings, their motivations…And she was living in New York, one of the most creative cities in the world.
By the late 1990s I was living there too, stimulated but also a bit intimidated…
AM-T: “I want to ask you about your feelings about working in a big, ambitious, thriving city like New York, right, because i realized maybe when I was about 30 that actually this wasn’t normal. Being surrounded by people who were this career driven, this ambitious, I didn’t have feel bad, because in other parts of the world, other parts of the US even, this wouldn’t have been the case, I would have been surrounded by much more normal people. But I felt a little, like I’ve said this on the show before, I have a B plus personality, not an A, I’m a B plus. So I’m used to be surrounded by A type personalities but I’m not really an A type myself, but you realize when you’re in big cities they are full of Type A people. Did you feel like you belonged in that environment, how did you feel about working in a crazy place like New York?”
“Well, for me, so I was coming from a very small town. So moving to New York, I mean there wasn't anything familiar or comfortable…it was profoundly disorienting, and talk about a soundtrack. It's kind of like suddenly the soundtrack was full on, but it didn't feel like it was the soundtrack to my life. You know, it was just really loud, but I didn't know whose life it was playing for. So it was a profound culture shock going to New York, and yeah, everybody had a project, everybody had an idea and everybody was, everybody was going somewhere really fast. And I did not feel that way.
And again, I'm not, like of temperamentally I'm not going anywhere. Like that's, my nature is that the only thing that's ever going on is the question what's going on. And so that's a very present way of thinking, right? And so I don't know how to plan for the next step in my career. And I didn't then, and I still don't, but it was hard to not be more that way, living in New York. I mean, there were so many jobs around and I was working in a big building full of shows happening, that it was relatively easy to bounce from one to the next. So it wasn't that I couldn't find work ever, or that I wasn't forward moving in that regard. Like I was always working, but I had no idea where it was going and what I was pretty certain about, and I still have a lot of shame about this, is that I never thought that I would ever be the full-on… that I'd be the producer. Because being the producer meant being with your head on the chopping block, and I didn't think I was smart enough or good enough to ever be that person.”
She was associate producer, but she says she was never head producer for that reason – she just didn’t have the confidence. And maybe you’ve had this too, that sense of slight shame when you didn’t take a particular job or even try to apply for it…I have…but on the flip side looking back she doesn’t really mind because TV wasn’t her anyway…she says it was expensive to make, full of jostling egos…
“And I just thought all of this is all such bullshit, the way that this whole world of television operates. So I taught myself how to produce audio…I just kind of like wandering in the dark in a room, wandered toward audio because it allowed me to do what I wanted to do, which was interview people and edit, but I didn't have to raise $500,000 to do it.”
She left New York a couple of years after 9/11 and went home to Vermont. Around this time she also got pregnant… she had a baby, but she and her son’s father split up when he was just one. So now Erica is back in Vermont…on her own, with a toddler.
She had been working for a health website when she arrived back home. Then she got a job doing data entry for a friend’s company, then she started making some radio pieces on the side…something she really enjoyed. And then she landed a job she did for several years. She had this friend Susan, who she’d met in New York years when they both worked in documentaries. Susan now lived in Vermont as well, and she worked as a private detective.
“So after being home in Vermont a while, she gave me work because it was very, it was a similar skillset to documentary work. It's essentially, find people and talk to them and figure out what happened.”
AM-T: “That’s so interesting because I do think people – you talk about being a private detective and people’s ears perk up and they think, hmmm, that’s interesting…”
“I know, everybody thinks…and you know it’s really funny too, Susan always says this too, is people always think they’d be a really good PI. People often say, I always thought I’d be really good at that…And you say, ‘yeah, yeah…right.’ And you know, the thing is, people are titillated and it is titillating. I mean, it’s, it was all crime. It was all criminal work that I was doing. So I guess on some level that is titillating. I mean, Lord knows there are enough podcasts about crime. Everybody wants to hear about dead girls apparently. But this was a lot of, you know, pedophilia and child abuse and domestic abuse and really garish stabbings. And I mean, those are all perhaps titillating one at a time, but they become less titillating when you’re working on 20 at a time.”
But throughout her time as a private eye Erica was using her questioning skills and her listening skills – putting a story together, piece by piece. She says the problem is the pieced-together story was then just given to lawyers to use in court…it wasn’t HER story.
She was telling stories in her freelance radio work. But pitching stories, getting them accepted and aired…it was uphill work.
Erica wanted to tell stories of her own. Make something of her own. We were both late bloomers in this regard – like me she was in her forties when she launched her podcast, Rumblestrip…
“I remember of like a moment when I decided, and it was, there was just a moment. I think I was on a StairMaster and I remember thinking, Oh, now it's time to do that. It's simple. You have to just start doing that, or you're going to be disappointed. You're going to be a disappointment to yourself and to your son, if you don't start making consistently. And the way to make it consistently is to have, is to do it yourself and make a podcast. And then you don't need anybody's permission to air things.”
She says she made a lot of bad audio to begin with…but today her intimate, beautifully crafted show has listeners all over the world. She produces it single-handedly from home.
Erica has lived back in Vermont for almost two decades now…far from the cities where she’s worked in the past.
AM-T: “Thinking back to New York and what we talked about, this endless current of energy and ambition that you’re surrounded by…I haven’t really talked to that many people for the show who live in rural parts of the world…I spoke to a young farmer once in Maine, I recently spoke to a volunteer firefighter in Oklahoma, but those are the exceptions…and I’m really curious, do you and your friends spend a lot of time talking about your careers. How does it feel compared to the big city life?”
“Yeah, that's a fascinating kind of area. Like what is, what does life mean in the city versus the country? What is the tempo of life? I mean, I think one of the things I remember vividly noticing when I moved to Vermont or came home to Vermont, was that nobody asked me, ‘what do you do?’ at a party. That was very noteworthy that the first question that people were asking me was not kind of, you know, well, what do you do? Nobody thought to ask that, which isn't to say that, I'm not saying that in New York it's horrible or that it's a horrible place where everybody is just ambitious.
I mean, what I miss about New York is just that people are extremely excited about what they're doing and want to talk about it. I wasn't moving in banker circles where ambition was just about climbing a ladder of some kind. I was with people who were really excited about what they were doing, but there's also a certain way in which that can be very tiring when you don't want to think about all that. You don't always want to be thinking about what you're doing. You know, the project that you're working on. And in Vermont, there was just a great silence that opened up around that. And that wasn't such a constant pressing question.”
She says living in a rural part of the country is different in other ways, too…
“Nobody does one thing. People do lots of things. You might be a carpenter and you know, a furniture maker and you're in a band and, oh, also you run marathons or whatever. People are self identified - they do many things. They are very seldom one thing. And also people very often don't have regular jobs here, at least in my experience, a lot of people here kind of piece lives together. So what they're doing is really interesting, but it's not quite so intensely singular as a lot of lives in New York.”
She does a mixture of things herself, but they’re all audio-focused – she makes her show, she makes audio for the Vermont Folk Life Center and other institutions, Vermont Public Radio.
AM-T: At this point now that you’re balancing your show and other audio work do you feel like you’re where you’re meant to be, are you happy where you’re at in your career? And do you think about it as a career I guess I should ask? Because sometimes I wonder about that myself, I think, do I have a career or do I just have a series of weird stages? I don’t know.”
“I think I am in the latter category of, I have a series of weird stages. I have never thought of myself as someone with a career. I just don't, I don't think of myself that way. But I'm very happy with where I am right now. I love what I do, although it's lonely and it's challenging in lots of ways, but I feel absolutely like this is what I want to be doing and where I want to be doing it. “
In this clip from one of Erica’s shows last year she’s interviewing a 15-year-old boy, Leland. He’s a neighbor of hers. She’s interviewed him every year for the past six years…
[Erica and Leland clip here]
Erica says she is glad she moved back to Vermont all those years ago. She wants to record the lives of Vermonters, the sounds of the place – that is her life’s work now. She says working in audio allows her to indulge a long love affair with the place where she grew up…
“I hear it differently. I experience it differently with a microphone and I, this is a place that I have a long-term love for. And also, which includes hate of, you know, it's a place that, you know, I remember vividly when I first came back here, there were certain bird sounds that came right up out of my childhood. They were deep sense memories, um, from childhood. And I realized, Oh, this place has a very particular sound to it that I know that is of me. And when I have a micro, now that I have a microphone, I feel like I'm chronicling something that is, you know, really, um, uh, cellular for me somehow, you know, I want to listen to it. I want, and I want to record recorded. I want, I mean, I want it to be recorded the sound of this place. Um, and I don't think I'll ever get tired of, of, of doing that.”
…
CLIP 2 ends: “The birds are still out but the peepers are starting…”
I wondered if Erica sees all the jobs she’s had over the years as helping her get to where she is now…or not?
“Yeah. I don't know how much my muffin jobs….you know, the muffin jobs went on for quite some time. I mean, I had a lot of muffin jobs and I don't know that they were awfully character-building or that they gave me any special insights. And frankly, when I think back, I do think back with a certain measure of shame at my absolute bewilderment, my chronic bewilderment in my life, that I never knew where I was heading. And it took a long time to get here. And I don't know that I wouldn't have started my show a lot earlier if I had, um…I don’t know, I want the answer to be different.
You know, I don't regret having such a strange and wandering, work life. I don't regret it mostly because I don't see the point in regretting it, but I don't feel proud of it either. I feel like I am of a piece in this way. I am of a piece. I mean it's how I roll. It's how I am, but I am not forward-thinking and so I've just taken what comes next, always.”
AM-T: “I should ask you this one question before we go – which is how do you view success, what to you is success?”
“Yeah, boy I mean we’ve talked about this a lot. I wish I had better, more inspiring answers. This is a question when you’re with independent podcasting that haunts one. How many listeners is enough listeners, how much money is enough money, what feedback loop is required to feel success?
I finally feel successful because finally I'm making something that I believe in, and that requires courage, and also that I am willing to fail with, because I care about it. I'm willing to fail in what I do, and that feels like success to me, or that's part of why I feel successful is that I finally feel willing to look stupid, in order to make something that I think is worth listening to.”
AM-T: “Yeah, so for you success is bound up with what you do and how it makes you feel, not with earning a certain amount of money by a certain age or stage?”
“Yes, right, yes, absolutely. I think it's like, it feels like my first honest job in the sense that it feels true, it feels like it's part of me, it's not separate from me. And so that feels successful. It feels like I finally figured out a thing that feels true. And yeah, it is not financial. I mean, my son wonders this sometimes. Why do you not make more money? And why don't you seem to care? Or, why don't you have more listeners or why aren't you looking to become bigger and more successful? And I don't have answers. I don't know why I don't want those things or why those things aren't compelling to me, or compelling enough to work hard to get them, but they're not.”
Erica Heilman.
Last year Erica made a series of podcasts during Covid called ‘Our Show’ – they were made with tape that listeners around the world sent into her. At the end of last year The Atlantic magazine picked 50 best podcasts of 2020 and Erica’s series came in at number one.
That’s The Broad Experience for this time. I will link you to more information about Erica and Rumblestrip under this episode at TheBroadExperience.com
If you enjoy my one-woman show and you haven’t given it a review I would love it if you could – you can also give a donation of any amount at the support tab at TheBroadExperience.com.
I’m Ashley Milne-Tyte. Thanks for listening.