BRATTLEBORO-Lawyer, history scholar, and New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore will host a series of local community conversations beginning this month at the Retreat Farm.
The agricultural nonprofit and event venue has joined with Vermont Public and Vermont Community Foundation to offer “America at 250: A Four-Part Community Conversation about Our Country, Its Founding, Active Citizenship, and Community.”
Each event in the series is to be hosted by Lepore, acclaimed author of These Truths: A History of the United States (2018) and We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution (2025), and 13 other titles.
Lepore is professor of American History at Harvard University and a professor of law at Harvard Law School, where she holds classes in evidence, historical methods, and humanistic inquiry.
Retreat Farm founder Buzz Schmidt, of Guilford, who has an extensive background in not-for-profit advocacy and administration, first reached out to Lepore late in 2019 to invite her and her husband, Tim Leek, to the Retreat Farm.
“We sat in the conference room in the yellow farmhouse just talking, and I told her about our dreams for the North Barn,” the circa 1837 structure on the 500-acre farm campus that was soon to undergo renovations to become a capacious public venue.
At that point, Lepore, a part-time resident in southern Vermont, had an idea. “What you need to do,” Schmidt recalls her saying, “is host a civil discourse series there.” Lepore is, he adds, “a small-d democrat and a communitarian.”
When North Barn renovations were complete, “I started bugging her. Are we ready for a civil discourse series? You want to host this? But she was tied up then, and I left the scene for a while.”
Soon after Schmidt’s return last fall to a more active management role at the Retreat Farm, Lepore called him to propose what ended up being a successful December 2025 event.
“That got the two of us thinking about what we could do during [America’s] 250th anniversary year,” Schmidt says.
Thus, the America at 250 series was created, and the first installment — “Being American,” a live storytelling event featuring local residents telling their stories about what it means to be American — takes place Wednesday, March 11, at the North Barn.
“Being American” will be produced and presented by the Transom Story Lab, founders of the popular Moth Radio Hour public radio show and podcast featuring the influential storytelling series.
Schmidt notes that the value of the first event is “getting people to express their own feelings, their own hopes, their own affinity for their own concerns for their American citizenship.” As Lepore hosts, Tom Bodett — author, radio personality, and local community facilitator — will emcee.
“It’s going to be exciting. It’ll be fun. And hopefully a great kickoff,” Schmidt says, also acknowledging the role of Transom’s executive director, Sophie Crane, in the development and facilitation of the event.
Lepore has had a relationship for several years with Crane who, prior to taking the lead at Transom, was recruited by Pushkin Industries, the podcast company founded by author Malcolm Gladwell. Prior to that, Crane worked as a producer for PBS’s Frontline.
Pushkin recruited Crane with the intent of having her work on a podcast with Lepore.
“As a history person, the opportunity to work with Jill was just such a gift,” Crane recalls. “She’s incredible. So brilliant and so fun to work with.”
Called The Last Archive, that podcast was about the “history of truth,” Crane explains: “What truth meant, and why it felt like we were in a moment in time when no one could agree on what was true anymore.”
Crane, who lives in Norwich, graduated in 2016 from Brown University with a concentration in the history of science.
“It turns out that if you study history in college, it’s mostly just lovely people telling you stories in seminars,” she says.
With an enduring passion for storytelling, she made radio and podcasts throughout college and started an audio magazine with a friend “to basically have an excuse to teach ourselves and our classmates how to make narrative, long-form radio.”
Crane explains that the 25-year-old award-winning Transom Lab — the brainchild of her father, environmentalist Bill McKibben — was “well before podcasts, the internet hub for narrative radio: people who were doing really interesting experimental things, mostly on public radio.” She called it “a tiny, scrappy nonprofit that punches so far above its weight.”
Transom has evolved to be the primary training ground for people who want to make narrative radio through vehicles like This American Life, The Moth Radio Hour, and Radiolab.
“A whole bunch of people have gone through our workshops and trainings,” Crane adds.
Despite dramatic funding cuts, Crane explains, “things have been going really well. Our workshops have never seen more demand, and we’re doing more of them than ever. People really need this sort of joyful, soulful gathering place that is entirely outside of commercialism and entirely about craft.”
Since she took the helm at Transom, she adds, the organization has been engaged in much more live storytelling work and training, such as the March 11 program.
Participants in this event were selected through an application process from a broad spectrum of Brattleboro-area residents who will have engaged in a weekend-long workshop with lead teacher Meg Bowles, a senior director of The Moth and co-host of The Moth Radio Hour.
“Meg has years and years of experience as a story coach,” Crane explains. “That’s how we started doing three-day intensive workshops to teach people who have never told a story before how to tell a personal story live on stage. That’s what we’re doing in Brattleboro.”
Viki Merrick, an independent radio producer and voice coach, will assist Bowles in helping participants shape their stories.
“We’re trying to make sure that the crew selected represents all different sorts of Brattleborians,” Crane says.
The idea for this event is “to make sure that those voices are included in this larger conversation and that the people and their personal histories are taken as expert testimony.”
“We’ve been working with the library, in particular, and [its outgoing director], Starr LaTronica. She’s done a huge amount of the outreach,” she adds.
The intent, says Crane, “is just about being in community, being in person, putting down the phone or the computer.”
“A huge part of this workshop wherever we do it is honestly just about learning how to be vulnerable with strangers,” she continues, calling that vulnerability “a skill that atrophied for people during the pandemic and in the age of social media.”
“And it hasn’t come back,” Crane says.
“It’s so easy to have your most vulnerable moments now be with an AI chat bot anonymously or on social media anonymously, and the idea of sitting down with strangers and being vulnerable is something that is really, really hard for a lot of people,” she adds. “Understandably so.”
The rest of the series
The second event in the America at 250 series will be Thursday, May 7: “The Meaning of the Declaration of Independence.”
According to press materials, leading historians will discuss the origins, meaning, and legacy of America’s founding document. The panel, moderated by Lepore, will feature Christopher Brown (Columbia University historian), Ken Burns (documentary filmmaker), Maya Jasanoff (Harvard University historian), and Jane Kamensky (retired Harvard University historian and CEO of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation and of Jefferson’s home, Monticello).
Following that, Schmidt explains, he and Lepore are “really looking for the strength of the community.” Thus, the third program on Thursday, Sept. 17 will be “Strengthening Community, Citizenship, and Civil Society in a Time of Change and Conflict,” where local, state, and national leaders will weigh in “on our roles, responsibilities, and opportunities as citizens, community members, and civic leaders at this critical moment.”
Vermont Public’s Jane Lindholm will moderate a panel featuring Michael Wood-Lewis, Front Porch Forum founder and CEO; Dan Smith, Vermont Community Foundation president; Vijay Singh, Vermont Public CEO; and Django Grace, local activist and Columbia University sophomore.
The last program in the series, slated for Thursday, Nov. 19, will be “The 2026 Election and the Health of Our Democracy.”
There, “elected leaders and analysts chime in on the implications of the election for our country as it begins its 251st year” with a panel, moderated by Lepore, that will include U.S. Rep. Becca Balint and others to be determined.
If the series succeeds, Schmidt says, he’d like to see it become an annual event with a different focus each year as part of Retreat Farm’s regular programming.
He wants to see the Retreat Farm “enabling civil society, civil discourse, and community gatherings.”
“We’re very self-conscious about our opportunity to be a coalescing, coordinating venue for all the organizations in the community to utilize both the interior and outdoor spaces,” Schmidt says. “Gathering places, spaces for retreats and that sort of thing are so critical to the health of a community, so that’s the genesis of this.”
For March 11 tickets, or more information on the America at 250 Series and to learn about the Retreat Farm, visit retreatfarm.org.
This News item by Annie Landenberger was written for The Commons.