Michael and Carrie Kline, Talking Across the Lines

Room to Grow was produced by Nicholas Boyer and Carrie Kline with Michael Kline of Talking Across the Lines, based on Carrie’s interviews with farmworkers. We want to unveil the lives and personalities of the people who grow food in the Connecticut River Valley of Massachusetts. How much richer will the world be when curiosity drives us beyond barriers of language, shyness and hesitation to cross...

“You Can’t Unknow the Past” Twelve Years of Archaeological Research Affirming Centuries of Indigenous Memory and Belief Neglected by Non-Indigenous Historians This production opens with the voice of David Brule, Coordinator of the American Battlefield Protection Program Advisory Board leading an April 2, 2025 monthly board meeting, open to the public, in the Town Hall of Montague, Massachusetts in...

This is a teaser, a taste of what is in the second of our two podcasts featuring Angelique Bickford, a 26-year-old first time mother. While working in the packing shed, she fell in love with Maico, another employee on the organic farm. She learned Spanish easily to communicate with him and her fellow workers and after a period of shy courtship they decided to make a life together. Right when their...

Angelique Bickford is a nearly-26-year-old first time mother. She is a natural, and her three-month old daughter is calm and happy. This is remarkable given the circumstances. While working in the packing shed, she fell in love with Maico, another employee on the organic farm. They managed to embark on a special relationship despite great shyness. Right when the baby was born four members of their...

We present this field interview with Mireya Katrina Tsironis Genius made with Carrie Kline in April of 2025. Now in her early thirties, Mireya Genius is an organic vegetable farm manager in the Connecticut River Valley of western Massachusetts. She traces her involvement in agriculture to her childhood on the Isle of Crete where her parents had settled in a small traditional village with plenty of...

Wally and Juanita Nelson were civil rights activists, peace activists, war tax refusers, subsistence farmers, and advocates for simple living. They were members of groups such as CORE (Congress on Racial Equality), FOR (Fellowship of Reconciliation), and Peacemakers. In western Massachusetts they were founding members of the Greenfield Farmers' Market, the Free Harvest Supper, the Valley Community...

“New Lights in the Dawnland” Recorded and Produced by Michael Kline, Talking Across the Lines, Sunderland, MA Time 2:00:08 “New Lights in the Dawnland” is a two hour audio documentary based on five individually recorded voices recounting 13,000 years of Indigenous history of Northfield and surrounding areas in Massachusetts and Vermont leading up to the arrival of English colonists in the 17th Cen...

In honor of the 100th birthday of the late Juanita Nelson, we are posting this 11-minute audio teaser, a sampling of what is to become a longer piece imparting the clear and persuasive ways in which Wally and Juanita Nelson lived their lives. The Nelsons were beloved to hundreds of people. Wally and Juanita, who lived their final three decades in Western Massachusetts, worked a small plot of land,...

Northfield, Massachusetts' Indigenous Origins This recorded testimonial is the account of an Indigenous resident of Northfield, Massachusetts, Joe Graveline, creating a sense of the town's pre-European history. Graveline's discourse is strongly rooted in archaeological and geological findings right around his own home and fields. He is open to the way the land itself speaks to him in the Connectic...

“Brotherhood of the Spirit:” An Unvarnished Window into New Age Communal Life of the Post-Vietnam Era in Western Massachusetts Recorded by Carrie Nobel Kline and Joan Stoia for the 350th Anniversary of Northfield, Massachusetts Oral History Project in the Fall of 2022. This 65-minute audio recorded narrative offers a moving, compellingly honest account of back-to-the-land, intentional, spiritual,...

Fiddlin' John Johnson (An 8-minute radio piece from The Home Place Series) Produced by Michael Kline, supported by the Humanities Foundation of WV (1979) John Johnson, born and raised in Clay County, was a towering figure in the circle of legendary West Virginia fiddle players. His father, recognizing the boy's talent as a five year old, invited neighboring and distant fiddlers to come stay for da...

Rick Rees, Michael Hoberman, Carrie and Michael Kline created this radio piece in 1993 for WFCR, Public Radio of Western New England. Michael Kline recorded the interviews and musical sessions that make up this production while serving as folklorist for the Pioneer Valley Folklore Society. With funding the Mass Foundation for the Humanities, we were required to write and read a somewhat analytical...

Remembering Blair Mountain was written and produced by Miranda Brown while interning with Talking Across the Lines. Brown weaves oral history interviews recorded by Michael and Carrie Kline and music from the The Blair Pathways Project, produced by Sara Lynch Thomason. The Klines' interviewees were marching to Blair to commemorate the original march of 1921 and save the location of the original Ba...

In this powerful 8-minute program, union organizer and widow from the Mannington/Farmington Mine Disaster tells Michael Kline of the last day she spent with her husband. In 1968, 78 miners needlessly died in a West Virginia coal mining tragedy. For a deeper understanding of what really happened and how it could've been avoided, read The Memo, a chapter in Written in Blood: Courage and Corruption i...

Civil War enthusiasts will be captivated by the unfolding story of the Allegheny Mountain campaigns of early 1861 punctuated by lively West Virginia fiddle tunes and songs, cradled in the ambient sounds of the surrounding country side. Digitally recorded interviews with Pocahontas and Randolph County West Virginia elders detail memories of their families’ first-hand encounters in historic battles...

Although these stories, tunes and songs take place along the Staunton-Parkersburg Turnpike in northcentral West Virginia, they could be about many places in rural and small-town America. Part of Michael and Carrie Kline's 100-voice oral history project with 30 more musical performances by people along the historic road, themes in this podcast include the Civil War in western Virginia, the birth of...

Took Off Running is part of a series of audio history and musical productions that explore life along the Staunton-Parkersburg Turnpike, an early toll road through the Appalachian Mountains of West Virginia. Featuring first-hand accounts of local residents, this production brings to life voices of the region's inhabitants in a vibrant, fast-moving quilt of stories on race and ethnicity in the 19th...

Voices of the Staunton-Parkersburg Turnpike is a series of audio history productions that explore life along the Staunton-Parkersburg Turnpike, an early toll road through the Appalachian Mountains of Central West Virginia. Featuring first-hand accounts of local elders, this production brings to life voices of the region’s inhabitants in vibrant stories and music. Over ninety oral histories augment...

[Excerpted from the CD jacket of Riding Freedom's Train: The Underground Railroad in the Upper Ohio Valley] Wherever there are instances of institutionalized oppression and cruelty, history provides us with examples of people who risked everything to free themselves. And often, people nearby have aided in the escape from bondage. Thus, from the beginning of the enslavement of Africans on the Ameri...

"Gathered at the Ohio River" is a 63-minute audio piece produced from interviews recorded in the 1990s by Talking Across the Lines for the Wheeling Spoken History Project. Co-sponsored by the Wheeling National Heritage Area Corporation and the National Park Service, this project recorded 160 local voices from diverse neighborhoods, ethnicities and industries. The Spoken History Project opened the...

Born & Raised in Tobacco Fields is a 58-minute audio documentary telling the vivid and complex story of the Tobacco Buyout in Calvert County, Maryland in 2003, the most monumental change in the economic and cultural landscape of southern Maryland since its founding as a tobacco producing colony in 1634. With a score of voices and songs, this production was the winner of the Oral History Associatio...

Etta Persinger of Beckley, West Virginia describes a life of close knit family and church members, full of love and care. Close to her heart is shape note singing and "the old songs," as she calls them. Listen to her quiet passion and the power of the congregation "singing the shapes."

This production, layered with local voices and music, aired on West Virginia Public Broadcasting in 2008 and remains current today. Radio producer Jean Snedegar produced this 15-minute documentary in which Michael and Carrie Kline discuss the power of documenting spoken history through deep listening. For more on the Klines' work visit www.folktalk.org and https://www.facebook.com/klinesacrossthel...

Charlie Blevins is an extraordinary musician and storyteller. A coal miner who made his home in southern West Virginia, he owned and operated the Red Robin Inn in the coalfields of Mingo County. Tune in for some the best and most authentic performances of traditional music you'll ever hear. Feel the pathos when he says the new highway, "Corridor G is going to wipe out our heritage," built in the p...

To rockin' tunes and blues numbers, Nathan Shelton and Brenda Jackson, alumni of Mount Hope High School in Fayette County, West Virginia, each tell of their own devastating collision with racism in their school years during the 1960s. They, along with Elinor Agee, discuss the ways in which interracial families have always been part of the fabric of West Virginia life and have become perhaps more s...