Lucia Festival \ Events

Finn and the Bell is the story of a small community struggling to respond to the 2020 suicide of Finn Rooney, a 17-year-old boy who had become an inspiring and unifying figure to many people in his hometown of Hardwick, Vermont. It is not a story about suicide. It’s a story about a boy who loved to fish and play baseball and write poetry and embroider…and what happens to a small community as it staggers forward after an unspeakable tragedy.

Erica Heilman is the producer of Rumble Strip, an independent podcast which she produces in her living room in central Vermont. The show is an attempt to inspire in listeners a keen curiosity about people unlike themselves. To consider other people’s lives and struggles and choices without judgment but instead with love and curiosity. Her story Finn and the Bell received a Peabody Award in 2021.