Hi I am Jens Ulrich-Verderber!

I am a 17-year-old high school student living in Northern Vermont. You might know my part of the U.S. as the place where the most famous Maple Syrup in the world comes from, and some of the very cows that produce Ben and Jerry's Ice Cream roam in meadows all around my house.  There's a wonderful rural ease that makes conversation easy and engaging.

On top of that, I grew up with a huge extended family that appreciates story-telling and the legacies that the elders in my family have left for us.  With this kind of family culture, I grew up learning to appreciate the important connections between the past and the present, but I'm not sure that in our hectic, often disconnected society, people of my generation are getting much generational wisdom.

I decided to do something about that. 

Our Inner View was started when I was 14, a freshman in high school, as my way of collecting the colorful stories and history of the people I have grown up around, but it soon expanded to include interviews with people who were referred to me by others. People would say, "Oh you've got to interview my grampa! He'll tell you so much about... " and some amazing bits of history have been recorded in my interviews.

I believe that learning from someone older and wiser is a great way to get to our shared humanity and understand the wider world. I love hearing a good story and hopefully I'm asking the kinds of questions my listeners would ask if they were in the room with us! I want my podcasts to feel like having coffee with friends.

I did not come up with this idea for this project and my own, I was inspired by StoryCorps, a project that finds and shares stories for the sake of preserving them for humanity. StoryCorps inspired me to do something right here in my community and now beyond. 

Thanks for stopping by. I'm hoping to prove that our inner view can be transformed by a simple story.  Let's keep conversation alive and well!

~ Jens