This story by Tom McKone was first published in The Bridge on June 17, 2026.
The artist behind the “Heart of Barre: Building Community After the Floods” and the founder and former owner of the Positive Pie restaurants will represent Vermont later this month at a two-day Washington, D.C., event honoring survivors of extreme weather events.
Extreme Weather Survivors, a California-based national organization supporting Americans impacted by increasingly severe and frequent extreme weather, invited the two central Vermonters to participate in Stolen Summers: The Next 250. The event, which will be on the Washington Mall and at the U.S. Capitol on June 23-24, is the first time the organization will have artists and weather survivors from all 50 states at a gathering.
Barre artist Dierdra Michelle, co-creator of the multimedia “Heart of Barre” exhibit, and Melissa Whittaker, founder and former owner of the Positive Pie restaurants, will meet with lawmakers and members of the public to share how flooding in 2023 and 2024 affected them and their communities.
“Dierdra’s piece, ‘Heart of Barre,’ is technically beautiful and extremely special,” said Ellie Forman, the organization’s creative producer, in a phone interview from San Francisco. “It’s made up of individual canvases, each one depicting a portrait of a survivor from the flood, and is paired with a narrative that she and the poet she works with, Shawna (Trader), created from interviewing people. This tells a really complete, human story that is very hopeful and very survivor-centered.”
Whittaker described the flooding that closed her Montpelier restaurant for eight months as the most traumatizing event in her life. After rebuilding the restaurant, making it more flood resistant, and running it for a year, she sold it and moved to Nashville. Although she and her husband, Carlo Rovetto, kept their Vermont home and rented it for the past year, and she is spending the summer up here, they now live in Nashville. Her husband moved his excavating business down there, and she started a business — coaching people, primarily women, in empowerment and how to start a small business.
“It was the most traumatizing thing I ever went through in my life,” Whittaker said in a phone interview. “To have a running business one day and the very next day have your whole business completely destroyed, have 40 employees who no longer have work, have no income …. Every business owner was traumatized by going through that. It was very difficult, very painful, very scary.”
Whittaker mentioned several reasons for moving, including getting away from the trauma and going somewhere where it is easier to run a business.
She said the lack of growth and the loss of state workers make it “very, very hard” to do business in Montpelier. From the time they opened Positive Pie in 1999, costs kept going up and the profit margin kept getting smaller, she said. Nashville, on the other hand, is thriving.
While she praised the organization Montpelier Alive and was grateful for community and volunteer support, she said there is not an adequate system in place to help businesses deal with weather-related events that can cost them hundreds of thousands of dollars.
“Even though I don’t own the business anymore,” she said. “I care about the effects that these weather events are having on the planet and on … small business owners, families, and people who don’t have the money to rebuild and who lose their homes (or) businesses and are totally traumatized.”
Extreme Weather Survivors began touring the country with customized programs to highlight the plight of survivors of fires, floods and hurricanes in 2025. Co-founder and co-executive director Chris Kocher met Whittaker while visiting Montpelier after the flood, and he invited her to participate in a panel discussion at one of his inaugural events in New York City. Forman said they hope to bring the organization — which provides survivor care, promotes building community and fights for change — to tour all 50 states.
In addition to an art show and meetings with lawmakers, this month’s event in Washington includes speakers, musicians and a narrative spoken-word testimonial created by Waterwell and performed by professional actors, including Wendell Pierce, Broadway star and veteran of HBO’s “The Wire.”
Michelle spoke of the devastation of the Barre flooding, the individual and community trauma it wrought, and the frustration of facing something over which you have no control.
“The thing that I could do was to make this project. To do this art so that people’s stories would not be forgotten,” she said. Paralleling the goals of Extreme Weather Survivors, she spoke of planting a seed in people’s hearts. “If you get that seed to grow in your heart, then you’re willing to do the things that need to be done to help people.”
