Young Vermonters - Not an Endangered Species

A Self-Interview as Preface
Joe Sherman / Self Interview

What’s this book about?
      It’s my response to the claim that young Vermonters can’t live in Vermont
anymore. I wanted to challenge the conviction that it’s too expensive for them,
they can’t find jobs, that they can’t make it here.

Why did you decide to do interviews instead of writing a conventional book?
      Interviews aren’t exactly unconventional, but they’re more raw, of the
moment, capture a person in a different way. I really wanted that rawness, the
one-off quality that interviews do best. I wanted the young Vermonters to speak
for themselves.
The project really started out as something entirely different. I planned to do
an update of Fast Lane on a Dirt Road, my contemporary history of Vermont.
It wasn’t contemporary anymore; the last update was in 2000. I thought I’d talk
to some young Vermonters in their twenties and thirties about their lives in our
times. I’d cherry pick the good parts, mix in a little broader history for context,
and update my old book.
But it didn’t work out that way. Right off, after a couple interviews, I had a
problem. The interviews were richer, funnier, and sadder than I ever imagined.
I reluctantly use the overused word inspiring, but that’s what they were—they
were great. They deserved a book of their own.

How did you pick the twenty people?
      I’m not a very systematic person. I just asked my friends for help. I wanted a
variety of people, so I asked a variety of friends for leads. It all worked organically,
which was reassuring. Slowly, this sort of vine-like net emerged from the
process and it gradually netted most of the state, from Brattleboro to Franklin.
I’m pretty happy about that; I think I have a decent cross section of what a
demographer might call my “ target population.”

Could you tell us a little about the young Vermonters in the book?
      I’d rather not. I don’t want to spoil the interviews for you. I will tell you
there are ten men and ten women between the ages of twenty-one and thirtyeight.
Two had just started new businesses, three were into the local-food
movement. There are two musicians. There’s a trial lawyer, an Abenaki chief ’s
granddaughter, a blue-collar renegade who teaches people how to shoot a rifle
and has a small arsenal of his own, a black man profiled in Burlington since he
was twelve, a poster girl for foster care (she survived five high schools in four
years in Vermont), a junior developer who saw the twin Trade Towers collapse.
And so on.