Revisiting Isaac

What Class Are You is a periodic series I make for Vermont Public. Thank you Vermont Public for letting me share the series on Rumble Strip.

Many of you got in touch with me after Isaac's story aired in the first week of What Class Are You. Isaac's on his way to Columbia in the fall, on a full scholarship, and you came up with amazing ideas for how you might be helpful, so I went back up to Newport to discuss it all with Isaac. And it turned into a really interesting conversation on a number of fronts. 

What Class Are You is a periodic series I make for Vermont Public. Thank you Vermont Public for letting me share the series on Rumble Strip.

What Class Are You is a periodic series I make for Vermont Public. Thank you Vermont Public for letting me share the series on Rumble Strip.

What Class Are  You is a periodic series I make for Vermont Public. Thank you Vermont Public for letting me share this series with Rumble Strip. 

What Class is a periodic series I produce for Vermont  Public. Thank you Vermont Public for allowing me to share this series with Rumble Strip. 

What Class Are You is a periodic series I make for Vermont Public. Thank you Vermont Public for allowing me to share the stories with Rumble Strip.

What Class Are You is a periodic series I make for Vermont Public. Thank you Vermont Public for allowing me to share these stories with Rumble Strip.

Irfan Sehic and his family fled the war in Bosnia when he was seventeen, and landed in Barre, Vermont. Irfan did a lot of jobs when he got here, then went to college, and now runs an insurance company out of his house. I’ve interviewed Irfan for Rumble Strip before, about the war, which you can find on this site somewhere, but in this story, Irfan talks about the American class system as he sees it, starting with the middle class.

This is a periodic series I make for Vermont Public. Thank you Vermont Public for letting me share the shows with Rumble Strip. 

Isaac lives in Newport, Vermont, which is as far north as you get in Vermont. It’s a town in the Northeast Kingdom with a beautiful lake. It’s also a town with a state prison and a lot of drugs and poverty.

I met Isaac at a writers group in town, which meets once a week in town at the amazing Nevermore Bookstore. Isaac is eighteen. He loves to read and write and this spring he’s graduating form Lake Region High School. I asked if he’d be willing to talk with me about class, and he was.

What Class Are You is a periodic series I make for Vermont Public, and I want to thank them for letting me share these stories on Rumble Strip.