Just One Thing with Thomas Kearnes

Thomas Kearnes’s story “I Will Forget His Voice” explores the way a few words can bury into the mind, tilt everything. Here he shares just one thing about the piece:

“My story (along with the remaining issue of Split Lip) debuts just over a week after the majority of our countrymen decided Crazy Uncle Donny was a better bet than Cousin Kamala to navigate us through the shitshow for which our nation must shoulder at least some of the blame.

I write the first draft of this roughly 15 years ago. During editing, I was fortunate to work with fiction editors who knew what this story was about.

So what’s missing? Any overt political content, for starters. Every queer story I’ve written takes place in Texas, though, and that’s no accident. I’m hardly the only Lone Star State queer storyteller, but I take pride in the fact that these last twenty years have shown me time and again that what *unites* us as one humanity means so much more than what divides us.

No country in all of history has successfully “redeemed” itself by trying to rewrite its past or silence inconvenient truths (and those who insist such truths be shared). Individuals attempting to shame or silence you: the zeitgeist is paved with the fearful flesh of such irritants.

Those who’ve read Orwell, Atwood, and other visionaries saw the writing on the wall decades ago. Sadly, such warnings are wasted on a citizenry that believes books are so powerful, the only faction of our society held in more contempt than readers are the writers of said books, themselves.

Atwood spoke to that as well…

‘Don’t let the bastards grind you down.’”