 And welcome to Moments with Melinda. My guest today is Stephen Kearnan. Ella, hi Stephen, how are you? I'm glad I have my moment with Melinda. I am so excited that you're having your moment with Melinda. I get to have my moment with Stephen. Well, let me tell my viewers a little bit about you. For those that don't know, Stephen Kearnan is a journalist and graduate of Middlebury College with an MA from the writing seminars at John Hopkins University and an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers Workshop. He has written two works of nonfiction, last rights and authentic patriotism that promote better end of life care and civic engagement. And his writing and journalism have been recognized with numerous awards, including the Breckner Center's Freedom of Information Award, the Scripps Howard Award for Distinguished Service to the First Amendment and the George Polk Award. Stephen lives in Vermont with his two sons and he has written four novels of which we're gonna talk about his latest today. So Stephen, tell my viewers a little bit about you, about your life. Okay, well, you know, the biggest thing in my life that is not in that biography is the family that I come from. I'm the sixth of seven children and I grew up in upstate New York and my parents died, if not young, I would say kind of prematurely and the result is that the seven of us have stayed really tight and our kids are tight with each other and many of them have married and had kids their own. I think we're at like 40 or 41 now in the immediate family and that's a huge part of who I am and how I think about things and is this great family that I come from. And so I came to Vermont in 1978 to attend Middlebury, had a great, great experience there. It was still, there was a lead-ism there but it also had a counterculture and so on. And then I left and did other kinds of work and business for nine years, always wanting to be writing, always getting up in the early in the morning to write. And then I came here to work at the Burlington Free Press. I was there 15 years and most of those years spent on the editorial page which was great fun and a great education in Vermonters and in policy and trying to be helpful with that. And all that time I was itching to do something that was longer than 800 words which is what the typical editorial was. And so the first book was, the first two books were nonfiction kind of building on that newspaper experience. And then one of those books led to a lot of speaking engagements for me that paid pretty well. So I was able to take a risk and take a leap and start and write the novels I'd always wanted to be writing. So I left the Free Press 18 years ago and knocking wood it's worked and continues to work. And I've got two books in the pipeline and six that are out. So I feel pretty lucky. No kidding. Well, it sure is working my friend. So Stephen, who was a great influence in your life? Who inspired you? Well, you know, different people in different ways. I had, you know, I'm also a musical guy and I had a lot of musician friends that were willing to take really big risks for their art. And that was really inspirational to me. This is Maple, by the way, 20 year old sweetheart who helps me work every day. Yes. So she loves the camera. So there were a lot of peers that were helpful. And then I would say that I had something that you would think was not helpful, but actually was which is really stern parental opposition to me going into the arts. And they really made it so I had something to prove because they so disapprove. They thought I'd be broke and destitute and a drunkard and so on. And then there were a number of people along the way. There were a couple of faculty members in middle right college that helped quite a lot. There was a poet there who also ran the Breville Friders Conference who first sort of said to me that I might have a little gift that I should pursue that. And likewise in Iowa, there was a professor there or the guy who ran the program was very nurturing. And so lots of influences, even people that I read and the books I read and what it took for somebody to get that book written and published and so on. There are a lot of inspirational stories out there. Writers have to be stubborn, you know? If you have to get tough on rejection and just keep going. So I had a lot of friends that kind of showed me that way. That helped you get to where you are. Well, listen, I really love your work and we're gonna get into that. But for me, and I think for a lot of people in Vermont who know you, you really are a Renaissance man because you're a journalist, a novelist, a visionary. You have to do research or a researcher for your books or a historian and a musician. And you've been the reader for the Polar Express event for many years, right? Polar Express reading is my favorite day of the year. I get to read a children's story to, you know, four crews of a couple of hundred kids at a time and it makes me feel like the big daddy. I'm not Santa, but I'm the guy that gets to read them a story. And Santa, the guy who is Santa is a friend of mine. So we have a lot of fun that day and it's for the Children's Trust Foundation. So it's doing great things for communities all over Vermont. It's a lot of fun. And that's Michael Montay of Santa and Sarah Sewell. That's it. That's Santa. Yeah, I mean, what a great, what a great event. So I want you to talk a little bit about your novel, Steven, but before we do that, I want to talk a little bit about your music because you're also a fabulous musician and I believe you play a 12 string acoustical guitar. I do. I play a lot of string different sizes. Oh, but your music is so beautiful. Talk to us a little bit about your music. Well, Linda, if I had any regret in my life, it is that I haven't done more with music because it's been such a rich part of my life. When I was younger, I played in a lot of bands but I spent a lot of years and solo and really enjoyed that. And then a couple of years on my own and I did cut some CDs and wrote music for TV movies and for Vermont stage company shows and stuff and loved that, but really the work of writing novels. And I was a single parent for a lot of years. There was no room in there for gigging. And now I don't know, it might be the lighting here but I feel like I've just got a little bit of gray in my hair but I would like this, I would still like to do that. I would like, you know, in however many years I have and I hope it's a lot, I would like to do more with music in my life because musical audiences are like none other. You know, I've played in other countries where I don't even speak the language but they get what I'm saying in the music and they say it back in their way and it's really fun. It's a great language. Well, yeah, and I wish, and I hope that you do get back into your music because it's beautiful. And you do have gray hair, but it looks so good on you. I love it. I'm glad to have hair, you know. I'm so glad that you're, I think you look fabulous and you'll always be young and hard. And I think I'm quite a bit older than you are by the way. So look, I wanna talk, I mean, I have read three of your four novels and I've got to read The Hummingbird but your first, I want you to talk about your novels briefly, each one. The first, your first novel, your fiction novel was The Curiosity, which I, like I said, I think should, then the next one was The Hummingbird. Yeah, that's this one. That's that one. And then Baker's Secret, which I was in love with and your most recent, which is Universal Two. And I have to tell you, you have a way of spinning a story that puts, that visually just lights up my brain. The way that you, that I get into your characters and their lives is you just have a beautiful rich way of writing, Stephen. And so let's share with our viewers a little bit about your four novels. Okay, first thing I wanna say is there was a guy named Galway Cannell who was a Vermont poet laureate for a while. He used to say that this is about half of the transaction. And the other half is what happens inside the imagination of the reader. And that's really been a guide for me in terms of how much I give and how much I sort of allow the reader or prepare the reader to imagine the story. So if you think it's vivid, it might be your imagination and more than less than me sort of spelling everything out. Like I, for example, in each of these books, there seems to be a female character who has some kind of beauty characteristics, but I never describe what they look like. I never say even what color their hair is or anything else, let the reader imagine it. Anyway, so the curiosity is a story that it is set in a lab that is doing the most cutting edge cell science and a lot of it is ethically pretty shady. And it's run by a guy who's really ambitious. The main character that we know is a woman who's there who has kind of a high ethical sense of purpose. These people are able to wake up shrimp that are frozen to death and krill that are frozen to death. And lo and behold, they're looking for that kind of material in icebergs and they find a human being who's frozen to death and they wake them up knowing that this time will be limited and the tabloid media of America loves him and there's protests about him and all that sort of thing. And he is not a Neanderthal. He was a district court judge in Lynn, Massachusetts. He's a well-read guy and he is blown away by our culture now. And it was really a way of trying to examine some of the ethical question of the question of the ethical things that they're going on in some labs now. You know, would it be right for someone to clone me? For example, really simple question, simple technology, but there are a lot of ethical issues in that. Anyway, so that's the curiosity. Then the next one was the hummingbird and that one is tells two stories. The present day story is a guy who is just back from his third deployment in Iraq and he's in pretty rough shape, but his wife is a hospice nurse and she's completely unafraid of suffering. So she's determined to help him to heal and it's their love story. At the same time, she's taking care of a man who is terminally ill who has written his last book. He's a scholar historian on World War II. His last book is about a Japanese pilot who bombed the mainland of the United States in 1942 and comes back in 1972 to apologize. And that is based on a true story that actually happened. And so those two stories in tandem and how this guy in contemporary times finds a way to stop being a warrior. Then with the Baker secret and that was D-Day from the French perspective, was like to live in occupied Normandy and have little food and no rights. And one day 250,000 soldiers from other countries lay their lives down and taking the beaches and liberating you from the Nazi control and what that experience is like. And then from that, I'd had like the Pacific Theater in Hummingbird and I'd had the European Theater in University of Two. I wanted to write a homeland story. And while I was looking for one and working on another idea that wasn't very good, I became across the story of Charles Fisk. He was a mathematician 19 years old when he was instead of being drafted in the army. In 1944, he was drafted into the Manhattan Project and he ended up building a detonator for the atomic bomb. What I found in the research for that was that a lot of the scientists working on the bomb had great moral qualms about it. They didn't know what they had signed up for. And they wrote letters and they signed petitions and they did everything they could to have the bomb test detonated on a Pacific Island, uninhabited island first, figuring that the Japanese saw that they would surrender and they were overruled by the military. And so it's a story about his medical, his ethical quandaries again. What I think I'm trying to do with these stories is take kind of ordinary folks and put them in these extraordinary times, right? I don't have superheroes. I'm not writing about generals and princes and presidents. I'm writing about 19 year old guy who's good at math or a guy who's just back from a third deployment in Iraq and he saw terrible things and he did some terrible things because he was ordered to. And that seems to be the turf that I work in. Didn't know it, didn't plan it. I wasn't an expert in World War II when I started this at all. I right now I'm up to my eyebrows in finishing a book that is set just after World War II in France, but I think that there are stories in history that can inform us about now, that can tell us something. And so the quandary that the people building atomic bomb had I think is pertinent to the existence of 7,000 atomic bombs in the United States arsenal right now. In fact, the book came out two days before the 75th anniversary of Hiroshima. It's not exactly an anti-nuke book but it does really look through this one character, through Charlie's eyes. It does look pretty closely at the ethical dilemmas and a lot of the questions that we don't have answers to yet. Even all these years since 1945. And it's a love story. Very much. How did I leave that out? It's a saucy love story. It is a saucy, saucy love story. That's the best kind. It really is. Well, listen, I'm gonna ask you to read from universe of two. And as an introduction of it, so people can get a feel for your writing. And so I'm gonna ask you to read from page 340, halfway down the page to the end of the chapter and just let folks know a little bit about what you're gonna be reading here, Steven. Okay, the thing to say in advance is it's about a page and a half. So it's not too bad, okay? Charlie's the main character. His sweetheart is Brenda. And there is not a lot of profanity in this book, but there isn't a scene. And I'm just gonna say explanation. Say it, it's fine. No, well, you can say it. I mean, this is, yeah, just go ahead and say it. Okay, it's cable, we're good. Yeah, right. It's me, you're at the moment with Melinda. So okay, so some of these young men are very excited about the first testing of the atomic bomb. And some people are terrified because they know if it works, the next it will be used on people. So here we are in the middle of the New Mexico desert, Alamogordo, New Mexico. And what we've had is a long buildup. We are that far along in this book, right? It's very far along when we have, this is where it goes. The first instant was darkness. The whole sky black to the nearest fraction of a second followed by a light later calculated to equal the brightness of 100 suns. It illuminated everything. Stones, men's faces, the distant mountains with a cruel and brilliant clarity. A blast of heat came next as if someone had opened an oven door. Even at that distance, the temperature was hard to withstand but the heat passed as it rose a fireball billowing into the air raging on itself. It ran through the colors of the rainbow, deep purples closer to the earth, bright oranges and yellows at the height of the climbing cloud. The pillar of power rose almost sexually before widening in every direction. A boiling head with broadening shoulders and was that a flash of lightning inside the explosive cloud? The scene took place entirely in silence as if projected on a screen. Fully half a minute passed before the sound reached the bunker, a blast that a roar that shook the earth. It growled and endured and carried so much dust and stones and sand that it scoured the observation windows. Instantly, they became as opaque as sea glass. The MP bent his head against the force of it. Holy fuck. Then the air rushed back toward the test site pulling like an ocean's undertow as an inferno ravenous for oxygen sucked everything toward itself. It surprised the men, some of whom glanced backward, perplexed as if expecting to see another explosion in that direction. Meanwhile, the burning shaft flowered upward into a toadstool shape, roiling orange like lava, climbing miles into the sky. We did it, Giles cried, shaking Charlie by both arms. It's worked, shouting his eyes. The technicians threw down their goggles and rushed outside, watching as the furious cloud rose and spread. The men hooded and danced as though they were drunk, piting one another on the back, shaking hands. One raised his fist and shouted, take that, Mr. Emperor. The MP's face was ashen. Holy, holy fuck. Cheer up, chum. Mather answered, skipping past. The war will soon be over. This is what you people have been building all this time? Giles was squatting by his measuring sticks and he called out seven. The dust cloud rose seven miles, but the others ignored him. Their revelry careening outward while pink in the east hinted at a day soon to begin. The plume reached its peak, then opened across the sky. Gradually, the men calmed enough to clamber into trucks and jeeps, caravanning back to the command center, swerving and honking all the way. They forgot one of their kind. In time, he would have to march the whole five miles. When he arrived mid-morning, sun burned and parched, the guards would speculate that he must have been caught in some unprotected place at the time of the blast. But that was hours later. Until well past dawn, he remained forgotten, squatting in a corner of the observation bunker, whispering one thing over and over. Brenda. Brenda. Charlie huddled in the dirt, his clothes soaked with sweat, his goggles still in place. Try as he might. He could not make his hands stop shaking. Beautiful. Beautiful and horrific. Thanks. One of the things that research does is it tells you things like they were 9,000 yards away, so it took 28 seconds for the cell to reach them, which means so I find out that they experienced it in silence. And to me, that makes it so kind of visceral and real. But also they must have died an early death because they, I mean, I don't, were they... They all died an early death. They all died. I mean, it was... Yeah, yeah, yeah. If they didn't die from their exposure to things during the process, then they dragged themselves to death. Yep. All right, so to my viewers, anyone of Stephen's books must be read, but this is his most recent universe of two. I want to encourage you to call Phoenix Books. You can order it online at Phoenix and they can send you a copy. The Curiosity, The Hummingbird, The Baker's Secret, which is one of my favorites, and the universe of two. Check with your local bookstores and start reading Stephen Kiernan because it will... Make you very joyful to read his work. It's... You are gifted, Stephen, and thank you for taking all of this time to write these books. I really appreciate it, but I'm going to segue now into something else that you've done in your career, which is the Vermont to the 10th power. It's the blueprint for protecting Vermont during these challenging times and protecting our democracy and protecting Vermont from a country that is moving in a direction that might affect all of our equality and liberty. And you put this together several years ago, and I just wanted you to share that with our viewers. What is the Vermont to the 10th power? And where are you now with it and how is it progressing? And what are some of the most important issues of our time? Well, I guess the origin of this is that I spent at another newspaper before I was in Vermont, and then here I spent about 14 years writing daily editorials. And so I was accustomed to the idea of when I was concerned about something, talking to a lot of people who are very smart about it, way smarter than me, and from their ideas, formulating a position. So I was feeling a lot of frustration as I looked at the chaos in the federal government. People have paid a lot of attention to the last president and the sort of reckless presidency that we had, whatever you may think about policies, but I think that if you look at the judiciary, it is not as strong as it was. And if you look at the Congress, it's incapable of doing a lot of things that vast, vast majority of Americans agree about. When you see broad polling of American opinions, people want much stronger action on climate. People want much stronger improvements in education. People feel like democracy and voting rights need to be upheld and maintained. People feel like there are reasonable regulations you can put in place for gun safety that will not take guns away from people, but that will keep them in a safe usage. And they're huge, you know, 90% plus in all those centers, people agree, and yet the federal government is not able to move. The 10th Amendment to the Constitution, whether the Constitution was enacted when it was put in power, there was a bill of rights that was 10, the first 10 amendments to it. Nine of them were about the rights of the individual, right to free speech, right to religion, right to assembly, right to bear arms, right against, to be protected against unlawful search and seizure and so on. The last one, that's nine of them, the last one said, whatever power isn't explicitly given to the federal government and the Constitution belongs to the states. And so my feeling is that we've been a scrappy, great place since before we were a state, right? There were 13 colleagues and we didn't join because we had a Constitution that said there could be no slavery. So we couldn't join until there was, we were the 14th state because that was controversial in that time, right? And so we've always had a little chip on our shoulder. I think it's one of my favorite things about the Vermont character. It's why we have iconic class politicians. We don't have the smoothest we have, but kind of most independent. And that goes from our select boards to the US Congress. And so I think it's in keeping with Vermont's way of being that we look at, that we examine closely the ways that we could exert our powers to behave differently than the rest of the country and certainly than the way the federal government is in its failure to govern. So I came up with this document and I'm not writing for newspaper anymore and I don't hold any elective office. And I can tell you that every news outlet in the state wanted to talk about it and hundreds of people co-cited, including you. Thank you very much for that. And there's a question about, do you turn this into a political movement or is it kind of a starting point? I have other things that I want to write about that I've done homework on, one that pertains to climate and one that pertains to racial justice, particularly in the criminal justice system. And those are smaller than our overall relationship with the federal government. And I've got a book deadline of March 1st. So I'm really just doing that and sleeping right now. But I'm hoping to offer more on that. And again, the point is not to be always right at all. It's just to get people thinking. Same with the editorials. It was to get people to think about things in a more informed and engaged way. It's hard enough without stronger daily news presence. It's much more difficult. We have social media. So we're able to, you know, our revolutions, you know, we do have social media and that does help to get our wisdom out there. Have you ever thought about Vermont succeeding from the nation? Has that ever crossed your mind? No, not for a second, for a couple of reasons. I mean, you know, I've spoke with those folks, but I think first of all, the American idea is a really good one. And it has mostly, you know, mostly, please, you first. I'm so sorry. But right now you feel that way. But if things were to change, you know, maybe you would not consider that. I mean, you know, there's- But I think, for example, that there's a lot of shifting that's going on in the political landscape right now because of Senator Lay's retirement after many years of spectacular public service. And there's a lot of ambitious folks that are looking at that sort of chess pieces that are moving. And I think that the real, that we shouldn't be distracted, that the real target is who is gonna be our governor in 2024 because it is certain that the federal government's elections will be a mess and probably a cesspool. And we are gonna need a governor who will stand tall and say, this is what is real and we control our National Guard, not Washington. And so as all the mayhem occurs, this becomes an island of sanity. And I think that that would be more valuable than us being an island without COVID when people would came here like crazy, that this is a place where, you know, and I think that it's gonna take really seasoned and firm judgment. You know, I don't see who's gonna do that job right now, but I think that we need to be prepared to be even more iconoclastic and differentiated from the federal plan. Well, we are. I mean, we just, the legislatures just passed through Prop 5, which guarantees reproductive liberty in our constitution. And maybe we need to have more amendments in our constitution that protect us. And when I was on a Zoom yesterday with Pat Leahy, bless his beautiful, wonderful soul. And I asked him whether that would hold up against any kind of federal legislation to take away women's rights, reproductive liberty or human rights to liberty. And he said, absolutely not that our constitution would hold. So maybe that's what Vermont needs to do is we need to just pass more constitutional amendments. It takes a long time. Prop's gonna go before the voters in November, but listen. I can't wait for that though. Think about when Vermonters get to weigh in on that and say, this is where we stand. And the rest of the country can be in all of these combat about it. And this is where we stand. I think it's gonna be actually a very powerful and kind of exciting day. It's huge. I mean, we're just, yeah, I mean, it's, yeah. I mean, we are one of a kind and we are rebellious and bless our hearts. So, well, so I wanna just move on for a second to talk, because time is running out. I could talk to you forever, but I wanna talk a little bit about what you're working on now, Steven. Cause you spent five weeks in France for your next book and you met some of the, you know, your closest friends and made beautiful friendships. And it was for your next book. And I understand that you were studying stained glass in France. Can you talk a little bit about what you're working on? Sure, sure. It's a really fun project and I've been at it for a while, but it is getting almost delivery time. So the first thing is the setting. The setting is France immediately after World War II. You have every, you know, every rail line, every bridge, every major road, every church, every school, every hospital, they've all been bombed and nothing, right? They're all, not all, but a lot of them have been really damaged a lot. And meanwhile, you have a great political divide. On the left, you have the resistance and the people that were the underground and the people that fought. And on the right, you have the people who signed the armistice with Hitler and that built the Vichy government and that rejected democracy and shut down the legislative part of the federal government. And these two people not only did they disagree about everything, they also think the other is immoral. And somehow they're supposed to work together to rebuild their country. And I think this is just an allegory for where America is right now. So that's sort of the setup. And what the story is about is a guy whose wife and daughter were killed in the war and he survived and became an assassin within the resistance. And so he has those assassinations on his conscience. At the same time, he has a lot of guilt. So he's a pretty broken guy too. He's about as broken as his country. And he's wandering the countryside and he winds up in a place that's been making stained glass windows for about 450 years. And they are repairing or building new stained glass windows for the cathedrals that have been bombed. And it's a bunch of misfits. Everybody's damaged by the war. And so partly it is each man in that group has to rebuild so that they can have these works of art that they rebuild so that a nation can be rebuilt. And there are things about how they did that. But I think they're really sublime, they're very beautiful. And so I was really influenced by the windows that Mark Chagall made, great, great artist. And windows that he made after World War II that are in some of the cathedrals. So I was over in France doing research on where Chagall had been and the places that had assembled his windows. I've also spent a lot of time at AO Glass in Burlington. They've been terrific about letting me watch them blow glass. I've made some things there. And likewise, Larry Rebecky who's a great stained glass window maker has been really patient with me being completely ignorant about windows. And he keeps saying, I just wanna make sure we don't completely screw this up. So it's very helpful. And it's a beautiful art form. And there are some amazing windows to be seen in the United States, even in Chattanooga County. But it was great to go to where some of the best ones in the world are. And to build a story around the making of a very particular kind of religious art. It's a healing story. It's a rebuilding story. Oh, how beautiful. We all need a healing story, Stephen. We do need a healing. But I think all your books have healing in them. They do. I really do. I think there was healing in all of your books. So can't wait for the next one. And we've run out of time here. And I just wanna tell you how much you brighten our lives here in Vermont and how much you brighten and lighten up our minds. And you provide us with fabulous stories. And when I finish your books, those stories linger in my mind for a long time. And I go back to those stories a long time after I shut the book and put it in the bookshelf or send it off to one of my good friends. So for that, and all of Vermont, I wanna thank you for the gift that you give us in your writing. This is the best place on earth to do it, Melinda. I feel very, very fortunate and privileged to be here. This is the place to do it. Well, thank you. Vermont's privileged to have you. And when your next book comes out, I hope you come back on my show. Love to. Okay, so I'm gonna sign off now with my viewers, but I'm gonna ask you to hang in there for a few minutes after I hang up. But I just wanna thank my viewers for being with us today and sharing some time with Stephen Kiernan. And I will see you shortly, soon. So take care, enjoy this day and have a good Valentine's Day. Bring a lot of love into your life. Bye-bye.