Sim Kern calls their full-length adult debut, The Free People’s Village (Levine Querido, Aug.), a tale of “coming of age in protest spaces.” Against the backdrop of an alternate 2020 U.S. embroiled in an eco-friendly “War on Climate Change,” a queer punk band gets swept up into an activist movement to save a Houston neighborhood from gentrification. Kern spoke with PW about the intersections of art and activism.
Why climate fiction?
I set out in college to major in environmental science. I was this passionate environmentalist teen, back in the days before An Inconvenient Truth, when most adults I knew thought global warming was as big a concern as Bigfoot sightings. But I didn’t have the disposition for scientific research. I wound up teaching English and chaperoning the school’s environmental club, but otherwise feeling frustrated that I wasn’t making a more direct impact. That’s when I started work on my YA debut, Seeds for the Swarm. The climate crisis always features heavily in my writing, because that’s the background of our times, isn’t it? I can’t imagine a day in which I don’t experience some amount of existential dread about the future
What inspired the alternate timeline?
I got the idea in 2020, when leftists were getting so much messaging saying “you just have to vote.” “Vote for Biden and the climate crisis and police violence will be solved.” So I thought: What if we took the Democrats at their word? What if Democrats had held a supermajority since the Clinton administration? How would society be different? Based on what I’ve seen from the Democratic party, I think you’d see a lot of hollow promises and surface-level changes like the greenwashing in this book.
I was also writing from a place of grief after watching the George Floyd and Breonna Taylor protests be so brutally crushed by police violence. How do you keep going when the best people you knew put everything on the line for this movement and it was crushed? I wanted to explore how you move forward as an organizer and as a person who hopes for a better world.
How did you approach the theme of community?
It’s kind of the intersection of two communities. When I was in my early 20s, I was doing activism with Occupy Houston, but I was also in a band. There was a beautiful creative anarchy to some of these band houses but also a lot of self-destructive behavior and substance abuse. It was interesting to explore that punk world coming into contact with a Black-led organizing movement. How do those two communities coalesce and find a way to live together, and how is everyone transformed in that process?
What is narrator Maddie’s relationship to race?
Black activists often talk about how they can’t forget about being Black; their experience of moving through the world is constantly racialized. Only white people have the privilege to say, “Oh, I’m color-blind.” And I think you see that reproduced in books by white authors even when they’re writing about racial justice. White characters will interact with characters of color without any self-awareness. I wanted to have this narrator who’s very self-conscious of her whiteness and learning about her complicity in oppressive systems and learning how to be not just a performative ally but a true comrade to the racial justice movement.
