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 Michelle Kearnes is a freelance writer and journalist currently living in Akron, Ohio. She lives with her third husband, daughter and grandson, in an 80 year old, four story home which she moved into with the intention of renovating. It seemed like a good idea at the time. She also has a pit bull and five cats none of which she is particularly fond of. It's just that her kids keep
rescuing in animals in shelters without having a place to keep them. So they trudge them over to their mother, who they know is a big
sucker for stray animals that have been rescued from death row. (She's spent a little time behind bars herself, the iron type and that people sit at and order drinks, so she can relate to them.) Kearnes, whose name is actually Anais Michelle Kearnes, but she can't figure out how to make her computer form the umglot over the letter "i" in her name, as a matter of fact she's not even sure how to spell umglot, and besides no one can pronounce her name properly anyway, has had a very unusual life. Born and raised in Detroit, Michigan, she was adopted by a nice family of Russian descent after a brief stint in foster care. Hoping to instill their values of hard-work, modesty and high moral standards to their new daughter, Kearnes has been ever grateful that adoption in the '50's did not include a refund policy. Raised in a working class urban neighborhood, which is what they called it before the term "ghetto" became popular, Kearnes attended, or rather survived, Detroit Public Schools. She excelled academically if not socially.
Frankly, she was a geek and her mother dressed her funny. In her fourth grade picture she can easily be
mistaken for someone suffering encephalitis, or as it's commonly called "a water-head baby." An avid reader from childhood, by age fourteen she fell in love with the works of Beat Generation writers, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and more significantly William Burroughs. She also was fond of '60's writers Ken Kesey and Tom Wolfe. But it wasn't until she came across a copy of Hunter S. Thompson's Hell's Angels that made this life-changing revelation. Here was a man who hung around bikers, partied his ass off, documented what he could recall of the situation, and got paid. Hell, I could do that, thought the young Michelle, and so she decided to become a writer, quashing all hope of her adoptive parents instilling any type of value system in her whatsoever. They responded by moving to the suburbs when Michelle was fifteen. Ill equipped to deal with this change, Michelle remained in the city where she became a "street person." To this day, she suspects that this was her adoptive parents answer to the no return adoption policy. She likes to romanticize this period of her life by likening her experiences to Russian writer Gorky, but no one has yet offered to name a park after her. Like Gorky, however, she has stolen many of the personalities of the characters she met during this time as fodder for short stories and research. She has held a life-long fascination with sub-cultures within American society. Married three times, Kearnes has three biological children and one-step daughter. She was a foster mother to a crack and
heroine addicted child for five years, who was returned to his paternal grandmother who refuses to allow the child contact with Michelle. This has prompted her to write her first book, titled Dear Daemon. The book in process is in two parts, the first a series of letters to her beloved "son" and the second portion will consist of interviews with women who have lost a child either by removal from their homes or other means. She is interested in how these women are able to go through the hoops set up by the system to regain custody and their mental state resultant from the
loss. (She has also experienced the parental kidnapping of her step-daughter who was located after six months of hard work on Michelle's part.) She honed her writing, research, interviewing, and editing skills working as an investigator for various Detroit area attorneys. Eventually, she figured out that she could use these skills to obtain and abuse a press pass to get into bars and concerts for free, and became a music critic for a local Detroit magazine. In addition, she has been published in Ohio's Gay People's Chronicle. A self-described feminist of dubious sexual orientation, Michelle spends her free time sweeping up animal hair, smoking cigarettes, reading, studying Voodoo (seriously), advocating for Methadone patients, and walking around in
circles trying to figure out what to do next. Anyone interested can e-mail her at
michellekearnes@hotmail.com.
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The Couch 