Dan Hahn, for Thom Dean
I don’t claim to know Thom best, I know a few folks who deserve that space and this is as much for them as it is for Thom. We were friends, we put our hearts and time towards some of the same goals and yeah there were disagreements along the way but Thom was among one of my closest confidants when it came to writing.
The first time I really met Thom was through a few mutual friends. We got along well enough but it wasn’t until we began work on what would later be one of our greatest achievements, the Fredonia Follower that I really got to know him. It was Pete Mason, Thom Dean, and Dan Hahn back then. We had the bright idea following the three strikes policy to begin promoting an unfiltered student opinion on campus activity. He wrote for his High School paper, Pete and I knew one another from the Raphy Report, our team just came together spontaneously and from day one I admired both of them for how they wrote.
Thom had a voice for satire. He had the ability to hide the sharpest edges of his criticisms beneath understated flashes of wit. I would never have told him but today I have modeled my own satirical voice on his. In a way he taught me how to write for the Follower and so much of his breath fills the lungs of those articles, even the ones he had nothing to do with, because of what I learned just from being around him in those early stages.
Much since then is of course history. Now the Follower is growing every day stronger and even the night he passed I saw him and we talked about how it has been booming. He always said he’d write out a few more articles once he had the time and I told him I was excited to see them. His voice belongs in the Follower but now that I know he will never write again, I feel as if I must amend that to say the Follower will always speak in his voice.
This weekend has been difficult. Surreal almost, it’s like I still am expecting to walk into Starbucks and see him there with his same dirty coat and messed up hair goofing around with his best friend Griffin. I’ll walk up and he’ll heckle me the way he always does. Make fun of the way I talk when promoting something, a voice he heard frequently while we worked through SA with the Follower. We picked on each other often but, I know from my end and suspect from his, it was always out of respect. We did something together. Something big. We did what every writer dreams of one day doing: going out to where there is nothing and building something vast and powerful. The Follower was our little act of defiance against the inevitable conclusion that Thom reached a few years before he should have.
This weekend I realize what the Follower is all about. Yes it pokes fun at people and things but we’re on the same side as those people and things. It isn’t people the Follower defies, the Follower’s adversary is death. The Follower is an irreverent cry against how things are. Sometimes it beats against the way things must be but that never stopped us from writing. We wrote because we had something to say and we were going to say it. Thom’s hand will never write again, but those words that he has written will never stop glowing with the spirit he put in them. The Follower and the work he did with it will never stop shining with the soul of one of its three primary founders. The Follower is a testament to the power language holds over death. The power we have to be more than mortal men. The Follower will always bear the mark of Thom Dean and in his words, he will live forever.