An Alabama Story

Daniel, you’re the author of An Alabama Story. Let’s start by hav­ing you intro­duce your­self to the pub­lic in a few short words.

Well, I usu­ally write about polit­i­cal and social issues, both in Swe­den and abroad. But this last year I thought I’d try my luck at fic­tion writ­ing. Before embark­ing on this project, I had barely done any cre­ative writ­ing at all, but all the ideas I came up with got me to a really quick start, and before long it was a true labor of love. For a longer blog post I wrote about the work lead­ing up to the fin­ished man­u­script, see here. And for more of a per­sonal por­trait, see the one I included at the end of the novel at this page

You’ve now writ­ten a book about a south­ern fam­ily liv­ing in Birm­ing­ham, Alabama. Yet you’re been writ­ing this from your home in Swe­den? How has that been like?

In this day and age, it’s unbe­liev­ably easy to famil­iar­ize your­self with life in other parts of the world. A tool I’ve really enjoyed using is Google Earth, with its satel­lite pho­tos as well as the street view. You get a sim­ply extra­or­di­nary phys­i­cal overview of any city in the world with it, since you can get a closer look at most of the build­ings and other struc­ture. They’ve got web cams linked to the map as well, where you can often see in real-time what kind of peo­ple walk the streets, what kind of cars peo­ple drive around with etc. Then you’ve also got Youtube, where espe­cially young peo­ple like to doc­u­ment their daily lives. You can peer into the class­rooms through their videos to see what it’s like there. Apart from these ser­vices, I’ve also perused online guides to the city, like this excel­lent one. So I’ve not found it too dif­fi­cult hav­ing my char­ac­ters come alive for me in my head, in a real­is­tic set­ting, and then putting it down in writing.

That’s neat, I never real­ized how well these ser­vices fit together. So what audi­ence did you have in mind for your book?

I think this is a book that can be read by pretty much all ages, though the demo­graphic I believe will get the most out of it is young men in their late teens. This is the period when you long the most for some­thing rebel­lious to indulge in – and in this overly polit­i­cally cor­rect age, the taboos to defy are the ones on race, gen­der roles and sex­ual ori­en­ta­tion. That is, not show­ing any PC cour­tesy when depict­ing racial minori­ties and not bow­ing down to fem­i­nists or homo­sex­ual activists. The sort of mate­r­ial in this book is what fas­ci­nated me per­son­ally the most at that age, and I got into trou­ble with the author­i­ties myself for merely mak­ing jokes about such mat­ters on the net. Far from let­ting that silence me, now I’ve returned with a full-length novel filled with exactly that kind of material.

That brings us to a legal mat­ter. Over in Europe today, you’re not blessed with any water­proof pro­tec­tion for free speech like the U.S. First Amend­ment – speech and writ­ing can actu­ally get you impris­oned. Was that why you chose to pub­lish your work with Amer­i­can com­pany Amazon?

Yeah. If I had pub­lished this par­tic­u­lar work in my home coun­try of Swe­den, there’s a great risk I would get the max­i­mum prison term pos­si­ble for “hate speech” here – four years. The law is called Hets Mot Folk­grupp (Agi­ta­tion against Eth­nic Group in Eng­lish), and it crim­i­nal­izes “threat­en­ing or express­ing dis­re­spect” for minor­ity groups. No pro­tec­tion exists for major­ity groups like Swedes or Chris­tians, though – while you will be pros­e­cuted if you point out that a cer­tain eth­nic group is over­rep­re­sented in crime sta­tis­tics, you can freely talk about want­ing to kill Swedes in gen­eral (like a cer­tain rap band over here has done) or kill Chris­tians (like a cer­tain Amer­i­can black metal band has done, whose music is on sale in Swe­den too). Part of the rea­son behind me writ­ing this book was that I wanted to call to the world’s atten­tion the dis­mal state of free expres­sion in con­tem­po­rary Europe. Apart from the Swedish law, you’ve got ones like the “Pub­lic Order Act 1986″ in Britain that crim­i­nal­izes peo­ple who “use threat­en­ing, abu­sive or insult­ing words or behav­ior” that can cause racial hatred. In Ger­many, you’ve got the ban on Volksver­het­zung, crim­i­nal­iz­ing any­one “insult­ing, mali­ciously malign­ing, or defam­ing seg­ments of the pop­u­la­tion,” pun­ish­able by up to five years in prison. Laws like these cut deep into pub­lic dis­course and severely impedes debate on cer­tain issues, since the courts can charge who­ever por­trays minori­ties in a bad light with “incit­ing hatred” or “agitation.”

Hear­ing that makes me happy to be an Amer­i­can. There’s always a con­cern that the writ­ing of some­one who doesn’t have Eng­lish as his native lan­guage will fall short of what’s to be expected of the prose. What do you have to say about that, see­ing as your native lan­guage is Swedish instead?

I believe read­ers won’t have any­thing to worry about. I take lan­guage very seri­ously and have read and writ­ten in Eng­lish for over 25 years. A cou­ple of years back, when I made the deci­sion to go for a career as an author who mainly pub­lishes in Eng­lish, I took this care to a new level and stud­ied style hand­books such as Strunk & White’s “The Ele­ments of Style” and sim­i­lar. Yet on the topic of style, I always con­sider myself the final author­ity on my own writ­ing. Even if I con­sider it essen­tial to fol­low explicit rules for writ­ing and gram­mar, using some­one else’s tem­plate has never been my way of get­ting work done.

How was it pub­lish­ing your work through the sys­tem Ama­zon has set up for inde­pen­dent pub­lish­ers like you? And how do you see the state of self-publishing today?

Oh, work­ing with the Ama­zon sys­tem was a real treat. They had a pow­er­ful prod­uct already when I pub­lished my first book in 2010, and they had improved the func­tion­al­ity even more when I came around a sec­ond time for this work. It’s sim­ply amaz­ing that I’m able to get a writ­ten work out in print in less than a day after hav­ing uploaded the files. And with no need for prior review of the mate­r­ial of this work, unlike what would have been the case in Swe­den. If the author­i­ties had caught wind of me being about to pub­lish this sort of mate­r­ial over here, they would have had the legal right to seize my com­puter and any other mate­r­ial and tools that had been involved in the work’s pro­duc­tion, with­out even a court order, under the strangely named “Free­dom of the Press Act (Tryck­fri­hets­förord­nin­gen).” The dif­fer­ence between Swe­den and the USA is like night and day. After hav­ing grown accus­tomed to con­di­tions imposed on you in the for­mer coun­try, you think you’re in some other dimen­sion when you’re pub­lish­ing mate­r­ial through Ama­zon. Ah, how lovely it would be if the Euro­pean states were to over­turn their “hate speech” laws.

As for self-publishing, I def­i­nitely see a large num­ber of com­pe­tent authors today opt­ing for that route. Unfor­tu­nately there’s still a bit of stigma toward self-publishing, an unfounded one. Admit­tedly, there are peo­ple who self-publish utter junk and hope they will make a bit of money from it, but there’s also plenty of real junk ema­nat­ing out of the large pub­lish­ing houses today. I won’t name names since I might alien­ate peo­ple if I do, but I’m sure you’re aware of which ones I mean. I rather get the impres­sion that the oppo­site is true – that the stuff backed by the large pub­lish­ers is gen­er­ally of low qual­ity, since that’s what sells, while the Melvilles of our day self-publish their work. Per­son­ally I’m try­ing to reach some mid­dle ground in between these two extremes; while I want to reach out to a large audi­ence and under­stand that that requires mate­r­ial that’s easy to digest, I still don’t want to taint lit­er­a­ture with more of the sort of books a high-schooler could have writ­ten. Every sin­gle sen­tence in my books has its own impact or is of rel­e­vance, and I require my prose to have sort of a melody to it for me not to delete it..

When I read the book and learned of this char­ac­ter Joan, and remem­bered that cer­tain other well-known peo­ple had made their way into the pages of the book, I started won­der­ing: Is Joan based on a real-life person?

Oh… Don’t ask!