Nightlife:  What made you want to tackle corporate and government human-rights abuses through fiction?

Adam E. Stone:  I’m a firm believer in fiction as a vehicle for social change. I look back at fiction such as Richard Wright’s collection of short stories Uncle Tom’s Children, John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, and of course George Orwell’s 1984, all of which deeply engaged their readers in specific social and political issues, and I can see very clearly how my own views about those issues were influenced by those powerful, moving, works of fiction. I think that’s true today as well. Look at what’s happening right now in Darfur: we see the news images, we hear the almost incomprehensible numbers–180,000 people dead, 2 million displaced–but do we feel the pain those people are experiencing? Do we see the minutiae of their lives and feel as if we’ve lived, at least temporarily, alongside them? If, as a fiction writer, you can create characters that your readers can relate to and empathize with, characters your readers feel as if they know personally, then you often spark in those readers a curiosity about, and compassion for, the social and political circumstances the characters face. And hopefully the curiosity and compassion you spark will motivate readers to look more deeply into the issues, and then to take action. That was my goal in Xamon Song - to create characters that readers would relate to, characters who aren’t so different from you and me, but just happen to be knee-deep in some of the most vexing human rights issues of our time. I’m a novelist, but I’m also very much a human rights activist, unabashedly so, and I hope very much that people who read Xamon Song will be moved enough by the experience of the novel to become more involved in, and vocal about, the protection of human rights in the United States and in the rest of the world.

Nightlife:  How do you feel the novel avoids the danger of readers thinking, "Great story, but nothing like that is really happening in the world?"

Adam E. Stone:  Well, in addition to being a believer in fiction as a vehicle for social change, I’m also a firm believer in music as a vehicle for social change. That’s why Xamon Song begins with the quote "It could be anywhere ... most likely could be any frontier ... any hemisphere" from the Clash song "Straight to Hell" - one of my favorite social protest songs. I think it’s important for the book to have a universal feel: this really could happen anywhere, and in fact things like this are happening today all over the world. When my agent was shopping Xamon Song around, an editor at one of the major publishing houses in New York wanted me to set the story in a specific, real–rather than fictitious–country. He felt the story would be more powerful and convincing that way. I understood his point, but I feel just the opposite: it’s too easy, when examining human rights abuses such as genocide and ethnic cleansing, to think of them as things that only happen somewhere else, and I think that tendency would have been magnified if I’d set Xamon Song in a real country. Readers could easily have dismissed this as a novel about something that happened "over there" in some distant place; I’d much rather have readers thinking, "Hey, this could happen anywhere, given the right set of circumstances." For one thing, I think that’s more realistic, and for another, I think it’s more likely to produce the kind of curiosity and compassion I talked about earlier. As far as readers thinking the premise of the novel is far-fetched, that’s a tough question. Lots of people have no idea what is going on in the world, and many of those people don’t want to know. Shortly after Xamon Song was published, I came across a news article, buried deep, deep beneath the "headlines" about Britney Spears and Brad and Jennifer, about an investigation by the World Bank into reports that the Perth, Australia-based mining company Anvil had allowed company helicopters to be used to ferry government troops into an area in the Democratic Republic of Congo where those troops allegedly later massacred civilians. I printed the article out and kept it, to remind myself and others that the idea of corporate collusion in widespread, systematic human rights abuses is not unrealistic at all.

Nightlife:  I found your Human Rights Quarterly article online, but my old web browser wouldn’t get me past the log-on page to read it. I’ll guess that you see deficiencies in the way American public schools address human rights, which maybe we could more broadly call international civics. As you wrote Xamon Song, were you thinking, "This is how I’ll get this subject into classrooms"?

Adam E. Stone:  Yes, in a way. I don’t think you can undertake the writing of a novel–with its attendant challenges, complications, and frustrations–solely with the thought that your novel will someday be studied from a social or political perspective. You have to love your characters, you have to feel passionately about them as human beings, not solely as vehicles for social change. The three characters who make up the closed universe of Xamon Song are very real to me, and in a strange metaphysical sort of way they now co-exist with me. When, at times, their story wasn’t coming out as I wanted it to, and I felt frustrated, it was their voices that pushed me on, that forced me to move forward. They kept telling me how important their story was, far more important than any short-term dissatisfaction I might have with a particular sentence or image. Same thing when all the major publishers took a pass on Xamon Song - Eddie and Digna and Mike kept telling me to keep pushing, not to give up. There are enough forgotten, disenfranchised people in the world. I didn’t want to add them to the list. At the same time, having done a lot of scholarly research on Human Rights Education, I was very much aware of the limited resources out there–at least as far as fiction for high school and college students goes–for the study of many of the contemporary human rights issues Xamon Song addresses.

Nightlife:  Are you happy with the reception Xamon Song has thus far received?

Adam E. Stone:  Well, I’m not on any Best Seller list yet, and don’t expect to be any time soon, but really that’s not what matters to me at all. If Xamon Song inspires some of the people who read it to learn more about human rights, and to speak out more strongly for human rights, then it’s doing its job as a vehicle for social change. And, if the characters touch some readers enough that those readers feel less alone, less misunderstood, in this world and in their views of this world, then the book is doing its job as a work of literature. That said, I’d love to see more mainstream support for the book. Amnesty International, which has a large Human Rights Education network, is planning to run a review of the book in some of its upcoming publications, which will help get the word out to a lot more teachers who are looking for books like Xamon Song. The book’s website is also getting hits from all over the world: over 60 countries at last count. International orders keep trickling in from unexpected places, which I take as a good sign too. I think the Teaching Guide that goes along with the novel, which was developed with the help of two very experienced human rights educators–Nancy Flowers from California and Christy Hargesheimer from Nebraska–and which is also available on the book’s website, has been a big help, as far as showing high school teachers and college professors the many ways they can use Xamon Song to bring human rights into their classrooms.

Nightlife:  How did your tenure in Carbondale influence your commitment to the issues you address in Xamon Song?