20 People to Watch - Kate Sweeney: The debut author

Local radio producer makes an auspicious debut with her book American Afterlife

Atlanta may already be familiar with Kate Sweeney’s voice. As a producer at WABE-FM (90.1) her serious but soft tone occasionally makes an appearance on the airwaves. As the host of True Story!, a well-attended bimonthly nonfiction reading series, Sweeney emcees introductions for the traveling magazine writers and essayists who come to read their works. But there’s another kind of “voice,” the one that book critics like to talk about that describes writers’ control of language and perspective, their skill at telling a story without letting you forget who is doing the telling. It’s that second kind of voice that readers will be introduced to this year when Sweeney publishes her debut work of nonfiction, American Afterlife: Encounters in the Customs of Mourning.

The book has been long in the making. While attending the University of North Carolina Wilmington seven years ago, Sweeney first started reporting on various American death customs and curiosities related to mourning. An early piece about an environmentally friendly cemetery in South Carolina ended up in celebrated Southern magazine Oxford American. She visited the now-closed Museum of Funeral Customs and the 10th Great Obituarist Conference. Then came the hard years of forming that reportage into a fluid, readable narrative, and finding a publisher willing to risk a broad take on what could have been a dry, dark subject. The University of Georgia Press picked up the project and will publish the book in March.

Like any author who has worked hard for years to form her ideas and reporting into the shape of a substantial book, Sweeney seems a bit exhausted by that journey. Yet, as soon as she’s asked about the work, she comes to life.

“I realized that the same generation that invented getting married on the beach is now defining a way to be buried on their own terms,” Sweeney says, eyes alight with the connection. Other revelations followed. “Initially looking back at Victorians, I saw them as a bit odd and death obsessed. As I went further, it started to seem to me that they had a healthy relationship with death that we lack today. Having a good death, dying at home and surrounded by loved ones, was a really big deal in the 1800s. Contrast that with today, where a lot of people die alone or in institutions far away from home.”

Not everyone can muster that kind of enthusiasm for grim topics, but that contrast is what makes American Afterlife such an entertaining read. In the face of oblivion, Sweeney doesn’t miss the occasional chance to marvel at life.

In American Afterlife’s first chapter, Sweeney writes, “To Americans, death is an enigma.” Only after reading the book and taking in the wealth of her observations do we realize how right she is, and how little of it we can ever understand. What Sweeney salvages are the precise details of mourning, the things we do to make it understandable. Sweeney has a subtle eye for the way that, when faced with the absurd finality of death, we cling to the equally absurd (yet tangible) vestiges of those we’ve lost.

As Sweeney stocks her book with vivid details - from the antique designs of metal cooling boards to wicker-woven caskets of “green burial” to the theatrical staging of memorial photographs to a coral reef of human ash - that unknowable enigma takes the strange and beautiful journey to becoming something slightly more palpable and comprehensible. Sweeney makes no pretension of grappling with the totality of death. But through the constellation of her details we begin to see the practical shape, that thing we will only fully understand when we all inevitably meet it.