Christopher Worthman has been with DePaul University for nearly three decades as professor, and most recently, serving as department chair of Teacher Education, Kinesiology and Educational Studies (TEKES). If that weren’t enough, he’s also an author of a brand-new book for young adults, Kid America (as C.M. Worthman).

From the book publisher’s writeup on Kid America, “the story follows 16-year-old Lenny, who is raised in Chicago by a single mother. After his mother faces a drug conviction following COVID-19 isolation, Lenny is sent to live with his grandparents in rural Illinois. When his grandparents fall ill with COVID-19 and he is left to fend for himself while avoiding local authorities, he forms a connection with a neighbor named Misty and tries to break the cycle of his family's struggles.”  The College of Education was very happy to talk with Prof. Worthman about the achievement of his first novel’s publication, his process as a writer, and more.

COLLEGE OF EDUCATION (COE): What was your path to writing your first novel specifically, and what are the differences and difficulties from shorter work?

CHRISTOPHER WORTHMAN: I came out of college having written quite a few short stories about my experiences, particularly my experiences in Alaska, and I continue to work on those. I've returned to them many times, but up until about 2020, I had pretty much been working on academic articles as a professor. I wrote a lot of ethnographic research that I often tried to frame as a particular way of storytelling grounded in data collection. But then, beginning around 2020, maybe a few years before, when my daughter was young, I returned to writing fiction, and I started writing some short stories. A couple of those short stories I've expanded into book-length pieces. One of them, hopefully, will be my next novel, which I hope to publish in about a year.

So it's a case where I've always had an interest in fiction, but because of my career trajectory, I got caught up in doing ethnographic research, which I enjoyed greatly. I felt I was very good at the narrative part of ethnography because it tapped into my interest in fiction writing…Once I became a full professor, I decided that I would transition back to fiction. I returned to a lot of those things I had been working on before I began academic writing, but I've also picked up on some things, particularly in middle grades and young adult literature areas, because I have a young daughter. I've become interested in how adolescents approach the world. I was a teacher for several years so that interest was always there, but I think having it right in front of me every day made me focus more closely on her development. But I've always taken an interest in how adolescents perceive the world and particularly how they're treated in the world. This goes back all the way back to my own experience as an adolescent. We, as adolescents, have very little say in what happens to us. Things are done to us, and it's been the last ten, twelve years that I've become very interested in trying to capture what that must be like for adolescents.

COE: The question all writers abhor, how did the story and your characters come to you?

WORTHMAN: It's not autobiographical. That's typically the first question I get. I was raised in a rural setting. I wasn't raised on a farm, but I'm very familiar with that type of life, and I'm very familiar with what Lenny is going through both before the novel begins and in the novel, this idea of being part of a dysfunctional family that goes back generations. I’m familiar with what that means, and particularly what it means for an adolescent. So Lenny, in some sense, is the quintessential adolescent in my mind. It's what I know; it’s what I experienced as a teacher here in Chicago. I don't think it's just something particular to rural adolescents, but I think, across the board, it’s how adolescents experience the world, particularly adolescents from dysfunctional families who are products of generational trauma. They experience the world in a particular way where their opportunities or chances to expand are very limited. As I've said before, they have very little say in what happens to them. Their personhood isn't necessarily recognized or nurtured. And that's not to say they're not loved. They oftentimes come from loving backgrounds. They have parents who love them, they have relatives who love them, but I think because of the nature of their existence in a family that is struggling, among adults who are struggling, there’s a sense in which loved ones don't know how to nurture these kids and provide them the opportunities they deserve to have. So, in that regard, I feel like I've always known Lenny. And I would say the same for characters in the other novels I've written and am working on. I feel like I'm tapping into my own experience both as an adolescent as well as a teacher working among adolescents.

COE: You said that there's a bit of you in every character and I was thinking, like, when reading, Grams and Paps—they’re interesting and complex characters because they're so cold to Lenny to begin with, and yet, looking through their perspectives, they have a life of their own, and there's this intrusion that comes into it, you know, they have a very simple, plain, conservative life and this intrusion comes in that is loaded with a lot of baggage because of their relationship with their daughter.

WORTHMAN: Exactly.

COE: How did you associate with those characters in particular?

WORTHMAN: I know adults like Grams and Paps. I was raised among adults like them. Again, I think with Grams and Paps, they love Lenny and in the book, they're growing to love him even more. They love their daughter, but they’re so damaged, so hurt by what has happened to them that they have this coldness, this distance about them reflected in a distrust of even their own family members, but particularly of outsiders. I've seen this with adults. I grew up during a time farmers were struggling. I did not come from a family of farmers, but they were all around me, so I saw how families struggled with farming. I grew up In central Indiana, and there was a factory town, Anderson, Indiana, about 20 miles from us, which probably a good number of people in my community worked. And those factories were closing in the late '70s, early '80s, and I saw the effects of that. And at that time, obviously, I couldn't name what was happening but in hindsight, it's very clear to me that people felt that their community, their government, the businesses in which they worked had deceived them and did not care about them. And, you know, looking back, we can analyze that and suggest a lot of different things that happened, a lot of different things they should have done, but the fact is those were real feelings and they were grounded in the evidence that these people had in front of them. You can't deny how they felt, how they responded, and how they've continued to respond. I saw similar types of feelings among adults when I was working with adolescents here in Chicago, and their parents and community members on the West Side of Chicago. They had a great desire to do what's best for their kids, but a great distrust in those institutions that have failed them historically.

COE: Lenny is potentially one of the at-risk teens that you, at least in the press notes that you write about in Just Playing the Part, your first nonfiction book. Inspiration from Lenny came from the classroom, it would seem.

WORTHMAN: Yes, not just from Free Street, the teen ensemble I've written about. Also, I taught for several years on the West Side of Chicago, mainly African American males at a mission school for males pushed out of CPS. How Lenny experienced urban life is very much a reflection of what I understood as my students’ experience of urban life. Although, obviously, Lenny is white. That, in and of itself, is a big difference, but their struggles are similar, as are adolescents across the identify spectrum.

COE: The thrill and the stress of young attraction and strict families behind that are also a strong theme, especially late in your book. Again, surely relatable. Why was it important to include this, especially considering Lenny's life and fate?

WORTHMAN: This wasn't necessarily conscious, but looking back, Misty is a catalyst for Lenny. She opens his eyes to his own predicament. He recognizes a lot of what happened with his mother and what's happening with him in her life. I think Misty is much wiser than she lets on. She understands her family, but she, like a lot of us, regardless of what's going on in our families, knows it is her family and she’s committed to it. And Lenny has that too, and in some sense, for him to act he basically must be stripped of all family connection.

The attraction between Misty and Lenny reflects how a lot of adolescents who have not been loved in ways, who do not have self-confidence, self-esteem, often approach attraction. They’re not quite sure how to present themselves. They’re pretty sure that however they present themselves, they're going to be rejected. The fact that they're both coming at it with those types of feelings, I think, in some ways, makes it easier for them, although, it isn’t easy. They're attracted to each other in part because of their appearance as outcast within the school and among others within the community. So there's that attraction and in my mind, like I said, Misty is sort of a catalyst and probably deserves a lot of credit for the decisions that Lenny makes.

COE: There's also a slow patience with their—to use an old-fashioned term—with their courtship that I really like. There’s a shyness, a fear, and that's a really another great strength of the book. It's a great relationship between the two of them. Now, I have to give a spoiler alert first.

Do you recall the writing the first line of Chapter Seventeen, that line in particular? And was it planned, the terseness of it all, or did it come out of your fingers at that moment when you were writing the chapter?

WORTHMAN: It probably came out of my fingers at that moment. I knew early on that Grams was going to die of COVID, and I knew Paps was going to die. I didn't quite know how to handle those events in terms of how Lenny would respond. I think his initial response is quintessential Lenny, like “this happened to me,” and in some sense, it's devoid of an emotional response. I'm hoping that emotional response comes through as he deals with her being dead and what he must do. I tried to capture that. Initially, though, I think Lenny felt that ‘of course, this is my life. Grams died.’

COE: He's very tender, how he takes care of Grams. Very mature, too, considering, you know, the embarrassment that an adolescent would likely feel about having to undress and then clean and then dress his own grandmother. And the same with his grandfather, and I like how in that case, he was concerned about his grandfather's embarrassment.

The book is a story of inheritance and survival. We see how Lenny survives, but what does he inherit and from whom? That might be more up to the reader. What do you feel Lenny inherits?

WORTHMAN: Generational trauma. It’s part of who he is. He's lived it with his mom in Chicago. When he returns, when he comes to the farm, he's living it. He's inherited it—I don't want to say it’s a black mark—but it’s a struggle that has defined his family for generations. One reviewer wrote that not all that we inherit is good. In Lenny’s case, this is part of what he's inherited. But at the same time, he's inherited a strong sense of other people's struggle. He's empathetic. He understands and doesn't hold it against others for their struggles, and again, I'm thinking in terms of his mother and his grandparents. He comes to an understanding of why they are like they are and in coming to that understanding, he also doesn't want to continue in that mold.

COE: Where he literally and symbolically buries the past. I'm sure that was at the forefront of your mind as a writer. And not only does he bury his own grandparents and the living root of that trauma, but, that he withholds the news of their deaths from his mother. The fact that Lenny makes that decision as the child to the mother, he doesn't tell her because what good would that do with her being incarcerated and having to carry that?

WORTHMAN: Well, he knows it'll crush her, too.

COE: This is one of the most basic questions you can ask a writer, but what was your process as a writer like while working on the book?

WORTHMAN: I wrote the book in one month in November of 2021 as part of a NaNoWriMo Organization writing challenge where you write 50,000 words in November. It's now a defunct organization. I wrote the entire first draft in that one month, and then I set it aside and worked on other projects for a couple of years. Then I returned to it, and having not really looked at it for a couple of years and having written it by basically just sitting down every morning and picking up where I left off, I rewrote it over the next 18 months or so, having a few people look at some stuff as I was going. I reworked it and got it down from about 65,000 words to, I think, it 43,000 now, which is relatively short for even a young adult novel.

So once I got it to where I felt like someone who wasn't a friend could look at it, I sent it to an editor. She provided some valuable feedback, and I revised again for about six more months, sent it back to her, and after another round of revisions, submitted it to a few publishers. All of them responded positively. I negotiated with one, Mission Point Press. The whole process is like the process for all my writing. I’m most interested in character development and instances in people's lives. I will sit down and just start writing and try to follow a character. I don't go back the next day and look at what I wrote previously. I just try to pick up where I left off and continue. And it's only when I have something that I think is complete that I'll go back and start working through it from the beginning. Obviously, there's going to be a lot of stuff that need addressed—the flow of it, the inconsistencies, contradictions, issues around what is possible in terms of events, everything lining up. So the revision process is a real revising process where probably 60-70% of what’s there is going to get changed in some way, just to make it all fit together. And that's been my process forever. I just want to sit down and be taken in by characters and let them do the early work. My job is to come back and make it presentable to readers.

COE: The character works the strongest aspect of the book, no doubt. That shines through. In what ways did DePaul's College of Education help you through this project?

WORTHMAN: That's a good question. I'm in Secondary English education, so I'm preparing middle grade and high school English teachers. We read a lot of middle grade and young adult literature. And of course we read a lot about writing development and the teaching of literature. I think, being immersed in it and engaging future teachers have really helped me think about how narrative works and what it can mean to adolescents. In my classes, we talk about how it is we can get our students to not only read and engage with a text but also begin to tell their own stories in relation to a text. We explore how we can get them to take on characters and to empathize with them and live through them. And I've had the opportunity over the last—this is my 28th year at DePaul—I’ve had the opportunity over that time, to hone my thinking and really engage others around it and hear what they think and what they value in literature. One thing about high school English teachers, they typically come into it because they remember how they experienced literature as an adolescent. The fact is the kids they're going to be standing in front of once they become teachers have not had that experience. We talk about how we can provide that experience, how we can make it meaningful. So, I try to be very much attuned to what I think adolescents need and want, and I want to respect their perspectives and understand that they're able to deal with complex issues, because in their lives, they typically are dealing with complex issues. In the literature itself, that should be reflected. There's always the belief that young adult literature and middle-grade literature is dummied down for kids, and it's very simplistic and can't deal with controversial or complex issues. The best middle grades and young adult literature I've read are works that adults should also be reading.

COE: What hopes do you have sending your baby out into the world?

WORTHMAN: I would like to get it into schools and school districts, and I'm beginning to work on that, contacting schools and English department heads. That's my big hope. I want to go out there and be able to talk about it with kids. Obviously, I want to sell books, but if I could get into schools and have kids read it and talk about it that would be the fulfillment of what I would want from the book.

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Kid America is now available at your favorite bookseller.