I’ve been a faculty member at an art school for almost two decades, teaching mostly fiction writing, modern lit, and narrative studies. Every so often in the classroom—even as I’m speaking to the students—I’ll have the experience of looking at myself in the third person and a little voice saying, “You get paid to talk make-believe all day.”
I’m fortunate. I get to teach these students for a living, and all the while, of course, I’m learning things from them. Some will become graphic designers, fashion designers, and photographers. Others will have careers making narratives: animations, graphic novels, and video games. What’s incredible is how—every semester—there are a few who arrive in my classroom with stories they’ve been creating, in some capacity, since they were fourteen or fifteen years old. Reems of notebooks. Infinite character sketches. Tons of lore.
These students are serious worldbuilders, and they’ve helped me to appreciate how all stories, to varying extent, are about the building of worlds.
I’m a lifelong Michigander, and when I first got serious about writing, I told stories set on the shores of the Great Lakes. Like a kid making sandcastles, I took the existing land and built something imagined on top of it.
But for my second book, a novel, I decided to go bigger—something I cursed now and then for all the challenges it caused. I again set my story in Michigan, but this time I created a whole town from scratch. Carved it out of forest on the Lake Superior coast. Like my students, I invented a history for my storyworld. A geography. I named every street and every business, even if those names never made it to any draft of the manuscript. I even drew a map on a posterboard and then hired a student illustrator to make it look amazing for publication.
Meanwhile, I got older. I became a father. My real world got bigger, and so, too, did the worlds in my fiction. For my third book, the stories branched off in farther directions. Stories set in other countries. Stories spotlighting folks of all ages. One story was set eighty years in the past, in a war-torn part of the world far from where I live.
It’s exciting to stretch the limits of these written worlds, even as they require research and travel and new story puzzles to solve. The result is that I’ve now written a novel set about twenty-five years in the future, in our soon-to-be world. And this time, it wasn’t enough to build just a small Midwestern town. This time (God help me), I built a nation.
Now, I’ll admit, it’s a small nation. One of the smallest on Earth. A tiny chain of islands in the middle of the Pacific. But it was once a beautiful place. And now it’s drowning.
Half a Million Minutes (forthcoming from Regal House in spring 2027) allowed me to world-build in wholly new ways. There’s alternate history. Speculative technologies. Global conspiracies. And at the heart is a retired schoolteacher named Hazelmary who discovers that the history she’d taught to generations is a lie.
On the surface, she and I are very different. But what we share is a love of teaching and for the thousands of students whom we’ve taught. With whom we’ve shared stories. By populating my fictional islands with Hazelmary’s former students—and by having them fight side by side for what’s good and right—I was able to channel the connections and gratitude I feel as a teacher.
I spent ten years writing this book, and over time I feel like I built this character into my real world, if you know what I mean.
In addition to Half a Million Minutes, I’m the author of the novel Haymaker (2015) and the collections Freshwater Boys (2010) and The Things We Do that Make No Sense (2017). My works have twice been named Michigan Notable Books by the Library of Michigan. I’ve had stories in journals such as Glimmer Train, North American Review, Indiana Review, TriQuarterly, and The Southern Review. I earned my Ph.D. and MFA from Western Michigan University. And I live in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where I’m a Professor at Kendall College of Art and Design, Ferris State University.
When I’m not writing or teaching, you can find me traveling, gardening, filling birdfeeders, or hanging out with one of my favorite mammals: my partner, Abby; my daughter, Elizabeth; or my cat, Benny.
You can also find me online at adamschuitema.com and on social media as @adamschuitema.
