Exclusive Interview with Kirstin Cronn-Mills

 

Nebraska native Kirstin Cronn-Mills has her fifth young adult novel, Rules for Camouflage, hitting the bookshelves this month (June 18th). While storytelling was always in her blood, it took Cronn-Mills years to realize she was also a natural writer.

“I never expected to write fiction,” said Cronn-Mills. “I thought being a writer meant being a poet. I didn’t know I could write novels. Here we are 20-plus years later.”

Cronn-Mills was heavily influenced by poetry, her first memory of her grandmother being a recital of a Robert Frost poem. Her love of stories first surfaced through poetry writing and an education and career in English. Cronn-Mills received her bachelor’s (1991) and master’s (1992) degrees in English from the University of Nebraska – Lincoln. She then completed her Ph.D. in English at Iowa State University (1997). 

Cronn-Mills has been teaching at the college level for 32 years, and she is currently an English Instructor at South Central College in North Mankato, Minnesota. Although she has been studying and teaching English for years, it took a phone call from the past to push her toward writing stories of her own. 

A frenemy from her hometown called Cronn-Mills on the phone and explained she was unkind to Cronn-Mills in their youth because she had a crush on her. Cronn-Mills thought the experience would make a good book, and the rest is history – a history of contemporary realism and non-fiction books for young adults by Cronn-Mills. 

Since then, Cronn-Mills has published four novels and four nonfiction books for young adults. She has another YA novel and a YA historical novel in poetry in the works, and hopefully another YA nonfiction book.

“I have always enjoyed sharing stories,” said Cronn-Mills. “Stories are the things that make us human.”

Cronn-Mills writes these stories with the same philosophy she follows as a teacher—meet people where they are. She’s not trying to change anyone, but rather help them adapt to the structures society has put them in.

Rules for Camouflage, set in the fictional Minnesota town of Bluestem Lake, is a young adult book about neurodivergent kids, the adults who choose to fight them, and the adults who choose to meet them where they’re at to support them. 

In her books, Cronn-Mills has shown dedication to character research of the community she is writing about. 

“First of all, you have to earn somebody’s trust,” said Cronn-Mills. “If you are going to use parts of their story or you are going to even step foot into a community that is not yours you need to be sure that community sees you as a guest.”

Cronn-Mills does this by doing her research, talking to people in the community face-to-face, being respectful, and representing that reality in the best way she can.

For Rules for Camouflage, Cronn-Mills was able to draw on her own experiences as a neurodivergent woman.

According to Cronn-Mills, her later-in-life discovery of her neurodivergence was like many middle-aged women in the regard that she didn’t realize she’d been living with it until her son was diagnosed. It was then she had her ‘ah-ha’ moment and began understanding what it means to have a brain that functions differently than what is thought of as a ‘normal’ brain.

Just as we see variations of physical traits in people, our brains also range in differences in function and behavior.

“There are some real advantages to this brain if you work in a place where you can be who you are,” said Cronn-Mills. “If you have to keep squishing into neurotypical boxes, that’s when it gets difficult.” 

Cronn-Mills hopes kids can see themselves reflected and be comforted that they are seen by others as well in her latest book, Rules for Camouflage.

“I really want to make a sanctuary for neurodivergent kids in that book,” said Cronn-Mills. According to Cronn-Mills that is something she couldn’t have done if she wasn’t neurodivergent herself.

As Cronn-Mills enters the Master of Fine Arts in Writing program at Minnesota State University, Mankato this fall, she will be tackling another project as her thesis. She plans to write a historical YA in verse that imagines a young woman going to Chicago to have a baby, the outcome of an unplanned pregnancy, in the summer of 1937.

The project is in part a tribute to her grandmother who first introduced her to poetry. 

“My grandmother was a writer in a thousand different ways, and she wrote about everything except her summer in Chicago,” said Cronn-Mills. 

Although ancestry research proves an unplanned pregnancy wasn’t the reason her 25-year-old grandmother went to Chicago, it was still a story worth uncovering.

“My grandma and my dad were both neurodivergent,” said Cronn-Mills. “I cannot even imagine being born in 1912 on the plains of Nebraska and being a neurodivergent woman. What a flipping mess that could have been.” 

After twenty years of practicing her craft Cronn-Mills has become more efficient and confident in her work. She understands her pitfalls and is better able to see them when they happen.

“I have grown immensely. I certainly trust my work’s quality more now because I know more and I have practiced more,” said Cronn-Mills. “One of the things I tell my students is that the difference between them and me is that I have practiced more.” 

Through her practice, Cronn-Mills has learned a few important writing lessons. First, she always trusts her imaginary people or follows her story intuition. Next, she spends at least some time planning each book to avoid several drafts by creating a visual map of the novel with color-coded character plotting. Finally, she has learned not to be afraid of who she is as a writer and as a person.

Perhaps this last lesson is the greatest since she has now become an advocate for neurodivergent people through her storytelling.