Despite living in a town where football is king and teaching at a university where fall revolves around the football team’s schedule, it’s not football that has the heart of English professor Kevin Waltman. In Waltman’s new young adult novel, “Next,” the focus is entirely on basketball.
“Were it about football, it would probably make a lot more sense here,” Waltman said. “But it’s almost just substituting sports, because the way people in Indiana care about basketball is not terribly dissimilar from the way people feel about football here.”
In “Next,” Derrick “D-Bow” Bowen is starting his freshman year at a city school in Indianapolis, Ind., where he is set to be the star of the basketball team. Things start to break down when D-Bow realizes that his new coach plays by a different set of rules and expects him to pay his dues as a freshman before rising to stardom as the team’s starting point guard. Add in the fact that a private school in the suburbs is vying for D-Bow to transfer, and things really start getting messy.
“It becomes the process of wrestling being a star but also being a freshman,” Waltman said. “Things are not going on the court quite as smoothly as he would have hoped, despite his talent. So it’s a story of harnessing that talent to the structure of a team and the expectations of an old school coach.”
Part of Waltman’s decision to write about basketball stemmed from growing up in Indiana, where basketball is the state’s pride and joy.
“I was a hoops junkie when I was young,” Waltman said. “My dad was a basketball coach, so I’ve been steeped in basketball my whole life.”
Waltman said although the story of basketball in Indiana is one that has been told on numerous occasions, it usually stems around retellings of the same story lines featured in the classic movie “Hoosiers,” where the characters are small town white kids who often grew up on farms.
“It’s not that that doesn’t exist in Indiana, but for the majority of the kids there, they live in the city, and they’re African-American,” Waltman said. “Part of it was tapping into this legacy of Indiana basketball stories but trying to update it to be a little bit more like what most high school basketball players are experiencing today.”
As a professor in English and creative writing, Waltman said he uses his experiences with his students to get into the mindset of what it’s like to be a young adult and tell the coming-of-age story that explores the ultimate question of identity that many people first face as young adults.
“I’m around young people all the time, and I’m reading their writing all the time, so I still feel like I have a sense of what a young adult’s life is like,” Waltman said. “Terminology changes, slang changes, technology changes, but the basic desires of teenagers haven’t changed in the last 20, 40 or 60 years. There’s a desire for acceptance, there’s a desire for love, there’s a desire for success, and there’s a desire to be seen as an adult.”
Ben Flanagan, who graduated from the University in 2007 with a degree in telecommunication and film and took Waltman’s EN102 class as a freshman, said he remembers talking basketball with Waltman before and after class and thinks Waltman’s extensive knowledge of basketball has been instrumental in the quality of his novel.
“He has a unique grasp of the guts of the game of basketball, the nitty-gritty details and the rhythm of what happens on the court and in the player’s head,” he said. “UA students will identify with the passion a fan base can bring along with some of the pressure it can put on a young man making a personal and possible professional transition.”
Waltman started writing young adult novels more than 10 years ago when he received a call from David Levithan, a young adult fiction editor who he knew from mutual friends, saying he was looking for writers for a new series within Scholastic. Waltman, who had never written young adult material before, decided to give it a try and ended up publishing his first novel, “Nowhere Fast,” in 2001, followed by “Learning the Game” in 2005.
“The good thing about writing young adult now is that it doesn’t have to be that different,” Waltman said. “You’re a little constrained by vocabulary and constrained by the age of the character, but in terms of content and what you’re allowed to say, that’s been unshackled to a great degree. There’s no longer a sense of having to have some sort of upstanding moral lesson for the kids. You can write about issues that young adults would actually care about, which frankly aren’t that different from adult concerns.”
“Next,” which is the first of a four-book series chronicling D-Bow’s four years of high school, came out in December 2013. One new installment is set to be released at the end of each year.
Waltman will sign books as part of the Spring Southern Writers Festival on Saturday from 2 to 4 p.m. at the Summit Barnes & Noble in Birmingham. Waltman’s book will be sold in the store.
Plan to go
What: “Next” book signing
Where: Spring Southern Writers Festival
When: Saturday, 2-4 p.m.
