James Worth has been writing since he was little, moving in and out of the craft for most of his life. “When I was a kid I wrote these stories about a knight and a butterfly who were best friends and went on adventures. I illustrated them as well. I told everyone I could that I was writing a book.” Being a creative spirit came with a measure of criticism, however. He couldn’t avoid the deep emotional truths and the queerness that came from getting close to his own heart. “I stopped writing for a long time. Because I was terrified of all the things there were to know about myself. Being queer and being feminine and being a sensitive creature, it was all there just beneath my words and I had to run from them.”

But the craft of writing—creating stories, building characters, stringing together words that tantalize—has always called to him. “It started with getting sober. I quit drinking and all of these thoughts and words and ideas came flooding to me and I just started writing them all down. It was always there but I had to give it back to myself again.” For James, writing became not just a hobby but a way of living. “I couldn’t exist if I wasn’t crafting novels, thinking up extravagantly simple songs, writing poetry about the world around me. It’s my lifeline. It tethers me to myself and to the natural world and to my community. It keeps me alive.”

James Worth is a penname or an artist’s name or an inevitability. But it’s all the same to James, also known as Chris to his loved ones. “James is my middle name, also my father’s name. There’s something so much more Irish about that name and I love being Irish—I’m deeply informed by druidism and a connection to green. And there is something really satisfying in just butchering the last name that has brought me so much ridicule in my life and cutting it down to just Worth. It’s so obvious but it’s also very true. I am giving myself my worth. That’s my writing, too, it’s all just a tool to understand the world and to return to myself.”