The following is an interview with writer Josiah Golojuh regarding the upcoming release of the YA novel, The Paper Boy, through Stage Beetle Books. In this interview, Fanbase Press Editor-in-Chief Barbra Dillon chats with Golojuh about his creative experience in bringing the coming-of-age story and characters to life on the page, what readers may take away from the story’s themes, and more!
Barbra Dillon, Fanbase Press Editor-in-Chief: Congratulations on the upcoming release of The Paper Boy! For those who may be unfamiliar, how would you describe the book’s premise?
Josiah Golojuh: Thank you! The story is set in the mid ’90s, we follow Daniel, the paperboy from the title, as he lives his geeky life using comics, action figures, and the like to avoid, well, reality! He delivers the newspaper to fund his habits his comic book habit. He delivers the papers at the local trailer park. One day after an encounter with bullies, Daniel finds the body of a young boy hanging from a tree in the woods. As a storm both literal and figurative surrounds him, he finds himself haunted by that boy, The Corpse Boy. As this unlikely friendship forms, Daniel faces his deepest fears and must confront a kind of creepy dude who lives in the trailer park, who goes by the name “Cowboy,” and we learn what lurks beneath the surface.
BD: The novel deftly tackles a coming-of-age story weaved together with the darkness of the paranormal and the weight of loss. What can you share with us about your creative process in weaving these narratives together?
JG: I always knew I wanted to tell the story of my paper route as under very different circumstances it was when I came of age. It was full of such interesting people, so some of the customers are very much based on my own newspaper customers. I, like Daniel, was, in fact, a paperboy in the mid-’90s. That’s where it started, however, as I began writing it, I found life giving me far too many opportunities to suffer grief and loss. In graduate school at USC, my mentor, the late Coleman Hough passed away recently after a long hard battle with Parkinson’s. In addition to being a brilliant teacher and poet, Coleman wrote Stephen Soderbergh’s Full Frontal. She suggested I research the newspaper I had delivered, to just get a feel. I read a story about a young boy who died tragically, drastically different from what’s in the novel, but still impactful and helped me determined the direction. Something dark, but accessible to that younger me delivering those newspapers. The rest was a bit of a puzzle, real characters, ideas for characters moments, scenes, feelings, a puzzle in the form of a story.
BD: At Fanbase Press, our #StoriesMatter initiative endeavors to highlight the impact that stories can have on audiences of various mediums. How do you feel that Daniels’s story may connect with and impact readers?
JG: Stories matter because we all have a story to tell, even if we don’t write them as novel, maybe we just talk to a friend, write for ourselves, scribble on a napkin, just what you love. I was at a birthday party for a friend of my daughter, there was a 5-year-old boy there. I asked him questions, he wasn’t responding, then we started talking Roblox. He told me stories of Roblox. He talked and talked. It was an open door to learn a bit about him, then he started to share a bit more about himself beyond just that. We connected over something he loved.
In this instance, the story of Oliver, The Course Boy, is quite dark and tragic. It’s a flip of the coin, that thing we loved can be used to manipulate or destroy us or it can be the thing to lift us up. It’s about how the bright and colorful world of comic books, action figures, and sci-fi can connect us and create unlikely friendship and illuminate the dark places and help tell the stories we may not want to tell. The stories of children who have suffered the horrors of abuse. I think stories matter and we need to engage so we can use them to show others the way and teach before they are harmed, and if people are harmed, then they matter even more because they are a point of restoration and healing.
BD: What makes Stag Beetle Books the perfect home for this story?
JG: I needed a team that understood the story; it has a darkness over it, but it is also light in spirit. The soul is bright, it has humor despite the gravity of the subject. Many years ago I wrote The Paper Boy as screenplay. I spoke with someone in Hollywood who told me the Corpse Boy shouldn’t be dead. As I adapted it to a novel, I faced rejection here there and everywhere. Laura, my publisher, and Kevin, my editor, understood the story and helped me hone in the tone to focus it in for our Young Adult audience. They knew that the story was about confronting death as we grow, and you can’t confront death without facing it, in this case in the form of the ghost of a little boy. You can view him as a ghost, or an angel, I see him as a bit of a superhero.
BD: Are there any additional projects that you would like to highlight for our readers?
JG: From me, please check out The Borough, my upcoming Kickstarter – it’s my second. Last year I did Young Zombie. Both of those are meta-fiction from The Paper Boy. You can find Young Zombie digitally on Amazon now and The Borough will be coming soon! How soon, I don’t know. The novel has been pretty all consuming but I’m excited to travel in my inter-dimensional time machine and go find some more lost comic books and bring them back to share with everyone. These are comics that Daniel and The Corpse Boy bond over in The Paper Boy. Also, visit my YouTube Channel, Josiah Is Write, for Geek Culture stuff, including a feature-length documentary on the character Zen: Intergalactic Ninja, a character I love. I interviewed the creators; it took me over a year to create and I’m very proud of it. And there’s tons of other content like that what Revenge of the Jedi might have been, George Romero’s Resident Evil, and the like.
Stag Beetle Books has a ton of amazing stuff, and September in particular is a packed month. Another horror book, Shaded Grove, by Oliver Seneca just released. It also happens to be set in Pennsylvania. I guess Stag Beetle has a subgenre of Pennsylvania-set horror/paranormal books. They have Earth Bound by Kate Stein on September 18th and book three in The Foiled Stars Trilogy coming September 22, and then Saint Destiny coming in November.
BD: Lastly, what is the best way for our readers to find more information about The Paper Boy and your other work?
JG: You can find me about the internet as Josiah is Write, the aforementioned YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, etc., so in all of those places you’ll get the latest Josiah news. I also have a Tumblr blog of the same name, which at least as of right now is my official website. If you Google Josiah Golojuh, you’ll find me, I assume I’m the only one so that’d probably work.
