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This podcast is for anyone who loves a good story. Board now for interviews and writing samples from talented authors!
If you would like to be featured, email your work to storystation@riverbendmediagroup.com
Submission guidelines:
There is no word count, but please select a piece that can be read in ten minutes or less.
Pieces with extreme violence, language, or other explicit content will not be considered.
Thank you for your interest!
Every story is a ticket to somewhere extraordinary. No need to pack a bag, just settle in and let the words transport you. Now boarding: an insight to an author's mind. This is The Story Station.
Emma: I will be honest. Starting podcasts is not my strong suit. I'm never quite sure how to start these things.
Josh: I'm not sure being on podcasts is my strong suit. We'll do our best.
Emma: There we go.
Josh: We'll muddle through it together.
Emma: Because I'm like, you gotta introduce your person somehow, but how do you introduce them without being like, "Uhhh... This is Josh Allen." I wanted to do, like, you know, like, the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland, how it starts with, like—
Josh: Nice.
Emma: When hinges creak in doorless chambers or, you know, something spooky.
Josh: Yeah, yeah.
Emma: But I don't know. I think that's copyrighted. So, I don't know, thanks for coming in!
Josh: It's my pleasure to be here.
Emma: So one thing that I like to ask—I don't know if you've listened to a few of the episodes, you might have heard. I like to ask why people write. And actually I got that idea from you, because in your class then you said it's so important to know why you write, and that really stuck with me. So why do you write?
Josh: Yeah. I've been thinking a lot about this lately, and I write for a lot of reasons. The two main ones are, first, I think it's fun. I think that as you get older—I'm 51 years old now—as you get older, I think it's really important to cling to those things that bring you joy, cling to those things that fill your life with wonder, and writing fills my life with wonder. It's fun. You can go anywhere. You can do anything in the stories that you're writing. And there's sort of this magic about putting words on the page and conjuring worlds into existence and creating characters, and it's so joyful. So for me, that's the main reason that I write.
I think another main reason that I write is writing binds us together. It connects us. I was talking to my students at BYU-Idaho today about the books that they've read where you read a book and you suddenly feel a kinship with the author, even though you've never met the author, even though maybe the author has been dead for decades, and you feel somehow seen. You feel connected to this person. And writing is this art form that binds us together. It helps us feel seen. It helps us feel understood. And writing is reaching out. It's an effort to connect with other people. And so that's another reason I do it. I think I have this yearning to feel bound to other people, to feel connected.
Emma: Sometimes when I'm reading a book, I'm like, "Oh, I really wish I could meet this author." Because like you said, you connect with them and you just think, "Oh, that'd be so cool to talk to them about this thing that we both can relate to."
Josh: Yeah. You feel you feel sort of... you know, you find those authors and you feel sort of... almost like they're your family.
Emma: Mhmm.
Josh: They feel so... It's such an intimate thing to have a favorite book written by another human being. It feels so personal.
Emma: So that might be why you write, now specifically, why scary stories... or how do you classify it? Would you call it horror or...
Josh: Oh, yeah. I'm comfortable with that word. Yeah. I like the word horror. That's definitely what I write. I write horror stories for children. Sure.
Emma: What led you to writing horror for children?
Josh: Well, again, I'm gonna go back to joy. I'm gonna go back to fun. When I was a kid myself, I fell in love with spooky stories because of stories like The Twilight Zone. I was the biggest eight-year-old Twilight Zone fan the world has ever seen, this creepy, old, black and white TV show that I used to watch with my dad. You know, we'd watch reruns on Saturday afternoons. I fell in love with books like Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark by Alvin Schwartz in 1980s. I discovered a book when I was, I don't know, probably around 11 or 12 years old. I discovered Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury. Just a staggeringly haunting book that I just fell in love with. And so these are the kind of stories that I fell in love with when I was a kid, stories about weird, zany, creepy, spooky things. And so when I sit down to write for kids, I kinda go back to what drew me to literature when I was a kid. So that's kinda why I write horror.
But why do I write for kids? I'm trying to be a proselyte for literature. And I think a lot of adults, their reading habits are kind of formed. If you're 45 years old and you're not a reader, the odds of you becoming a reader, I think they're pretty small. Right? I think your habits are pretty well formed by that stage of your life. But I feel like kids, you know, if you're 10, 11, 12 years old, you're still malleable. You're still figuring out who you are, and you're still figuring out what you love. And I'm trying to help kids who are on the fence about reading be less on the fence about reading.
And so I write for kids because I'm trying to win people over to reading stories and literature. And I write horror because that's what I fell in love with when I was that age.
Emma: That is a worthy cause. When I was a kid, then sometimes we would sleep outside on our trampoline, and my dad would bring out—we had this, like, CD player and he put the Bradbury 13 short stories in.
Josh: Oh, nice.
Emma: So freaky to listen to when it's, like, late at night, it's dark, and you're just in your backyard.
Josh: Oh, that's the perfect time to do it. Sounds fantastic.
Emma: I also wanted to ask you a little bit about writing short stories. What do you think are the biggest differences between writing shorter stories and then writing a full length novel?
Josh: Well, I've never written a novel, and so I don't know that I can speak to the differences with too much authority because of all I've ever done is written short fiction.
But I'll say that I'm committed to short fiction, especially as a children's author, because short story collections, I feel like, empower kids to read in the ways that they want. So if you read a novel, you start at page 1, and you finish on page 350, and you read the 349 pages in between in order. Right? Well, if you're reading a short story collection and you're a kid, you can read the first story, and then if you love it, you can go back to it and reread it again, and then you can skim the table of contents. And if there's a 22-page story, and that seems a little long for you, you can skip over it. Short story collections do not have to be read linearly. Kids can read them in any order they want, and I feel like this empowers children to take a little bit more control over their reading habits. And as a guy whose mission is to convince kids that reading is fantastic and they should do a whole bunch of it, I wanna empower kids to read in the ways that work for them.
Also, I'm committed to short forms because I feel like today's kids have been raised on short-form stories. Short-form stories dominate children's lives. Things like YouTube shorts, Instagram reels, TikTok. Kids obviously love short-form story. And so sometimes I feel like if there's a kid who's on the fence about reading, and you say to this kid who's been raised on short-form storytelling, "Here's a 312-page book. Try it out. You're gonna love it." I feel like that kid's intimidated right from the get-go. But if you can say to a kid, "Here's a 4-page story. Read it, and if you like it, you can read the next one, too." I feel like we can win more kids over to reading by meeting them where they are, and where a lot of kids are is enamored of short forms.
Emma: Give them some little bite-sized...
Josh: Yeah, give them bite-sized nuggets to tempt them in.
Emma: So with your audience, it seems like you have your audience in mind a lot as you write. That's kind of one of the first things that you learn in writing, right?
Josh: Right, exactly.
Emma: With that—writing horror, how do you balance writing both things that are suspenseful and scary, but also kinda maybe have some fun or other things that might appeal to your audience?
Josh: Yeah. That's a great question. For me as a children's author, rule number one is never condescend to kids. Kids are tough. I have enormous respect for children. They're brave. The kids that are coming of age today, they lived through the pandemic, which was tough. A lot of them lost people that they love, which was really tough. They know that there are some serious political tensions in our country. They see adults yelling at each other, and they're navigating this really difficult world. And they're navigating it really, really well. A lot of them are thriving. And so when I sit down to write a story, I wanna respect these children who I see as being really tough, who I think can handle an awful lot.
Now that doesn't mean that I throw a bunch of violence at them. I'm not interested in violence as a children's author. I write stories about things like the haunted paper towel dispenser in the boys bathroom. I write stories about things like a possessed pop tart, you know, like weird, zany, creepy things. And so I try to think to myself, if kids today, if they've endured the pandemic, if they are able to endure some of the political difficulties that they're witnessing and sort of standing aside and watching, if they're able to deal with difficult family situations, isn't it condescending to wonder, gosh, can they handle a story about a haunted paper towel dispenser? Well, of course, they can. Right? Kids are tough.
And I think one thing I do try to do as an author is I try to balance horror with humor. I'm not out to land kids in therapy, I'm out to entertain them. And in order to entertain them in a horror story, there's often this dark humor that pervades everything. Like I've said, you know, like a story about a possessed pop tart seems absurd at the surface, but if you can creep kids out with it, then there's this dark humor that emerges.
Emma: That is so interesting. Because sometimes I see things that are, like, made for kids and I think, I wonder if the person who made this... I don't know. Sometimes it seems a little maybe out of touch with what their inner child was like because it's... It makes me wonder, do they think kids like this because that's what they keep producing, so that's what kids keep consuming? Or is it stuff that actually kids like, you know?
Josh: Yeah. Yeah.
Emma: So I like that—kind of considering not only just, oh, well, the kids like it because we give it to them, but what will kids actually enjoy?
Josh: Yeah. What will they actually enjoy? It's something we need to spend a lot of time thinking about if we wanna write for kids. We have a responsibility to give them media that will compel them into reading, compel them into literature.
Emma: So do you have any advice for someone who's writing children's books, how they can really connect to their audience?
Josh: I think that you have to be a really careful observer. I'm lucky in that I have four kids of my own, and I've been able to watch them come of age, pay really close attention to the things that they enjoy, really close attention to the things that they find to be creepy. My kids have gotten old enough now that they're no longer the ages of my audience that I write books for. I write books for kids in between the ages of, like, 9 and 13. I don't have any kids that age anymore. My kids have aged out of my audience. But I'm really lucky as a children's author, I get to visit schools, and I get to give presentations, and I get to talk to kids at conferences, bookstores, and these sorts of places. And it's really important if you're gonna write for an audience of children that you spend time with children, that you pay attention to what a childhood in 2025 looks like, that you're aware of the tensions that are present in a child's life in 2025 so that you can play off of those in your writing. So being a really careful observer of human nature, super important. Getting yourself into spaces where your audience members kind of live and breathe and move so that you can watch them interact with one another, really, really important.
Emma: Tell me a little bit more about your process. Do you have an idea for one story, start writing that one, and do you connect them at all, or just try to keep them individual? Because if you're writing a collection, right, and each of your books has 13 short stories, right? Do they kind of influence each other in any way? As you're writing one, you might get inspiration for another story? Or do you compartmentalize them all as their own separate story?
Josh: I do think within each individual book, I try sometimes to bind the stories together. Because at the time I'm writing, there's usually a question that I'm trying to explore. Like in my first book, the question I was exploring was, what if ordinary, everyday things that we never ever pay attention to—what if these are the real monsters and they're... what if these things are out to get us? Right? And so this is where I have stories about, like, the boy and the girl trapped in the school crossing sign. This is where I have the story about the haunted paper towel dispenser in the boys bathroom, ordinary everyday things that are kind of out to get us.
And with my later books, I started to move away from that question and explore other questions, like, what would a vampire story look like in a modern day middle school? Right? So there's a vampire story in my most recent book. There's a zombie story in my most recent book, right? What if all of your classmates were turned into zombies over the summer break between fifth grade and sixth grade? What would that mean when you came back to school?
So there's usually a central theme or question that I'm exploring, and the stories will respond to that question in different ways. So, like, what if ordinary everyday things are out to get us? That's my first book. What if classic horror stories were reimagined in a modern middle school setting? That's my most recent.
Emma: Are there any common tropes in horror that you like to avoid or that you like to perpetuate in your books?
Josh: A common trope in horror that I try to perpetuate or avoid. Let me see...
Emma: Because sometimes tropes might be tropes for a reason. You know, there's, like, something to them that's compelling.
Josh: Horror is a genre that relies pretty heavily on tropes. There are certain monsters, certain things that come up again and again. And often, I like to identify these tropes, and it's not that I'm trying to avoid them. I like to give my spin on them.
A common trope we see coming up in horror again and again is the idea of, like, a ghostly double. Right? A doppelganger of some character. And so I have a story in my second book where I consciously said, that's a horror trope that comes up a lot. I wanna play with it and see what it would look like in the universe that I create in my story.
So it's not that I try to avoid tropes, but I don't want to just perpetuate the same old thing. If I'm playing with a trope, I like to put my own spin on it and to kinda do my own thing with it.
Emma: Gotta think outside the box.
Josh: Right. Yeah. You have to make the trope new in some way. Even for new readers who maybe haven't encountered the trope a thousand times like adults may have, respecting your readers means that you're gonna offer them something that is yours, not just the same thing over and over again.
Emma: I see you brought your most recent book today.
Josh: I did. Yes. Once They See You, 13 Stories to Shiver and Shock.
Emma: And okay. People who are listening to this, there is a giant eye on the cover. It's pretty creepy.
Josh: Yeah. The cover design is by Sarah Coleman. She's an artist who lives in the United Kingdom. She's illustrated all three of my collections of short stories, and her artwork is phenomenal. I can say that because I don't help at all, and I don't get any input. I just let Sarah do her job because she's so fantastic at it.
Emma: I can attest. It looks pretty cool.
Josh: It's creepy. And all of the covers of my books glow in the dark.
Emma: No way.
Josh: Yes.
Emma: That's actually the coolest thing I've ever heard.
Josh: Hardcover editions, all of the covers have glow in the dark features to them, which is super fun.
Emma: That is awesome. Do you know which story you'd like to read today?
Josh: Yeah. I'm gonna read you a story called "Hiding." So maybe I'll set up the story a little bit. So this story was inspired by when I started working on this book, I spent a lot of time thinking about the things I was afraid of when I was a kid. And I used to believe that there was a monster hiding in my bedroom. And before I would go to bed when I was a kid, I would sometimes lift the covers and check under my bed to make sure it was safe. Or I'd open my closet, and I might move the clothes on their hangers to see if anything was hiding in the dark corners of my closet. And I would bolt across my bedroom floor. My light switch was on one wall and my bed was up against the other wall, and I think many kids have had to go through the horror of turning off the light and then getting yourself to the bed before the monsters come for you. I used to invest all this energy in worrying about this monster that I was convinced lived in my bedroom.
But then, I guess, I don't remember when it happened, but it must have happened. One day, for that first time, I must have just flipped off my light and strolled casually across my bedroom floor. And one day, I must have stopped checking under my bed or stopped looking in my closet. And as I was working on this book, I thought, I wonder how my monster felt about that. Like, on that first day, the disrespect just to casually stroll across my bedroom. So I wanted to write a story from the monster's point of view as a kid gets older and stops checking for the monster under the bed. And so this is called "Hiding," and this is about the monster that you've stopped looking for.
You used to look for me under the bed, kid. Remember? Well, I think it's time to tell you I was never under the bed.
And not to be cruel, but sometimes I'd laugh at you through my fangs just a little when you'd kneel down in your footy pajamas, lift the drooping blankets, and peer past the toy cars and books to see if I was lurking there.
I mean, under the bed? Come on. I know to avoid such a cliche hiding place.
I guess that's why I laughed even harder when you got older and started looking for me in the closet.
Seriously, the closet?
Do you really think I'd wanna cram in there with your messy shoe pile, your stray socks, and your forgotten toys? Sure. Sometimes, I made the closet door creak all by itself. Or on other nights, just as you were drifting off to sleep, I'd rustle your clothes on their hangers. But to spend a whole night in there like you thought I did? No, thanks.
And, hey, do you remember years later, long after you'd stopped looking for me in the closet or under the bed, how you'd still scan the room at bedtime, checking the dark corners?
Well, you should know. I was never in any of them either, especially not in the corner by the side of the dresser that you always check twice. That's a bit of a tight squeeze for me, to be honest. So I've always tried to avoid it.
Oh, here's something else. Remember that winter you slept with the hall light on?
That was perfect. The glowing light from the hallway must have made you feel pretty safe, I guess, but you should know that you never were. Not even close. Light doesn't hurt me, or even scare me. And I was still in your room that whole time, light on or off.
But I guess I should thank you. With the light on, I could count your breaths as they rose and fell. I could stand close, just inches over you, and watch your dreaming eyes flutter below their lids.
I've got to say though, I've noticed you've stopped looking for me lately. You don't check the dark corners anymore. You don't sprint across your carpet after switching off your bedroom light. You don't even pull your covers up over your head like there's some kind of protective shield.
I'm not thrilled about this.
Not thrilled at all.
Lately, it feels like you've been ignoring me, and I hate being ignored.
I liked things the way they used to be, with you trembling under your covers and calling for your dad to make him listen for strange noises. I used to scrape my claws softly on your walls so you'd do that.
You'd better start looking for me again, kid. You'd better start showing me some respect because if you don't, well, I guess I'll just have to stop hiding.
And trust me, kid. You do not want that.
So that's my story.
Emma: Wow. Thank you. I loved the progression of at first just being all kind of wistful and reminiscent and then being like, hey, wait a second... You know, the tone kind of shifts subtly throughout the story.
Josh: Yeah. I try in that story to start almost parental. It's like this monster and this kid almost have this sort of parental relationship where it's like, hey. Remember our bedtime routine and how we used to do these things? And that's changing, and I'm not okay with that. And then I try to make it slowly descend into a more menacing and threatening tone.
Emma: Yeah. Because at first I was like, oh, that's sweet. Like, you know, listening to the kids breathing and stuff. I was like, wait, actually that's... that's pretty creepy.
Josh: This is getting dark really fast.
Emma: And I think that's what adds that layer of tension over it, is just that conflicting, "wait a second" kind of realization that it's maybe a little more menacing than it sounds.
Josh: Yes. This monster is not happy.
Emma: Well, that was really, really fun. Thank you so much for sharing your story.
Josh: Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.
Emma: This is gonna be a very vague question, too, but is there anything else you'd like to share about your books or about writing?
Josh: Well, maybe to all of the aspiring young writers out there—I talk to a lot of kids in schools, and I often get asked, what advice do you have for me as a writer? Right? As a young person who wants to write, what should I do? And a piece of advice I will often give young writers is this: set a ridiculously achievable daily writing goal.
A lot of new writers, a lot of young writers believe that if they're going to write their book, they have to engage in this herculean effort. They have to sit down and write 5,000 words a day. What happens, they end up getting this burst of creative energy. They sit down on day one and they write, you know, they write a couple thousand words and they're really excited. Then they sit down on day two, and they don't write nearly as much. Then they sit down on day three, and they maybe struggle a little bit, and their creative energy kind of peters out. It kinda burns fast and bright, but quickly.
And so if you wanna be a writer, what I say to young people is don't set a goal to write 2,000 words a day. Set a goal to write two sentences a day because that's something you can do. And when you sit down to write two sentences, you'll probably write more than two sentences. And you'll get the sense of accomplishment that you achieved your goal that day. Then the next day, you sit down to write your two sentences. And the next day, you sit down and you write two sentences. And before you know it, you have pages, pages, and chapters.
And this is a marathon, not a sprint. And so if you wanna be a writer, set a ridiculously achievable daily writing goal that you can fold into your life, whatever your life looks like.
Thank you for traveling with us. Next stop: your work of art. Poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, you name it. Email us at storystation@riverbendmediagroup.com. Submission guidelines are not shy; they can be found in the podcast description. The Story Station, hosted by Emma, is a production of Riverbend Media Group.