In debut novel, VCU creative writing student Josh Galarza brings life to teen experience

By VCU News staff, with interview by SJ Sindu

The release of his debut novel this month is more than a writer's milestone for Josh Galarza. It's a reflection of personal growth - and healing.

Galarza, who is in his third year of the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program at Virginia Commonwealth University, returned to adolescence for "The Great Cool Ranch Dorito in the Sky." Imbued with elements of Galarza's identity and life story, the young adult title marks the author's evolution in life and writing.

In 2018, discouraged that recent manuscripts had failed to sell, Galarza began "Dorito" as homework for a workshop he took while returning to the University of Nevada, Reno to complete his undergraduate degrees in art and English.

"Pages were due twice a semester. I had to write something," he said. "I began to recognize a marked difference between my older work and this new manuscript. For the first time in my life, I was writing from a place of healing rather than a place of festering toxicity. The work looked different. It felt different. I could see all the best of me in these pages, without all the bad habits I now recognized were holding me back. Despite myself, I began to believe in what I was creating."

By the time he graduated in 2021, he was ready to query agents - and confident in his work.

Galarza spoke recently with SJ Sindu, Ph.D., an author and assistant professor in VCU's English Department, about "Dorito" and other aspects of his journey.

What was the inspiration behind "The Great Cool Ranch Dorito in the Sky"?

"Dorito" was rooted in a desperate need I couldn't have identified when I started writing it: the simple desire to show myself compassion. I'd been sick since my teens with a severe eating disorder, a circumstance that was as destructive to my spirit as it was to my relationships and career. My behavior with alcohol had escalated into dangerous territory. Now in my mid-30s, I was consumed with shame and self-loathing, actively destroying my life. [I asked myself], "Why would a person do such a thing?" I couldn't understand why I was imploding.

When I made the impulsive decision to go back to college to finally finish my undergraduate degrees, I hit reset on several aspects of my life and took that first brave step and sought treatment. I was incredibly lucky to work with a team of health care professionals at the University of Nevada, Reno who held me accountable and supported me as I rooted out and finally faced the trauma that had been fueling my destructive behavior.

Many nights after particularly tough treatment sessions, I'd lie on the trampoline in my backyard under the stars and grapple with my emotions - including intense grief - which I had finally committed to feeling rather than numbing. Up until then, I'd only ever written for an adult audience, but suddenly there was this funny - and annoying! - teen boy in my mind who was feeling all the shame, guilt and confusion I felt. I was incredibly hard on myself after all the mistakes I'd made, but there was no way I could be hard on this boy. I just wanted to help him. I wanted to see him through his pain. [So] I started writing.

Loving this hot mess of a kid, whom I eventually named Brett, taught me to love and respect myself again and, yes, to show myself compassion - even when I was at my worst. Any person needs compassion if he's going to believe his life is worth fighting for. In that way, my relationship with this book was one piece of a larger, complex puzzle that literally saved my life.

What made you want to write for a YA audience?

I didn't! Because I was a Montessori teacher in my first career, I spent most of my days with children and put a lot of creativity into my classroom. During those years, writing was a way to take back some of my time and energy for adult pursuits.

Once I started writing "Dorito," however, I discovered that YA was a remarkably natural fit. My previous manuscripts may have featured adult protagonists, but their stories were always some version of self-actualization - these 20-somethings were always coming of age. And those stories, which never really worked as adult literary fiction, suddenly made sense if I reimagined their protagonists as teenagers. The right category had been staring me in the face all along, and I just couldn't see it.

In treatment, I recognized that most of the trauma that defined my life had been endured in my teens. As a result, there are these boyish parts of me arrested in that time and headspace, so it's easy to occupy the mind of a kid struggling with the very issues I did at that age. This insight led me to commit to the category. I may have suffered most of my adult life with destructive coping behaviors, but the boys in my books don't have to. They can learn how to heal now, before their troubles escalate and set their life's trajectory.

It's a cliché, I know, but I'm writing the books I needed when I was 15, and my most fervent hope is that the 15-year-old who is struggling today might find them.

Why did you decide to pursue an MFA?

When you go back to college full time in your mid-30s, you show up with the perspective of someone who's worked a 9-to-5 for many years, someone who knows how easily we can fall into stagnancy in our careers. Writing was my first tool to cope with that stagnancy, but returning to college was a revelation. I was constantly stimulated and growing as a person. My consciousness-raising journey was kicked into high gear, and my exploration of my intersectional identity as a gay mestizo was blown wide open. How could I not become addicted to such creativity and mental elasticity? I just love learning - as any Montessorian might say - and I recognized that I love being a student as much as a teacher. Grad school is the best of both roles.

What is the best writing advice you received, and how has it affected your writing?

We feel before we think. There's a practical application to this adage; it affects the literal arrangement of sentences in any given passage. But in a broader sense, I never forget that characters are motivated first and foremost by their emotions, often making (poor) decisions before they've stopped to think through the consequences or why they feel the way they do.

Since patriarchy conditions boys to divorce their intellect from their emotions and bodies (I'm still healing from this conditioning myself), male protagonists can be especially volatile and unpredictable to write. These disconnects between mind, body and spirit are where the worst types of knee-jerk decisions thrive. Of course, my intention is always that the boys I write will eventually reject patriarchal mores and become re-embodied, honoring their emotions and more readily understanding how patriarchal attitudes and behaviors harm them, women and genderqueer people. But regardless of my various didactic and entertainment goals, the ride toward a resolved plot is usually incredibly rocky for my male protagonists precisely because they have been socially conditioned as male.

What has your experience been like as a queer writer of color in the publishing world?

Recently, I was chatting with my stellar editor at Holt - Jess Harold, a queer Black woman - about the challenging subject matter I gravitate toward in conjunction with the ways identity manifests in my work. Jess was like, I don't think I could have bought this book five years ago. She was acknowledging that I'd arrived in her inbox just on time, a time when publishing, and especially kid-lit, are earnestly facing the challenge of dismantling white supremacy and patriarchy, carving out space for people like me that simply didn't exist until this moment.

No matter how well-intentioned a movement of social progress is, the struggle toward a better, more equitable future is always going to be imperfect and awkward. Growth involves growing pains. Mistakes will be made. Is it coincidental that the only Black editor who saw "Dorito"(in a famously white industry) is the one who hustled to snatch it off the market? Maybe, maybe not. But I can say that beyond her fabulous vision for my work, I was thrilled to sign with Holt because from our first conversation, I felt so seen and safe with Jess. I knew she understood things about me and my characters that even I am still learning.

What advice do you have for aspiring writers?

Pay your dues - the hardest part is investing the years it takes to do so, so cultivate patience and persistence. Take as many classes as you can, or join a critique group - better still, do both. Build a writers community of people invested in your work, and give earnestly and generously in your critiques for others. We learn far more by critiquing than we ever could by being critiqued, so critique a lot, and do so kindly. Kindness and honesty are not mutually exclusive.

What's next for you?

I'm currently completing my next YA novel (also my thesis work), a rather audacious mash-up of musical tropes and action film tropes that interrogates machismo culture within gay culture under white supremacy. It also tackles sexual trauma and conversion therapy, all housed in the late 1990s (because I'm a firm believer in passing down queer history to the young). Plus, you know, song-and-dance numbers. Simply put? It's kind of a lot.

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