Indies Introduce Q&A with Johanna Taylor

Johanna Taylor is the author and illustrator of The Ghostkeeper, a Summer/Fall 2024 Indies Introduce YA graphic novel selection. 

Holly Weinkauf of Red Balloon Bookshop in St. Paul, Minnesota, served on the bookseller panel that selected Taylor’s book for Indies Introduce.

“This is a ghost story with plenty of ghosts and creepy scenes. It’s also a sweet, feel good story with so much more,” Weinkauf said. “In the process of helping so many souls heal and move on to the afterlife, Dorian becomes very aware of his own need for self-care that is essential to his mental and emotional well-being. Taylor is an incredible artist and her lush illustrations give wonderful depth to this imaginative story of grief, belonging and love.”

Taylor sat down with Weinkauf to discuss her debut title.

Today I'm so happy and honored to be talking with debut author Johanna Taylor. Her young adult graphic novel is The Ghostkeeper. And, as you would expect from this title, it is a ghost story with plenty of ghosts and creepy scenes, but it is also very much a sweet feel-good story, and so much more.

So before we begin talking with Johanna about her book, let me first tell you a little bit about her. Johanna Taylor is an illustrator, a concept artist with a BFA in animation, and a graphic novelist living in Salt Lake City. She is passionate about tabletop RPGs (or role-playing games), comics, and exploring topics of mental health through storytelling. Johanna also enjoys video games and reading Victorian classic novels over tea with her cat, Raven.

And I think I can actually see Raven on our screen! So welcome to Johanna and Raven! And congratulations on your novel.

Johanna Taylor: Thank you so much, Holly. Thank you for having me. Raven says hello, too, but she's asleep. She does not want to be perceived right now.

HW: I just mentioned that you have your degree in animation, and I know you've been animating and illustrating for a while, but this is your first graphic novel. So, at what point did you start thinking about writing and creating a graphic novel?

JT: It wasn't something that I had planned to do from the outset. It kind of snuck up on me. I got a degree in animation. I originally was studying storyboarding, which is the art of doing a rough draft of all of the camera shots of an episode of TV (or a movie, or a cartoon). It basically is something you hand to the animators and say, “This is going to be the sequence of events. And this is how they're going to unfold. This is the angle you're going to choose. This is which character is going to stand where in the scene, and who's talking, etc.”

Originally I wanted to do that, but I worked too hard during my school years, and I injured my hand. I ended up with a repetitive strain injury, and I had to step way back and take a  break and pivot, because storyboarding is a very, very intense job. You do thousands of drawings a week, a month, because they have tight turnarounds, especially in TV.

I realized I needed a slower pace. While I was recovering, I fell back in love with illustration, and decided that I wanted to do more of that instead. During that time, I played a lot of role-playing games. I played a lot of D&D, and that was what inspired me to keep creating and to draw stuff for myself. I would draw my character, my friend's characters, and all the little stories they got into. That fed directly into the idea that I love illustration, but I also love creating stories that are behind the illustrations, and having people be able to look at something that I drew, and be able to absorb exactly what each character is thinking and feeling.

That, combined with the panel format of graphic novels, brought some of my storyboarding interest back into it. It became a natural thing that I drifted toward, because I still really like storyboarding. I learned a lot, and there are a lot of transferable skills from storyboarding to making comics. It's just every panel is closer to an illustration or closer to a standalone drawing than it would be in storyboarding (which encourages things to be very rough).

I've also had friends and colleagues tell me for years, “Oh, you should do a comic! You should do comics, your style feels very comic-y.” And I was just like, “Oh, yeah, maybe. But I don't know how to draw everything. Comic people are really good at drawing all the things, so maybe when I get really, really good, I'll try doing a comic.” Jokes on me. Comic artists learn as they go. No comic artist knows how to do it all when they start.

HW: Sure. And I would say now that I have seen your first graphic novel, you're very good at drawing all the things.

JT: Thank you!

HW: And I have to ask, how is your injury? Are you fully recovered?

JT: For the most part. It's not as bad as it was. While I was working on the graphic novel — especially in the crunch mode of having to churn out 10 to 20 pages a week, and doing all of that intensive work — it flared up every so often, but I've been very diligent. I do a lot of hand stretches, I lift with hand weights. I have been swimming a lot more, which was something that my physical therapist recommended that I do. That's been really helpful, because swimming has a quality of providing resistance in a gentle way so you're able to stretch those muscles without really overtaxing them.

Doing that and taking a lot of breaks have really helped me to recover more, and it still shows up every so often. I had to adjust the way I held my pen, I had to adjust the way I used shortcuts. I had to change a lot about the way that I worked, but because of those changes it's really helped my hand and helped me to keep doing what I'm doing.

HW: Alright, let's talk a little bit about this book! When I first picked it up, I expected to read a creepy, fun ghost story. Your book is creepy, and it's fun, and (as I said in the intro) it is also just so much more. I was surprised, and I loved how delightful and thoughtful it is. To help the listeners get a better sense of this unique story, can you give us a quick summary, or your elevator pitch about your book?

JT: The Ghostkeeper is based in a fantasy-flavored reimagining of 1890s Edinburgh, Scotland — so kind of a Victorian vibe — and it is about a therapist for ghosts. His name's Dorian. He goes from house to house, and people will recruit him if they've got a ghost haunting their house. Instead of exorcizing the ghost, he sits them down and says, “Tell me about your problems. Tell me why you're haunting this house. Why are you angry? Why are you restless?” And he essentially helps them to work through their emotional baggage, and whatever they have that's anchoring them to the living world and preventing them from moving forward and finding peace. He helps them to find that peace. But as he grows in notoriety and more and more ghosts start to come to him with their problems, it becomes very taxing on his mental health as the therapist, and as the caretaker of these ghosts.

It's very much a love letter to “The Therapist Friend,” who is used to being a source of comfort and help for others, but they don't really know how to take care of themselves and how to be kind to themselves, because they give so much of themselves to other people. It may manifest as work-life balance. It may manifest as trauma, or mental illness, or what have you. But it's very much a story about someone who wants to help so much that it affects his health very deeply, and him learning how to make it not affect his health as badly.

HW: Dorian is such a great character that I know everyone who picks up the book is going to care deeply about him, and care about his mental and emotional health right along with him. So this book is about mental health and self-care and you put together this story in such a brilliant and accessible way. How did you decide to write about these things in the context of the afterlife? And can you tell us more about your thought process in creating a story where there's both the living world and those moving toward the next thing?

JT: In my reading of ghost stories, ghost fiction, ghost fantasy, and horror — just in general — there's a lot about things that you regret, and reaching a point of no return, after which you can no longer fix, or atone for things that you've done, or things that have happened to you. That features very heavily in ghost stories.

So while I was working on The Ghostkeeper I was struggling with a lot of that myself. How do I contextualize this in a way where I don't just tell people, “This is what the afterlife is, and this is a definitive answer,” but I also create a way for people to conceptualize a kinder vision of the afterlife? I feel like a lot of people — whether religious or secular — will look at the afterlife as, “Oh, this is the point at which I get punished for what I do in this life. This is the point at which I can no longer take back anything. I can no longer apologize.” And it can be a source of potential shame and guilt, thinking about what might become of you in whatever comes after this life.

And so, my motivation for creating the lore and the world building of The Ghostkeeper in the context of the afterlife was a vision of, “Hey, this is a place that exists that's a neutral zone, and whatever suffering you endure in this neutral zone is the suffering that you bring with you,” versus something that's inflicted upon you. That is a huge part of mental illness too, not that it's self-inflicted, but that it's something that we carry with us. It's something that is created in our minds based on traumas that happen to us, based on experiences that we have, based on misfirings of brain chemistry, and individual struggles, and individual health issues. We can experience something that is completely from an outside factor that causes us to really struggle, but oftentimes it is incumbent upon us to create our own healing. Nobody can definitively do that for us.

I wanted to create a through line of, “This is something that happened to you that is beyond your control, and I know it sucks. Here's how you cope with it. Here's how you move forward, but ultimately you can't really rely on somebody to fix it for you. You have to find your own way to move forward and your own way to find peace.” It brought me comfort to think of the afterlife as an extension of that, that all the stuff that bothered you in the living world will still be with you in the afterlife, but it's not existing as a punishment to you. It's existing as, “Hey! This was something that you were holding on to, give yourself permission to let it go.”

HW: Letting go is such a big part of your story. And again, I just thought it was brilliant how we're seeing the ghosts processing the things they're carrying with them, at the same time watching Dorian sort through his mental health concerns.

JT: Exactly. Because at the end of the day, ghosts are still people, right? It's easy to think of ghosts as these spooky creatures who only want to terrorize, but the impetus and the general conceit of The Ghostkeeper is the idea that ghosts are people. Ghosts have the same issues that living people do. They have the same concerns, the same regrets, and there's a lot that the ghosts and living people can learn from each other, and learn about each other.

HW: It also made me think about how any anytime we meet anybody, it's easy to assume certain things, and just a reminder that all of us — living or ghost — have our backstories and all the things that we bring with us.

JT: Exactly, and the idea that the struggle of life is what you experience, but the afterlife is where you find peace. That's where you find rest, but not because it's designed that way, because you have to let go of the things that you struggle with and that cause you pain, and then you will find peace. 

HW: As I said, there's so much in this book. Let's talk about the art in this graphic novel. Your art in The Ghostkeeper is so rich and so beautiful, and it captures many different types of scenes and many, many kinds of emotions. Were there any scenes or characters that were more challenging for you to create than others?

JT: I don't know that there were any challenging characters, because characters are kind of my forte. I really like designing characters. I really like drawing people. I would say the backgrounds and the environments were probably the hardest part. Actually, I went on a research trip to Edinburgh, Scotland, and London, and I used that as an opportunity to collect visual references. I took photos of every edifice, every cobblestone, every chair, and desk, and lamp that I could find. That helped inform me, because I wasn't used to drawing those kinds of things, but because of the setting that I chose, it was a grave I dug for myself. It was basically doing hard mode: it's going to be a Victorian location, with bookshops and bookshelves galore, and bedrooms. It's just so much.

It's the kind of thing that you can't find in the wild here in America, and so it helped a lot for me to be able to go to places like Edinburgh and be able to get a feel for how the city was laid out, how the streets are laid out. Going to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London helped a lot too, because they've got a lot of Victorian era furniture, costumes, and various little trinkets on display, and silverware and coats and hats and that sort of thing. It helped me to create a visual catalog of what I wanted to create for the book.

Of course, my advice wouldn't just be like, “Oh, just go to another country. It's easy.” It was very much a situation of circumstance. A bunch of friends were going, and they were like, “Hey, do you want to come too?” And I was like, “Oh, my gosh, how did you know I was doing…? Yes, I'll go!”

HW: Yeah, win-win!

JT: It ended up being this very rare convergence of a win-win, because the setting and the place that they were going to coincided perfectly with me working on the book, and working within that specific setting. So, I think that was the hardest part of the book: anything that wasn't a character. I also think the comics medium is a bit difficult to adapt to, because you have to plan for the presence of speech bubbles. You have to create something that's detailed enough that it conveys what it's supposed to convey, but not so detailed that you do all this work and then it gets covered up by a bunch of speech bubbles.

HW: I had never thought about that. So, you really do have to think about how to leave space for that!

JT: Absolutely. It's a very unique medium that way, because you can't treat it like a storyboard, and you can't treat it like an illustration. It's this in-between zone which allows for a lot of freedom. There's a lot of creative freedom to be found in the way you set up the panels and the way you depict characters, and you can create some nice visual cues that bring out emotions in a way that a static drawing or a shot-by-shot storyboard would create and evoke in the reader, but it's tricky. It was very much a learning experience, and it was a crucible of figuring out how to work within this medium, having not done it before in earnest, but then just being handed a deadline like, “Okay, go do it. You said it would be about 250 pages.” (Jokes on me: It was 272.) “Okay, go for it. Can you have them done by September?” It's like, “Oh, go?! Okay!”

HW: Wow! Okay, so the non-people parts were the challenging parts. What did you most enjoy creating in The Ghostkeeper?

JT: Oh, gosh! Doing the interactions between the characters was a lot of fun. I actually really liked the thumbnailing stage where I was just barely laying out what all of the panels were going to look like — basically a rough draft of what each comic page is going to look like. I really enjoyed that, and being able to take it from there to finish was a lot of fun. I also really enjoyed writing for Dorian. I also didn't like writing for Dorian, because he was very much me-coded. I was writing from direct experience in many ways, so stuff that he experiences occasionally were things that I experienced in my life, so reliving that and recreating that was a little difficult, emotionally, sometimes. There were parts of the story where I was just cry-drawing because it was just such an emotionally difficult scene for me to do, because I remembered what it was like going through it, and having to create a resolution for the characters that I feel like I haven't gotten in my own life yet.

It was tough. It's tough to work in such a mercurial subject as ghosts and the afterlife, and mental and emotional rot. Those are such abstract things that a lot of people still disagree on whether they're real, whether they're a big deal, whether they affect our daily lives, etc. Some people believe in ghosts. Some people don't believe in ghosts. And so it was difficult to write about it in a way that I felt like would be perfectly relatable to everybody. I tried to focus mostly on the mental health aspect, because that is something that everybody can relate to, and it's enough of an analog that it gets the message across. But yeah, it's tough to write about those sensitive topics, especially when you have a direct connection with some of it, because it does kind of feel like reliving a little “t” trauma, in a sense.

HW: I do feel like writing about mental health through the perspective of ghosts actually — for some people — it'll make that conversation around mental health much easier to think about and talk about.

JT: I agree, because setting it up as ghosts creates a degree of separation.

HW: Yeah, yeah.

JT: People can let their guard down a little bit as they're reading, because they're thinking, “Oh, it's a fantasy. Oh, it's a fantasy! Oh, wait. This particular part relates to me.”

HW: I can relate to that. Yeah, yeah.

JT: And that's kind of the cool thing about comics, it's a little disarming that way. It can handle very heavy subjects in a way that softens the blow a little bit, and is a little bit buffered compared to what you might encounter in a prose novel, or even a children's book, because comics bridge that gap between children's book and “adult.”

HW: I would also say that in a graphic novel, emotionally there's so much you can also convey because of your illustration, so it's a powerful way to tell some stories for sure.

Well, I also love any book that includes references to food. And in your book, scones are a source of both connection and comfort, and you include a recipe that has a tie-in to the story. So, I'm just curious: tell us a little bit more about why you decided to include scones (and the recipe) in The Ghostkeeper.

JT: Scones are considered comfort food, particularly in that era. They are a source of connection and comfort, like you said. I wanted to create that as a bonding moment for Dorian and Lucy, Dorian and Brody, and just create a thing through which they can come together and enjoy something. And it's a gesture that both the living and the dead can appreciate: just existing within the ritual space of eating scones, eating a meal, having dessert together, and just taking a break from the world and creating that space.

The recipe is kind of a funny story, because I had a very old book — I collect old books when it's not prohibitively expensive to do so — called Instruction in Cookery by Mrs. E. Briggs. I believe it was written in 1890-something. It's pretty much a primer for how to cook for people who just are starting from scratch. I think it might have been used for schools teaching younger kids or adolescents, maybe training for kind of one of those proto-home-economics.

HW: The Joy of Cooking for the 1800s?

JT: Kind of, yeah. It was really interesting, because I wanted to use a recipe that was as authentic to the Victorian era as possible, so I could visually depict all the ingredients that go into it. I also thought it would be fun to recreate a very old recipe and see if it still held up today. The problem was that particular recipe book didn't account for modern day ovens.

HW: Oh, interesting!

JT: Yeah, basically, “You light your oven, and you wait until it is quite hot. And then you put the scones in, and you wait until the scones are quite golden brown.” They're all very, very vague, because ovens only had one setting back then; it was either lit or it wasn't. I had to Frankenstein it together with scraps of more modern scone recipes, and I had to talk to some friends across the pond, because they have different measurements and different ways that their ovens work — different heat settings — than we do in the United States.

I wanted to create a recipe that was translatable across both. I didn't want to just be like, “This is a Victorian novel, but I'm going to make everything completely American-coded.”

HW: So you did some adapting there.

JT: Yeah, I had to do some adapting. But I did try out the recipe, and it worked out pretty good! It is pretty tasty, so it is something that you can make if you follow it beat by beat.

HW: So there's more to the recipe that's included in this book than first meets the eye. That's great!

Well, Johanna, is there anything else you really want readers to know about your book?

JT: Oh, gosh!

HW: Or if there's one takeaway you would love for readers to go away with after reading your book...?

JT: I would say that the main takeaway would be to be kind to yourself. Be as kind to yourself as you would to a friend that was struggling, and give yourself time and space — both time and space within pain, and time and space away from it. You don't have to be trapped in suffering. You don't have to be trapped in whatever pain has been created, either by external forces or internal forces. Those are very important emotions to have, and it's okay that you're feeling them, but it's okay to let them go. You need to give yourself permission to let it go and be able to move forward with your life, because ultimately that is where you're going to find peace.

And of course, none of this is meant to be like prescriptive per se, but it invites readers to take on the perspective of “Maybe I need to be a little more patient with myself. Maybe I need to be more patient with other people, but not to my own expense and detriment and sacrifice. Because I'm important, too. I need to treat myself kindly.” Sometimes the world isn't going to be kind to you, so you need to be kind to you.

And just the idea of finding community where you can. Family is important, friends are important, but you'd be surprised at where you find common ground with people, and to use that as a source of support as well. Finding where you can relate to the people around you, creating little pockets of community as needed, is so important in today's world, because things have become so polarized. In some places it's a very scary world, so it's very much a reminder to pay attention to who's around you, who might need help, and be a source of support for them, but also be a source of support for you. Create those relationships that aren't just take, take, take, take — that are able to give, and have a bit of a balance as opposed to an imbalance or a codependency.

HW: Such helpful messages for all of us, and all delivered through a wonderful delightful story.

JT: Thank you.

HW: I do have one more question. Although I see Johanna's cat, Raven, has left the room.

JT: She has left.

HW: There's this wonderful cat, Muffin, in the story. Is Raven the inspiration? Are there connections there?

JT: Actually, there's another cat in the book that was based on Raven: Brody's little bookshop cat Shadow. She has a lot of interactions with Muffin. Muffin was based on my mom's cat; she just turned 20 years old this year.

HW: Wow!

JT: She is a Norwegian Forest Cat/Ragdoll/Maine Coon. We think. She's one of those mystery long-haired breeds that's definitely not the standard long-haired. When we got her from the shelter many years ago, she was already considered a senior cat, and they were just saying “I don't know what they are.”

HW: And now even more senior.

JT: It's true. She is definitely the most senior cat we've had in our family to date, and we've had a lot of cats in our family. We're very much a cat family. I feel like animals are very important sources of comfort and companionship, and I just personally really like cats. I also loved the idea of a ghost cat who causes mischief. Not on purpose, they're just doing cat things, but they're translating as poltergeist activity, like knocking a candlestick off the mantelpiece. That's a classic cat behavior, but people would look at it and be like, “Oh, my gosh! A ghost!” So she was the inspiration for that.

HW: So many wonderful things about this book. Again, congratulations, Johanna, and thanks so much for taking the time to talk with us today!

JT: Thank you so much, Holly. It was wonderful to get a chance to meet and talk with you, too.

HW: Alright. Take care, and everyone pick up The Ghostkeeper. You will enjoy it.

JT: Yay!

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The Ghostkeeper by Johanna Taylor (G.P. Putnam’s Sons Books for Young Readers, 9780593526668, Paperback Young Adult Graphic Novel, $17.99) On Sale: 7/23/2024

Find out more about the author at johannamation.com.

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