Interview with Wilde Press’s Paige Tokay: Author of Henry Golden Boy
Undergraduate Students for Publishing Vice President // Abigail Lincks
For years, Tucker Bennett thought he escaped—his life, his past, Henry—but when his dad gets sick Tucker must leave Vermont and go home to Shady Grove trailer park. As Tucker cares for his father, he grapples with the dad he missed out on and his relationship with the haunting, beautiful boy next door.
Henry Golden Boy will be released on April 18, 2026.
“It’s the full Pittsburgh effect.”
Tokay speaks to us about her upcoming novella, Henry Golden Boy, a Pennsylvanian Gothic novel about grief, loss, and the uneasy journey toward acceptance.
What was the initial point of inspiration for Henry Golden Boy?
The first inspiration was just a vague concept—the Hamlet story. The first week I was at Emerson, I was explaining to my best friend, “Hamlet is overrated and I don’t like him, and he’s a whiny baby.” And he was like, “Why do you think that?”
I just felt like Hamlet—it’s too big. There’s weight attached to even the name, and I wanted to make a Hamlet story I liked. I like Northern Appalachia. I like writing stories about queerness and masculinity and about figuring out who you are.
The thing that really brought it to life was the trailer park. Tucker’s is based off of my grandfather and grandmother’s trailer. Even the chicken coop is based on their chicken coop. The whole location is actually based in a different area, a different trailer park in Fayette County, which is a rural county high in the mountains in Pennsylvania. Everything unfolded from there.
What was the writing process like for the novella?
I wrote probably a third of this novel at work. I worked at Kohl’s and it gets so boring and miserable. Writing is the only thing that got me through the shift. People are so mean in retail, and the nicest thing I could do for myself was hide behind a counter or in a break room and write a page, handwritten.
You grew up in Northern Appalachia. Can you tell me a little bit more about this, and how it relates to the novella?
Pittsburgh is this weird, industrial spot. It’s got these steel mills and this really, really blue collar rooted livelihood. Everybody I know works in the steel mill, especially if they are a man. We’ve got these blue collar roots that are also on the Appalachian Mountains in the Ohio River Valley, so we’ve also got this weird cultural connection to the south in a strange way. A lot of the food we eat is really similar. Because of the Appalachian roots and the rural connections, we also have a lot of ghost stories, a lot of superstition, a lot of immigrant stories.
It’s the weirdest spot ever, but I definitely think a lot of us in Pittsburgh really, really hold on to our Appalachian heritage. I have one friend I know from Pittsburgh and we’ve had this discussion a lot about how it’s a space that’s not talked about. And both of us, our freshman year, took a writing class together and we had read an essay about Appalachian accents in academia, and how they aren’t really overly-respected ways of speaking. Together, we talked about how we curb how we speak at school to feel more intelligent, which is a terrible way of thinking about it, especially because I love how I talk. I was thinking about that a lot when I was writing Henry Golden Boy.
How, exactly, did this present itself in the novel?
I was nervous because Tucker becomes an academic in his own way through Henry and I didn’t want that to be like, “Oh, the smart person from the East Coast changes things for the guy who lives in Appalachia.” That’s not how I wanted it to be. It was more so the fact that his father never had the opportunity to like Shakespeare. He was always gonna like it, it’s just that nobody around him had the chance to give it to him. He’s very smart. All of the characters are very smart in their own ways.
My grandfather was a steel mill worker. One of them was a bus driver. I have a third grandfather who’s a coal miner. So, it’s the full Pittsburgh effect.
What do you want people to take away from the Northern Appalachia elements in the novella?
I want people to take the beauty out of it. It’s a sad story. It’s a tragedy in its own right. But it’s a beautiful place, and there’s a lot of love there. It’s something you can’t run from. I think that a large part of who I am is where I come from and I always feel sad thinking there’s someone out there who feels like they have to run away from where they come from because it’s not super artistic or interesting—whatever that means. I want people from Pittsburgh to be able to be like, “Oh, look there it is.”
Which scene was your favorite to write?
I loved writing the scene at the very end when adult Tucker has the argument with Henry who, of course, (spoiler warning) we’re not sure if he’s a hallucination or ghost or what he is. I love that scene. I feel like that was the release point.
And I like the scene of him and his dad at breakfast in the beginning of Act Two because I feel like that’s the most authentically them that they really get.
Religion in the novella:
I don’t think Tucker does, but I think a lot of people I know need religion to feel like all of this is worth it, like you don’t work for 30 years in a miserable steel mill just to go with the ground. And I think that’s sort of part of what’s at play in Henry Golden Boy. Tucker has no one to turn to, and not even a god is going to save Henry or him, or anyone from what they’re living in.
Do you think Tucker finds peace in God by the end?
It’s difficult. I think he finds peace in the fact that his father believed in it. For me, that’s a peaceful thing—the idea that, even if you’re not at peace, somebody you have this complicated loving relationship with, is. But I don’t think he ever really comes to terms with the fact that God didn’t believe in him. He didn’t end up having that savior.
Love in the novella:
Henry and Tucker are that first queer experience, which is a really loaded type of love. Especially if the person is so good. I know a lot of queer people who have had really tumultuous first queer experiences with people who weren’t the best for them, and Henry and Tucker were the most slotted into place two people could ever be. That’s part of why Tucker never really allowed himself to find somebody else, or ever really found another person he connected with like that because Henry saw the things that he wanted, and he let him have them. And it was sort of the other way around, like Tucker saw that Henry needed to learn how to shoot this gun, and Tucker saw that Henry needed to read this Shakespeare. And he was like, “Well, I want that too.” And it’s high school love, but the feelings they feel for each other are very real.
Masculinity in the novella:
Masculinity is interesting to me, in large part because I did grow up with mostly sisters. I’m from a blended family, like the Brady Bunch—so weird. But for a large part of my life, it was just me, my mom, and two of my sisters. It was a very female-centric household, so masculinity was this kind of foreign concept to me. My dad, for a long time, wasn’t a big part of my life, so it was like, “Mom calls the shots. Men don’t hold any power here.” Even my grandmother was the breadwinner.
I’m super interested in questions like: What is masculinity, really? And what does it mean? I feel like masculinity is tied so closely with repression and that’s something that interests me, too. I understand womanhood and feeling held down by my gender and wanting to burst out of that, so I’m always wondering, What is that like for men? It’s a different type of held down. It’s a different type of trying to free yourself. I always gravitate to how violence and softness battle with each other as men. It’s fascinating to think about.
What were you thinking about when you wrote the ending of the novella?
The ending initially was not going to be as sort of vague as I made it, but I was with a friend who was smoking a cigarette outside— I was standing next to him, and I was explaining it to him while he was smoking, and he had stopped me and was like, ‘Don’t make it specific. Let it be vague. The whole story is kind of vague and in this weird mental space, so why would you end it on a period? And I was like, “You’re so right. Oh my god, wait a minute.” So, I was just kind of thinking about that a lot as I was actually writing the ending, how Tucker’s story is kind of all over the place, and he doesn’t really know what’s going on half the time, so I didn’t want the readers to have a dead end.
Why was it so difficult to write the last scene between Tucker and his father?
I rewrote that scene like six times, seven times. It was so difficult for me to wrangle because I didn’t know for a long time how to balance the fact that Tucker loves his father and he resents his father. He knows that he tried his best, but sometimes your best isn’t good enough. There was never a point where I felt that his dad was truly malicious. He just didn’t have the tools. You’re a single father. You’re working at a very, very labor intensive job. You don’t know how to deal with queerness, and you don’t know how to deal with loss for a child in that way. You don’t know how to be vulnerable. So his father trying to do that when Tucker is an adult and Tucker still resenting him even though he kind of forgives him—Yeah, that was hard for me to put into words.
When did you first gravitate toward writing?
The first time I realized I loved books and wanted to be a writer, I was in fifth grade at my very rural elementary school. We had a 30-minute required reading period that day, and I had nothing to read so I went to the classroom library and saw Mockingjay—notably the last Hunger Games book. And I was like, “I’m not going to actually get into this, so I’m just going to read this for 30 minutes and put it back.” I didn’t put it back.
I read Divergent the same year. I had finished the last book, and was so mad that I sat at the kitchen counter after school and took out my Justice diary and rewrote the ending how I wanted it. After that, I just kept writing.
How has your writing evolved?
I’ve definitely gotten to the point of being unafraid to be weird with what I write. I sort of felt like I had to write stuff that would make people comfortable and Henry Golden Boy, the first draft of it, was probably the first time I had written something that made me a little uncomfortable. That was the tip of the iceberg for me. Now I have written a lot of things that are difficult for me to write, which I think is a good thing.
Paige Tokay is a published writer of fiction, poetry, and screenplays. Her literary work can be found in Concrete Literary Magazine, Two Cardinals Magazine, Page Turner Magazine, Story Magazine, and the Trident Poetry Collective’s With Gritted-Teeth anthology. She is a two-time winner of the Ligonier Valley Writing Competition and currently has three screenplays in production, all to be released within the year. As a proud Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania native, she loves to use writing to share the experiences of the hometown culture that made her. The oldest of six, when she is not writing, Paige is spending time with her massive family— and if not that, she is reading, watching movies, and working on film sets.
Follow her on Instagram @pk_writing_.