Evan Kuhlman's Backstory

      Wolf Boy began as a story titled "The Adventures of Wolf Boy" that I wrote while I was a student in the graduate creative writing program at Miami University. Since it was a short story there were no illustrations or comics, just a mention that Stephen was drawing comics as a way of channeling his grief over the sudden loss of his older brother Francis: his hero gone, he created a superhero to fill the void.

    When it came time to develop the story into a novel I decided that the comic book element should be more fully explored, so I wrote several comic book stories and included them in the novel. This was inspired in part from reading Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay: I wouldn’t have minded seeing some of the talked about comic book stories or panels. So I thought I’d try that approach with Wolf Boy. Instead of just telling readers that all of these characters and stories have flowered out of Stephen’s sorrow, I’m saying, “Here, take a look.” And the end result is a unique hybrid novel and graphic novel in one (illustrations take up 46 pages of the 312-page novel). Remember those old Reese’s Cups commercials where peanut butter and chocolate are accidentally get mixed together, but that turns out to be a good thing, at least if you enjoy Reese’s Cups? That’s basically what we’ve done here, mixed literary fiction with he graphic novel, and hopefully something new and tasty has resulted.   

      Like my protagonist Stephen, I lost my older brother when I was about Stephen’s age, but I don’t really think of Wolf Boy as my story. I’ve never been a big fan of the "write what you know” advice often given to writers, which, besides being too limiting also sounds rather boring: I already know what I know, so how is that going to be more interesting than what I can learn or what I can imagine? My interest in imagined worlds is probably why I tend to shy away from historical fiction and the memoir, and am drawn more to speculative fiction and graphic novels, though at this point I am still primarily reading and writing literary fiction. Anyway, when I began work on the novel version of Wolf Boy I essentially imagined the Harrelson family and the other characters into existence, and borrowed little from my experience or the experiences of my family members. I did mirror the family structure: mother, father, two sons and one daughter, and had the fictional Gene Harrelson adopt a trait of my father’s, his tendency to shakily talk about the accident whenever he had a willing or not so willing audience, but that’s about where the similarities end, except for a few minor oddities like my sister’s annoying habit of twirling her baton quite close to my head. Overall though, the Harrelsons have their own lives and their own ways of grieving, which is why I can confidently call Wolf Boy a work of fiction instead of a memoir disguised as fiction, or some kind of mixing together of fact and fantasy. I’ve done enough mixing together already, for one novel.

     My advice to writers is to write whatever you want to write, and consider your well of experiences, what's going on in the real world (ladybugs folding up their wings, bombs going off in Iraq, etc), and the free movie theatre in your head as possible sources for material. I think Eric Goodman, one of my Miami professors, also has some sound advice to offer: write like you hair is on fire.

Evan Kuhlman is the author of Wolf Boy