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• "That was the first time in my life that I understood the written word had power": TJ Klune remembers his secret origin as an author
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It’s not just superheroes — everyone has an origin story of some kind, an incident early in life that changed the direction of their life and influenced everything that came after. For acclaimed author TJ Klune, that origin story came in 1994, when he was in seventh grade, and was given a writing assignment by two women who, he says today, shaped his life.

Those women were his English teachers for the year, Mrs. Bence and Mrs. Pfeiffer. At a time in his life when he was an unconfident, uncool middle school kid — “I had a mouthful of braces, like hardcore braces, the kind with the rubber bands,” he told the crowd at his Emerald City Comic Con 2025 spotlight panel, where he shared this story — Klune’s class was given the assignment of taking a real life memory and transforming it into a comedic story. It was the first time he’d ever had to share his writing with anyone else.

“So, there I go in with my New Kids on the Block folder, and I'm thinking, we're going to turn it in, and then they're going to get ready and start teaching us,” Klune told the crowd. “No, they gave us busy work and began to read our stories right in front of us. You can imagine me, already a socially anxious awkward child with deep sweat dripping down his face, sinking lower and lower in the seat as new kids on the block gets higher and higher. So, Mrs. Bence was sitting in front of us, Mrs. Pfeiffer was reading some stories over there. It was my turn. Mrs. Bence opened my book or opened my New Kids on the Block folder and began to read the story. She did something that she hadn't done with anybody else. She began to laugh. She began to laugh so hard that Mrs. Pfeiffer came over to see what she was laughing about. So, they started from the beginning, Mrs. Pfeiffer reading over Mrs. Bence's shoulder, and by the time they finished, they were both laughing so hard, they were crying. That was the first time in my life that I understood the written word had power. It could make people happy, it could make people laugh, it could change their mood. It can make them do something that they may not have done before.”

That realization was a profound one for the young Klune, offering a necessary light at a time when everything else in his life was particularly hopeless.

“I need you all to understand something,” he explained to the ECCC audience. “I would not be here today without Mrs. Bence and Mrs. Pfeiffer, because my next year, my next language arts teacher told me in eighth grade that I should give up writing because I would never make anything of it. I wasn't good at it. If I hadn't had Mrs. Bence and Mrs. Pfeiffer before that, that would've destroyed me. But the thing is, I did have them. Somebody had given me a compliment for the first time in my life, and I held onto that like a lifeline.”

The experience didn’t just empower Klune to keep writing; it also shaped his own personal activism as he goes through life today. “The only reason that I'm here is because of those two women,” he said. “That's why I go to war for three groups of people. I go to war for teachers, I go to war for librarians, and I go to war for nurses because those are the people who have affected my life in such immeasurable ways.”

With a smile, he added, “And also? They're just typically bad-ass people.”

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