Steve Heller, an award-winning novelist, essayist, and short story writer, currently serves as Professor & Chair of the MFA program at Antioch University Los Angeles, the nation’s largest low-residency creative writing program.

Heller’s novel The Automative History of Lucky Kellerman, originally published by Chelsea Green (1987) and subsequently reprinted by Anchor/Doubleday (1989), was a selection of both the Book-of-the-Month Club and the Quality Paperback Book Club. The novel also received the Friends of American Writers First Prize Award for best published book of fiction or nonfiction related to the Midwest.

Heller’s second novel, Father’s Mechanical Universe, was published in 2001 by BkMk Press. His short stories have appeared in numerous magazines and national anthologies, and twice have received O. Henry Awards.

A recipient of an Individual Fellowship Grant in Fiction from the National Endowment of the Arts, Heller’s first collection of short stories, The Man Who Drank a Thousand Beers (Charitan Review Press, 1984), has been hailed as a Hawaiian Winesburg, Ohio.

Many of Heller’s stories are set in Hawaii, where he has lived for extended periods of time, including the spring and summer of 1995 when he served as Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Hawaii. Heller also taught at Kansas State University for 22 years, including 15 (1983-1998) as Chair of Creative Writing.

As an editor, Heller helped establish two national literary journals, the Hawaii Review, which recently celebrated its 25th anniversary issue, and Mid-American Review, which he conceived and designed in 1980. He has also served as an editor of Kansas Quarterly and Laurel Review.

Heller, who is finishing up his first book of nonfiction, called Walking Through the Moon: A Story of Ghosts earned a BA in English at Oklahoma State University and also has an MFA in English & Creative Writing from Bowling Green State University. He has also earned an M.S. in English Education from Oklahoma State University, as well as an Ed.D. in English Education from Oklahoma State University.

Derek Alger: Your first novel, the highly regarded The Automotive History of Lucky Kellerman, was inspired by your father. Can you tell us about him, and the evolution of the novel?

Steve Heller: The truth is, my father, Stephen Francis Heller, Sr., was a much more interesting man than Frank “Lucky” Kellerman, the character he inspired. Frank Kellerman is a man of few words, my father liked to tell stories about his life. He never wrote them down; in fact, he was barely literate.

When I was about ten, he took an exam to become certified as an electrician. In the evenings I would read the text book to him, and try to explain the meaning of various complex sentences, which I barely understood myself, since I had little idea about how electricity works. We made a pretty good team, because he passed the exam and became an electrician, first for Sears, then at the Oklahoma State Capitol. My father always claimed that he had never read a book from cover to cover. When my novel was published, though, he told me that he’d read it. Which was a half-truth; my mother read it to him.

DA: What did he think of the book?

SH: I asked him that question myself, on the phone, the day he claimed that he’d read it. “Well,” he said, “I guess some of that could of happened. And don’t forget to bring back the chainsaw next time you’re home.

DA: The chainsaw?

SH: Yep. I never asked him to elaborate. It was a perfect comment, and typical of his out-of-the blue sense of humor. Frank Kellerman is a different sort of man: less verbal, more brooding.