I discovered I was going to be a writer when I was fifteen and my English teacher, Mrs. Villareal, accused me of plagiarizing a book report. The book was The Eddie Mathews Story, a biography of a Hall of Fame third baseman for the old Milwaukee Braves. Mrs. Villareal suspected I’d copied the text because the voice in the report sounded like the voice of the book. That was deliberate, I explained, because I’d imitated the voice of the author, Al Hirshberg.
“Prove it,” Mrs. Villareal said.
In response, I wrote another page in the same voice, imagining a scene in which Matthews hits a home run off Sandy Koufax. Mrs. Villareal read the scene, then a bit more of the book, and finally said, “Well, I guess you’re going to be a writer, Steve . . . when you grow up.”
The growing up part took longer than I expected. For a decade, I read a lot and thought a lot about being a writer. But I didn’t write. The reason was simple: fear. I wanted to be a writer so much that I was terrified of failing at it. Finally, at the age of twenty-six I enrolled in a graduate creative writing workshop and wrote my first short story, a tale about a young pineapple worker on the Hawaiian island of Lāna‘i, which I’d visited a few years earlier. And that was it. Childhood was over.
In the years that followed, I wrote and published four books and more than sixty short stories and essays. One of my novels, The Automotive History of Lucky Kellerman, was a Book-of-the-Month Club and QPB Selection and received the Friends of American Writers Award. I’ve received two O. Henry Awards, an NEA Fellowship in Creative Writing, and other distinctions.
However, until recently I devoted most of my life to helping others conquer their own fears about writing. I hold a BA in English, an MS and EdD in Curriculum & Instruction from Oklahoma State University, plus an MFA in Creative Writing from Bowling Green State University. I’ve directed two large graduate creative writing programs and served as President of The Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP). My former students have written and published many novels, memoirs, and collections of short fiction, poetry, and essays. A surprising number are now themselves professors and teachers of writing and literature.
I retired from full-time teaching in 2019 to finally focus on my own writing. My fifth published book is my first with Regal House Publishing: a literary novel called Return of the Ghost Killer. The story is contemporary, but its theme is inspired by the Hawaiian legend of the ghost killer: a young prince of Maui who was banished to Lāna‘i, then known as The Island of Ghosts. With the help of his guardian spirit, the young prince managed to trick and kill all of the island’s mortal cannibalistic spirits and make Lāna‘i safe for the living. In the novel, the descendants of plantation workers, fishermen, cowboys, clerks, and maids battle their own ghosts of memory, imagination, dream, and regret. The kinds of ghosts that cannot be slain.
Regal House Publishing is proud to bring you Return of the Ghost Killer in the spring of 2027.
