Local author Peter Heller has enjoyed stints on bestseller lists along with numerous awards and accolades over the course of his remarkable career as a journalist and novelist. Courtesy: Penguin Random House
Peter Heller's 12th book, Burn, is set in the dystopian future of a civil war-torn America. Courtesy: Penguin Random House
Peter Heller grew up immersed in lyrical language and the great outdoors. Combining the two set the groundwork for a singular talent that has earned a legion of dedicated fans and a chorus of critical praise for the celebrated Front Range author over the past three decades.
Armed with an exuberant, gregarious approach to life and writing, Heller’s rise to literary stardom has included stints on bestseller lists along with numerous awards and accolades over the course of his remarkable career as a journalist and novelist.
Now the Denver-based author is back with his dozenth book, Burn, a novel of civil unrest following two lifelong friends who reconnect on a moose hunting trip to discover Maine has seceded from the union.
Reflecting on the winding path that brought him to his current stature in American letters, Heller points to a major source of inspiration: his parents. From his mother, a sculptor, he says he inherited “a fierce hunger for the truth and the courage to take artistic risks.” But it was his father, a copywriter and playwright, who instilled a love of reading.
“My father read to me every night,” Heller says. “He read a lot of poetry to me when I was little. Yeats at 11. And E.E. Cummings. He was a writer and brilliant occasional poet. He helped me a lot as I was learning to write. He would read over my shoulder and offer advice.”
Early on, Heller’s eclectic list of favorite books included works by James Thurber, the Russian writers, Wallace Stevens and William Faulkner. “I just couldn’t get over [them] … until I found Hemingway,” he says. “[I] wanted to be Hemingway, to be that guy, and write like that.”
Although he was educated at private school in Vermont, Heller still believes his most lasting lessons came from his parents. What he did get from his years at school was lots of time outdoors and the encouragement of teachers who saw potential in his writing.
“I was told I was a talented writer even when I was young, so that was really cool,” he says.
At Dartmouth College, he learned to kayak while earning a bachelor’s degree in English. His route from there was circuitous, including stints as a dishwasher, construction worker, logger, offshore fisherman, kayak instructor, river guide and pizza delivery driver. But he never stopped writing.
Much of Heller’s nonfiction works recall some of his life’s biggest adventures. In a 2002 article published in Outside, he reported from a whitewater expedition through the treacherous Tsangpo Gorge in Eastern Tibet, visiting a spot three times deeper than the Grand Canyon (and the inspiration for James Hilton’s mythical Shangri-La).
A few years later, on assignment for National Geographic Adventure, he joined the crew of an eco-pirate ship as it sailed to Antarctica to hunt down and disrupt the Japanese whaling fleet amid “fierce gales, 40-foot seas, rammings, near-sinkings and a committed crew’s clear-eyed willingness to die to save a whale.”
Heller has been close to death himself several times along the way. Once, the engine of a plane he was flying died over the Continental Divide of the Rockies. He managed to glide to a landing. On another occasion, trapped upside down in a kayak under a rock ledge, he remembers thinking, “Oh, crap. This is it.” But it wasn’t.
“I have been extremely lucky,” he says.
After building a reputation for gripping first-person reportage, Heller turned his talents toward fiction with the publication of his first novel, The Dog Stars, in 2012. The post-apocalyptic novel — recently adapted by Ridley Scott into an upcoming film starring Jacob Elordi — was selected as the book of the year by Apple Books, The Atlantic and The San Francisco Examiner, to name just a few.
His second work of fiction, The Painter, earned the Colorado Book Award and the prestigious Reading the West Book Award, shared in the past by western writers such as Cormac McCarthy and Terry Tempest Williams. It was also a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, a Hudson Books’ top fiction pick of the year and an Amazon Top 20.
Whether he’s regaling readers with harrowing reportage from the high seas or imagining a dystopian future for his fictional characters, Heller says it’s all about the balance of language and storytelling.
“To tell a good story, to hook myself in, I just start with the right line,” he says. “It has to have music, a cadence, a tone and a heft to it for me to get hooked on it. I am more interested in that than any plot.”
With more than 30 books under his belt, Heller has no sense of stopping or running out of ideas.
Given his trajectory over the past decades, one may wonder if he sees writing fiction as a safer choice than his grand outdoor adventures.
“It depends on what you mean by safe,” he says. “I feel like my biggest adventure now, the biggest thrill, is in writing fiction, conquering that new territory, writing something beautiful and new and fresh.”
ON THE PAGE: Burn by Peter Heller is out now via Penguin Random House.
Editor's Note: A version of this story originally appeared in Rocky Mountain Reader.
