CREATIVES > STEVEN PAUL LANSKY – Where Art Mirrors Life

Steven Paul Lansky is a novelist, musician, poet, radio DJ, and educator. He lives in Cincinnati, Ohio, and since childhood, spends his summers on St. Joseph Island, Ontario. Steven is an author of seven books, two poetry chapbooks, an audio novel, a novella, a collection of vignettes and sketches, a memoir and a novel. His art delves into topics of schizophrenia, alcoholism, sex, drugs and rock’n’roll.

stevenpaullansky.com

Steve Lansky has a unique perspective, from the doorward gaze, drawn either way, of the neurotypical, or the neurospectacular. Somewhere in between ambition, and accomplishment (something of a bipolarity itself, eh?). He starts a conversation with a version of himself, and flexes outward, as the reader becomes the most colorful of chameleons. Sure, there’s some shapeshifting here, and a relaxation of the serotonin guardrails, that order memory, and experience, to behave in a linear way, but it’s supposed to be fickle.

Lansky’s singular, marvelously absurd, graphic, hybrid novella, Shoes has cutting-edge detailed, prose modeled on recanted reality. It moves like the doorway god Janus, who, upon the threshold, looks both outwards, and to the interior. Two faces, toggle facets of moments, the third eye drawn from both, or either, and between the front and back, the edge. Imaginary and real, fantastic and mundane, possibilities sublimely rendered in comedic instants tucked into the mind as wayposts.

The novella shifts between places, a possible diagnosis, a change of heart, and/or venue, that keeps the reader in a rather delightful attempt to keep up with or abandon meaning in a literal sense. Take the rich detail and let the author’s sure hand move the narrative smartly back and forth through the doorway. Understand that the instrument of illustration is unnecessary for genuine pleasure in getting a little lost in the story and getting a little lost in the author, but the graphic element helps. There is a personal metaphor in all the mileage piled up, in the distance, from place to place recounted, time travel, from footnote to footnote.

Featured Music: Flem Snopes & Gordon Lee Theme Music: MAN FEELINGS

Running Time: 54 minutes