Person of Interest: Selections from a Novel

Date

2015

Journal Title

Journal ISSN

Volume Title

Publisher

MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa

Abstract

Person of Interest is an epic novel-in-progress. The themes include longing, love, fatigue, passion, technology, imagination, music, art, satisfaction, and community. The protagonist is a self-mythologized, middle-aged Cincinnatian, Redspin University professor, Steven Lansky, a self-styled, hippie writer, artist, and musician. He is in love, and destined to marry, two younger women, musician/model, Salen, and artist, Goose, and have a child with each. He slips through time listening to FEAR radio, an agitprop tool in the Cli-Fi genre, while on a lakeshore island in Ontario, Canada. Here his immersion in the wilderness permeates his world. His past work as a radio host, airing his novel, Jack Acid, his posthumous awareness of his father’s CIA responsibilities, and the collision or collusion of his paranoia, with mythopoeic psychedelia generate a world where uncertainty, combined with autobiography, straddle the regions between the real and imagined. He learns of the Green Sun, and is told about aliens and alien technology, which he questions. After a Caribbean sail with his brothers he returns to Cincinnati, and he accidentally kills Tom, who was also a character from Jack Acid. He is rescued by Salen. Lansky takes a blue water adventure crossing the Atlantic, with now pregnant Salen, before an African coastal cruise ends with a discovery in Ivory Coast. Steven travels to Western India, sets up camp in an abandoned palace, with music and art studios, where he creates animated films, in collaboration with his wives.

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Keywords

Longing, Love, Fatigue, Passion, Technology, Imagination, Music, Art, Satisfaction, Community

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