Photo By Larry Gross

Steven Paul Lansky takes readers to "the other side."

"I think from the voice you can sense as you read it the somewhat losing of a center," Lansky says.

Among the topics he covers are fear, the work monkey, adventures with his friend Lacey and the mermaid on the train. His writing is straight ahead, often funny, creative and intensely engaging. It's also confusing, delusional and frustrating. And it's all done on purpose.

Welcome to Lansky's world -- the world of a writer and of a paranoid schizophrenic.

Lansky's world has taken him down many roads. He studied at Harvard, Ohio State, The Union Institute and Miami University, where he now teaches creative writing. He's lived in Clifton and Over-the-Rhine but has also spent time on the West Coast.

He's been a janitor, a data entry clerk and a social worker and hosted a weekly literary radio show on WNKU-FM from 1989 to 1998. He's also a well-known published poet who was named Poet Laureate of Over-the-Rhine in 1985 and 1986. Throughout his varied career, schizophrenia has plagued him.

"I remember 1978 and attending a marijuana smoke-in on July 4 in Washington, D.C.," Lansky says. "I hitchhiked from the Bay Area to get there, ended up being arrested for unauthorized use of a motor vehicle. I drove away in a Rolls Royce that I found parked by the side of the road. That got me started with psychiatric treatment."

Initially, Lansky was resistant to taking medication for his illness, but by 1982, after six months of being stable because of it, he resolved himself to stay on it. That medication changed in the spring of 2001, however, when he was finishing up graduate school in creative writing at Miami University.

"I decided to try a new medication and wanted to write a book about it and started taking notes," he says. "This is where The Citizen starts. The stories are to reflect the ups and downs of that experience. I'm trying to demonstrate it, trying to show it."

So far the chapters are a melting pot of various situations -- stories about misadventures in New York City, train stations and Lansky imagining that he's in a film. Some of the stories concern race relations.

"What was happening in Cincinnati, what the press likes to call 'the riots,' that was a backdrop for a lot of my experiences, too," he says. "I can tell you some real things that were really wacky. The worst of it was getting locked in jail in Darke County, Ohio, for fleeing and eluding a police officer in my car. I had WLW radio on, and a part of me was imagining that I was going out there to find out what happened to Timothy Thomas. I was checking it out in as real a way as I could in my mind. Being in that state of mind, I wanted to test boundaries and limits."

The testing came to an end in September 2001.

"I was in the hospital when Sept. 11 happened," Lansky remembers, "and at that point I thought I was a terrorist."

He's now back on his old medication and takes the good with the bad when it comes to his illness.

"Schizophrenia can be divided into positive and negative symptoms," he says. "The positive symptoms are things like voices, hallucinations and delusions, but it all points to the big, bad word 'psychosis.'

"But I'm able to access my mind even though I take medication and have had this illness. I feel really fortunate when I look around at others who have the same thing I have. I'm very lucky."

Lansky has a simple hope for what readers take with them after reading chapters of The Citizen.

"I'm allowing the reader to see the other side," he says. "I would hope they will see a different understanding of tolerance within themselves and in other human beings."