Meet NUNUM's Spring 2020 Contributor Steven Ostrowski

NUNUM

Blending Flash Fiction & Art

Interview with Steven Ostrowski

Steven Ostrowski lent his art to 

Bret Crowle's story "Shock Therapy" and once we blended them together it gave the Spring 2020 issue of NUNUM exactly the kind of jolt it needed. 

We were recently lucky enough to get a little of Steven's time and got to learn a little bit more about the man behind the art.

Shock Therapy words by Bret Crowle, art by Steven Ostrowski

By now you know how this is going to start, Steven what was the first 

The Last Artifact by Steven Ostrowski

​book you remember picking and reading by yourself?

It was a biography of Dolly Madison, of all things. I can’t recall why I chose it, but I picked it up at our local library and I read it, slowly and unsurely. I don’t recall much about it, I’m sorry to say, except that reading it made me feel grown up.

Wow, you might have guessed it but no one else has picked that book. Okay, let's get more recent, what was the last book you read that made you say damn that was a good book?

What Jesus Meant, by Garry Wills and Ararat, by Louise Gluck.

Two more for the reading list, thank you.

Pen, pencil or phone which one do you reach for when you need to write something down?

Pen, fine-tipped.

You'd be surprised how few people answer that way. On holiday, who are your go-to writers?
Elizabeth Strout, TS Eliot, Carl Jung, William Faulkner, and Elizabeth Bishop.
​ 
Let's flip back to the now again, contemporary artists, who do you find yourself admiring these days?

Bob Dylan.
​
What about more local, is there an artist in your local community that you would recommend people check out?

Yes, a poet named David Cappella.

Which artists have influenced your current artistic direction?

Picasso, Dylan, Kandinsky, Miro, Emily Dickenson, Lucinda Williams, and my son, poet/fiction writer/musician Ben Ostrowski, with whom I’ve published a book or two of collaborative poems and also with whom I’ve co-written songs.

What advice would you give someone who is just starting to send their work out to journals?

Persist. Don’t take rejection personally. Imitate until you don’t have to anymore. Risk something, or don’t bother doing this.

You See Her, She Sees You by Steven Ostrowski

Well said, that line about imitation really brings me back to when I was just starting to get serious about writing. Wish I'd known you then, would have helped a lot. But what about you Steven, is there a relationship between your writing and your painting?

Yes. With regard to process especially. My poems often go through many changes on their way to completion or abandonment. If you were to x-ray my paintings, almost all of them would reveal a lot of painting over, a lot of re-vision. I paint almost every canvas over and over until I think I have discovered what I’m (most likely unconsciously) after.

Is there a relationship between your work and your personal conception of spirituality?

They are one and the same.

And before we wrap this up Steven, can you give us a hint about what’s next for you?

Trying to love and understand. My son Ben and I recently co-wroite a draft of a novel called somethinggg; it’s different and I hope we can find a publisher for it. I’m writing lots of poems, painting lots of paintings. Trying to stay present and still in this wild, dangerous, spinning world.

Steven Ostrowski

Steven Ostrowski's written work 

appears widely in literary magazines, anthologies and chapbooks. After the Tate Modern (Island Verse Editions), a long poem about looking at modern art, won the 2018 Atlantic Road Poetry Prize. Two books of poems written in collaboration with his son, Ben Ostrowski, were published in 2018: Penultimate Human Constellations (Tolsun Books) and Seen/unseen (Cervena Barva Press.) His paintings have been shown in galleries and published in several literary journals, including one that was used for the cover art of Lily Poetry Review.
   

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