“fearless wordslingers! break out! flee the workshops! make sense not!” —Steve Katz, “Manifesto Dysfic” (2007)

Steve Katz

We don’t expect our manifestos, our documents of rebellion or revolution—in society in general or in the arts—to be penned by 73-year-olds. But then Steve Katz, an innovator in fiction writing who has been strenuously recreating his art since the mid 1960s, is not one’s typical 73-year-old.

Creator in the 1960s of such wild rides as The Exagggerations of Peter Prince (three g’s intended) and Moving Parts, Katz has remained perhaps the most consistently committed avant-gardist in fiction of the past 40 years. In fact, Katz’s work bears so little relationship to most American fiction these days, it is perhaps better to look to music for analogs. Katz dedicates pieces in his newest collection, Kissssss, to Cecil Taylor, Ornette Coleman, and Steve Lacy, three heroes of the free jazz tradition. Like them, Katz is a constantly improvising, constantly moving artist, at pains never to settle in one place; like each of these jazz legends as well (Taylor, coincidentally, is visiting Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center on Saturday), Katz is highly playful, never letting the serious in art make for dour overseriousness.

In short, the audience for his reading Thursday at Medaille College, the last event in this year’s Write Thing Series, should expect to laugh. One Katz story in Kissssss, “Hollywood Novelette,” uses anagrams of celebrities to fashion character names—the lead character of a cast of dozens is named Eukan Severe (Keanu Reeves). Other stories make playful use of cannibalism, parrots, and the number 43. Katz is also currently in the process of writing his memoirs, and has been known in recent years to show up with a coat specially designed to hold various short chapters, which are then selected by audience members, so that episodes may be read at random. “That’s how I remember them,” he says.

—ted pelton