Author Spotlight: Lenny Abelson

On discovery, catharsis, and leaving room for wonder

“I am not certain whether I write or I am being written,” he says.

It is not a line meant to sound mysterious. It’s a genuine description of how his creative life feels from the inside. Stories do not arrive fully formed or on command. They arrive when enough threads quietly align, and when they do, his role is not to dominate them, but to follow where they lead.

Being written

Influenced in part by his studies with a Zen master, Lenny approaches creativity with an understanding that challenges the idea of a fixed, controlling self. Where Western philosophy often centers the thinker, Buddhism suggests something else entirely. Thinking exists, but no thinker.

Writing, for Lenny, works much the same way.

He does not rely on formal outlines or rigid plans. As he writes, he slips into what he describes as a gentle trance. The narrative moves in directions he did not anticipate. Characters appear with their own weight and momentum. Ideas surface without explanation. Meaning reveals itself through movement rather than design.

In that space, writing becomes less about execution and more about presence. A way of knowing that cannot be rushed.

Discovery through immersion

The spark for Lenny’s work rarely comes from a single moment or idea. It comes through convergence. Family history long carried but never fully resolved. Cultural inheritance that lingers quietly. Spiritual language that offers shape without certainty. Dreams that connect rather than invent.

When those elements align, the work carries a gravity that cannot be manufactured.

What he discovers through writing is not new information. It is something more intimate. A felt connection to cultures and histories that no longer exist in the same way. An understanding that arrives not through research or analysis, but through immersion. By staying with the work long enough for it to speak back.

In this way, writing does not simply express what he knows. It teaches him what he did not yet understand.

Catharsis, not sentimentality

When asked what he hopes lingers after the final page, Lenny does not speak about lessons or messages. He speaks about catharsis.

Not tears as sentimentality, but tears as release. As recognition. As the moment when something painful and beautiful is allowed to coexist without being explained away.

He often returns to the Greek idea of catharsis and to Robert Frost’s belief that there can be no tears in the reader without tears in the writer. For him, emotional honesty on the page begins with emotional honesty in the act of writing itself.

This commitment does not mean that the work is easy or comforting. It means that it is sincere. That the emotions on the page have been lived with, not manufactured for effect.

An invitation to the reader

Readers entering Lenny’s work are not handed conclusions. They are invited into unfamiliar territory.

New worlds. New questions. Possibilities they may not have considered before.

He enjoys challenging assumptions, not to provoke or shock, but to open space. Space for forgiveness to exist where it seems unlikely, space for spiritual growth to emerge in unexpected places. and space for contradictions to sit side by side without canceling each other out.

“Expect the unexpected,” he says.

It is not a slogan. It is an invitation to remain open.

Staying with the questions

Lenny does not write to close doors. He writes to leave them slightly open.

He encourages readers to dwell in possibility, to sit with uncertainty, and to trust their own responses as part of the experience. Meaning, in his work, is not delivered. It unfolds.

In a literary world that often prizes clarity, resolution, and certainty, his approach offers something quieter and more generous. Permission to feel deeply., to remain curious and to let understanding arrive in its own time.

Want more? Visit Lenny and Ibbur’s Tale today!