KDSN RADIO News
Small-town Iowa is setting for ‘novelistic’ short story collection
A central Iowa English professor’s debut collection of short stories is being released today and it’s an atypical collection since it reads more like a novel.
Marc Dickinson, who teaches creative writing at Des Moines Area Community College, says each of the 12 stories is linked, with multiple recurring characters.
He says his book, “Replacement Parts,” centers on a series of people struggling with personal demons and societal expectations in small-town Iowa.
“If you read it from beginning to end, instead of just jumping around it like you do in some collections, it would have a novelistic feel,” Dickinson says. “But no matter what, you can probably see linkages between stories that are inevitable. And if you want to do a deep dive, you could see all these different easter eggs that are kind of planted throughout to show how these stories are talking to each other.”
Dickinson is a Cedar Falls native and a UNI grad whose first teaching job was at the DMACC campus in Newton. He started that job some 20 years ago, shortly after the community’s big Maytag plant closed, and many of the just-fired employees were trying to reinvent themselves.
“I was a little intimidated to have these older factory line workers in my class as a new teacher, and they were actually the most inspiring students,” Dickinson says, “and it was maybe the best teaching experience I’ve ever had in my life. And that town was a big source of inspiration for how I saw small-town Iowa.”
His short story collection is set in a fictional Iowa town of Dexton, which is loosely based on an amalgamation of many small, struggling towns.
“Dexton is a town that is kind of on the decline,” he says. “It was a thriving community, and it had a factory system, and it was a quaint small town, and now it’s gone kind of into decline as the factory closed and a neighboring small town has now turned into a giant suburb, and it’s kind of funneling all the financial benefits that way.”
Dickinson’s first appearance with the book is scheduled for tomorrow on September 11th, and he says the association with the Nine Eleven attacks isn’t entirely coincidental.
“I do have a story in the collection that talks about a veteran who served in Afghanistan, who came home kind of struggling to find his bearings,” he says. “That story was an inspiration from a lot of veterans I know and students I know who served, and that was, once again, kind of a compilation of several different stories that people told me about their experiences.”
Dickinson will appear at 6:30 PM Wednesday at Beaverdale Books in Des Moines
