Dan Libman is a writing instructor at Northern Illinois, the host of WNIJ’s Under Rocks podcast and published author.
Libman discusses his recently released third book of short stories, Shocker in Gloomtown, with WNIJ host Jason Cregier.
Dan Libman offers a live reading from the book at Maze Books in Rockford this coming Sunday.
(This is an excerpt from Jason and Dan’s conversation and has been edited for clarity.)
Listen to the full conversation in the link above.
Jason Cregier: Hi Dan!
Dan Libman: Hi Jason.
Obviously, I know you, so I can see some of the parallels between yourself and these characters.
Huh?
(laughs between both)
How many of the stories are based on some aspect of your life?
Well, probably all of them to some degree. There's probably a little piece of me in all of them. Not the bad ones though.
I have to ask you about one of the more outrageous stories. And you might need to provide me with some clarity about it, because I was lost in the story a bit.
That’s good writing. Good writing generally makes the reader feel lost. (laughs)
I’ll say I was “lost in the story.”
OK. Two people. Living inside an obese man.
That’s right.
Please, explain.
That story is the truest one to real life really. It’s a married couple looking to spice up their marriage. You’re married Jason, maybe you’ve experienced this.
The couple is trying to jazz up their life a little bit. They find the corpse of a dead man — they don’t kill him, they find the corpse of a very large fat man — scoop out his insides and then then each take half of that fat man and live the rest of their lives in that body. Just a slice of life.
No pun intended there.
Yeah, ha-ha.
Speaking of slices of life, a lot of these stories are set around the Stateline. Many from Rockford. DeKalb is referenced a few times. Maybe I’m projecting, but does this book act as a bit of a love letter to the northern Illinois region?
I never really thought of it like that, but I definitely do love it here. I came to Rockford late — I was thirty years old before I ever set foot in Rockford. I’ve been here twenty-five years now and I really do love it.
I have that one story where the guy's going from store to store looking for things to do on a Sunday morning in Rockford. I’ll go with that, a love letter to northern Illinois.
The store-to-store hunt in Rockford. That’s something I can relate to personally. In that mundane way of looking for a coffee maker, the character then describes how much he hates Subway sandwiches.
He doesn’t like Subway sandwiches, he doesn’t like Kohl’s, but he’s got to get a coffee maker that’s red because it matches his houseware.
Was the order and pacing of these stories deliberate? Or was it random?
I try to mix up the moods of the stories as you read through the book. In terms of theme, that just sort of develops on its own.
The oldest story in this book is from 1999 and the newest one is from last year. It turns out that when you’re writing stories, you’re working on stuff that you’re interested in. If you look at a dozen of your stories there will be a theme there. This is the stuff that makes you want to rearrange the elements of your life and put them down on paper, and you kind of see if you can work stuff out. So, the themes kind of develop on their own over time.
Dan Libman will be at Maze Books in Rockford this Sunday, reading from his book of short stories, Shocker in Gloomtown. Dan, thanks for coming in and I’m sure I’ll run into you again at some point soon.
Thanks for having me in Jason, this was a lot of fun. I really like your studios, I’ve always wondered what it looked like as a listener.
Yes, it’s your first time ever being inside this building (said sarcastically).
